Listening is Action

Listening is Action: A Soundwalk with Hildegard Westerkamp

In the sound documentary Listening is Action, the composer Hildegard Westerkamp engages in a conversation with Luis Velasco-Pufleau at her home in the city of Vancouver, which is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She talks us through her first field recordings and her soundwalking practice, her work at the Vancouver Co-operative Radio, and her participation in the World Soundscape Project, all of which started or took place in the 1970s. Furthermore, she takes us on soundwalks at places she used to go and record more than thirty years ago, such as those now called Kitsilano Beach and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and that constitute the sources for her soundscape works A Walk Through the City (1981) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989). This sound documentary is an invitation to listen more attentively to the multiple voices that inhabit our environments in order to imagine new, plural, and unforeseen realities.

Listening is Action was narrated by Hildegard Westerkamp, produced, recorded, and edited by Luis Velasco-Pufleau, with music by Hildegard Westerkamp, mixing by Christophe Rault, and lead voice by Chanda VanderHart. Diffusion: Babelfish asbl. 2023, 31 minutes.

Land Acknowledgement: Listening is Action was recorded in the city of Vancouver, which is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. We acknowledge the inherent rights and jurisdiction that these Nations hold to their territories.

Funding: Listening is Action was part of the research project ONTOMUSIC, conducted at the University of Bern and McGill University, and was financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101027828.

Festivals:
La Semaine du Son / De week van de Klank (Brussels, Belgium), 4 February 2023
Official selection: SONOHR festival (Bern, Switzerland), 25 February 2023

To know more about this work and its creative process, see:
Luis Velasco-Pufleau, “Listening is Action: A Soundwalk with Hildegard Westerkamp”, Performance Philosophy, vol. 8, no 1, 2023 (forthcoming).