Artist Research——Hildegard Westerkamp

In this research, I chose the sound artist Hildegard Westerkamp. Her works often focus on environmental sounds and how people listen to and feel the world around her. I want to study her because my project is also related to natural sounds and environmental perception. I want to know how sound artists use sound to present an environment, and how they influence the listening experience of the audience through the selection and organization of sounds.

The practice of Westerkamp is related to sound scene recording and sound listening. She pays attention to the sounds that are easily ignored in the daily environment, and makes the audience pay more attention to these sounds through recording, editing and sound organization.

Her works made me realize that environmental sounds do not necessarily need complex processing to produce meaning. Sometimes, changing the way we listen to sounds, or extracting certain sounds from the original environment, may make us pay attention to details that we have not found before. I think it’s very interesting, because it makes me start to think that sound creation is not necessarily just to make a realistic sound. The way the voice is organized and how the audience listens may be equally important.

Kits Beach Soundwalk

Hildegard Westerkamp’s work Kits Beach Soundwalk made me realise that sound can not only record a real place, but also change the way we listen to it. Created in 1989, the work uses environmental recordings from Kits Beach in Vancouver, Canada. I can hear waves, birdsong and distant city noise. Westerkamp also uses narration to guide the audience’s attention towards different sounds in the beach environment.

I think the most interesting part of this work is her attention to the tiny sounds made by barnacles. These sounds are very quiet and can easily be covered by the sound of the waves. However, Westerkamp makes these small sounds more noticeable, allowing the audience to hear details that might otherwise be ignored.

When I listened to these tiny, high-frequency sounds, I felt calm, almost as if I were meditating. Although the sounds were very subtle, they caught my attention and made me focus more closely on the details of the soundscape. This made me realise that our experience of an environment is not only determined by the sounds around us. Sound levels, the relationship between different sounds, and where we direct our attention can also affect how we understand and experience a place.

This experience connects to my own project, in which I want to explore how synthetic sounds can create a sense of nature. Rather than simply trying to reproduce realistic wind, water or birdsong, I could experiment with high-frequency noise, delicate sound textures and slow modulation to create a calm, meditative atmosphere. I am interested in whether artificial sounds can produce a similar feeling, even when they do not clearly represent a specific natural source.

This also influences my idea of making a synthesiser with physical knobs. By allowing users to adjust the texture, density and movement of the sounds, I want them to explore different sound layers and discover details through listening. Inspired by Westerkamp’s work, I want to investigate not only how sound can suggest a natural environment, but also how it can change our attention, feelings and experience of that environment.