FROM THE INDIA SOUND JOURNAL
(in progress since 1993)

Gently Penetrating

The vendors' voices in this composition were recorded in specific areas of New Delhi during my first visit in 1992: in the residential area of Januk Puri, at the early morning produce market in Tilak Nagar, at the market near the Jama Masjid, and at the market stalls just off Janpath near Connaught Place. I noticed that many of the other sounds in these places besides the vendors' voices were those of metal (such as buckets falling over, cans rolling, the handling of metal pots, squeaking gates, sometimes unidentified objects rattling or clinking as they pass), bicycle bells and scooter horns. As they seemed to be rather characteristic sonic "accompaniments" to the environments through which the vendors passed or where they had their stalls, these sounds became major players in the composition.

Coming from a European and North American context, I was delighted by the daily presence of the vendors' voices. As the live human vending voice has disappeared almost entirely in Northern Europe and North America and has largely been replaced by media advertising, it is somewhat of a miracle for the visitor from those areas to hear such voices again. The gruffer, coarser shouting of male voices seemed to occur in markets near noisy streets or where a lot of voices were competing with each other. The vendors moving through quieter neighbourhoods seemed to have musically more expressive voices and almost songlike calls for their products, with clear melodic patterns. And then there was the voice of the boy selling juice...

In a city like New Delhi, and other places in India, one experiences shimmering beauty and grungy dirt and pollution side by side all the time. These opposites are audible in most of my recordings as well and specifically in the sound materials selected for this piece. I wanted to express acoustically/musically both the shimmering and the grunge as it seems to represent so deeply and openly the contradicitions within this culture and the intensity of life that results from it.

Finally I believe that this piece also explores outer and inner worlds as one experiences them in India: the extraordinary intensity of daily living on the one hand and the inner radiance, focus and stillness on the other hand that emanate from deep within the culture and its people, despite the hardships of life.

I would like to thank Savinder Anand, Mona Madan, Arun Patak, Virinder Singh, and Situ Singh-B¸hler for taking me to the places where these vendor's voices occured. Without their help and local knowledge I would have had a difficult time capturing them on tape. Many thanks go to Max Mueller Bhavan for inviting me to New Delhi in the first place and giving me the opportunity to work with the Indian friends and listen to this city. I am grateful to Peter Grant for being a compassionate and listening companion throughout this time.

The piece was commissioned by and realized in the studios of the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique/Bourges, France and received an honorary mention in the Prix ars electronica cmpetition in Linz Austria, 1998.

Hildegard Westerkamp

July 1997

Length: 14 Minutes

Soundscape Composition: Linking Inner and Outer Worlds

Soundscape composition as I discuss it in this context, exists exclusively in the electroacoustic realm. We can only hear it if we have sound equipment, loudspeakers and electricity. In other words, it exists in the same realm as all the voices, musics, and other sounds that we hear daily on radios, TVs, films, videos, CDs, websites in many private, public and commercial environments. Our acoustic environment, which in itself can be dense and noisy, is populated with these additional electroacoustic sounds. Although this situation is perceived as 'natural' and 'normal' by many, it can also have a disorienting effect and create a sense of unreality. Murray Schafer appropriately calls this a 'schizophonic' listening experience, which is characterized by the fact that the sound source always originates in another place than where it is heard and often produces a mood or atmosphere that is out of context of the listener's physical location. Whether that place is an urban centre or a remote village (with electricity), acoustic and electroacoustic soundscapes are intermingled randomly throughout any day of the year in many parts of the world and the listener's "sense of place" may become confused and uprooted.

How then does soundscape composition fit inside this sonic labyrinth? Does it not contribute to an even deeper disorientation in this growing sound maze? Or can it, in fact, create a meaningful place for listener and composer despite the fact that it is experienced schizophonically?

In the face of wide-spread commercial media and leased music corporations, who strategically try to use the schizophonic medium to transport potential customers into a state of aural unawareness and unconscious behaviour and ultimately into the act of spending money-- in the face of such forces the soundscape composition can and should perhaps create a strong oppositional place of conscious listening. Rather than lulling us into false comfort, it can make use of the schizophonic medium to awaken our curiosity and to create a desire for deeper knowledge and information about our own as well as other places and cultures. It is a forum for us as composers to 'speak back' to problematic 'voices' in the soundscape, to deepen our relationship to positive forces in our surrondings or to comment on many other aspects of a society. Rather than disorienting us, such work potentially creates a clearer sense of place and belonging for both composer and listener, since the essence of soundscape composition is the artistic, sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception.

A soundscape composition is always rooted in themes of the sound environment. It is never abstract. Recorded environmental sounds are its 'instruments', and they may be heard both unprocessed and processed. Some soundscape works are created entirely with unprocessed sounds and their compositional process occurs in the specific ways in which the sounds are selected, edited, mixed and organized. These pieces lean towards what I would call soundscape narrative or document. Other compositions may be created pre-dominantly with processed sounds. But in order for these to be heard as soundscape compositions the abstracted sounds must in some way make audible their relationship to their original source, or to a place, time or situation. Yet other compositions may be created with a combination of unprocessed and processed sounds. But whatever the continuity is or the proportions are between the real (unprocessed) and the abstract (processed) sounds, the essence of soundscape composition lies in the relationship between the two and how this relationship inside the composition informs both composer and listener about place, time and situation. A piece cannot be called a soundscape composition if it uses environmental sound as material for abstract sound explorations only, without any reference to the sonic environment.

In the soundscape composition ... it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced and exploited by the composer. The listener's past experience, associations, and patterns of soundscape perception are called upon by the composer and thereby integrated within the compositional strategy. Part of the composer's intent may also be to enhance the listener's awareness of environmental sound.

Soundscape composition is as much a comment on the environment as it is a revelation of the composer's sonic visions, experiences, and attitudes towards the soundscape. Audio technology allows us as composers to sort out the many impressions that we encounter in an often chaotic, difficult sound world. If "listening is as much a 'material' for the composer as the sounds themselves," as Katherine Norman claims, then daily sound impressions play a significant role in the compositional process itself.

Equally one can assume for audiences listening to such compositions, that the experience of conscious soundscape listening in daily life would add significantly to the understanding of and involvement with a soundscape composition. Composers and listeners then share the activitiy of listening as an important ingredient for making sense of the sound environment as well as of soundscape composition.

In fact it depends on our listening participation and invites us - through our active, imaginative engagement with 'ordinary' sounds - to contribute, creatively to the music...As listeners, and composers, we may return to real life disturbed, excited and challenged on a spiritual and social plane by a music with hands-on relevance to both our inner and outer lives.

Audio technology allows us to use environmental sound as a type of language that has its own set of meanings depending on the context within which it occurs or into which we place it in a composition. The soundscape composer may use it like a writer uses words in order to comment on the essential characteristics of a soundscape and heighten the listener's perception of it. Or alternately the composer may work with it like a caricaturist who exaggerates the contours, say, of a person's face and thus sharpens the viewer's perception of it; or like a landscape painter who deepens our understanding of and relationship to a place through a certain use of colour, light and shadow; or like a photographer who zooms in on the details not visible to the naked eye. In the same way the soundscape composer can draw our ears more deeply into the contours of sound, its colours and textures and into its details, and thereby enrich our perceptions of and change our attitudes towards our daily sound environment. This type of composition and what Katherine Norman calls a "real-world work"

....can be seen as a move away from the reality, but through the reality, that frames our experience of music.....While not being realistic, real-world music leaves a door ajar on the reality in which we are situated. I contend that real-world music is not concerned with realism and cannot be concerned with realism because it seeks, instead, to initiate a journey which takes us away from our preconceptions, so that we might arrive at a changed, perhaps expanded, appreciation of reality.

The soundscape composition then is a new place of listening, meaningful precisely because of its schizophonic nature and its use of environmental sound surces. Its location is the electroacoustic realm. Speaking from that place with the sounds of our living environments inevitably highlights the world around us and our relationship to it. By riding the edge between real and recorded sounds, original and processed sounds, daily and composed soundscapes it creates a place of balance between inner and outer worlds, reality and imagination. Soundscape listening and composing then are located in the same place as creativity itself: where reality and imagination are in continuous conversation with each other in order to reach beneath the surface of life experience. ...real world-music, like poetry, is impelled by a desire to invoke our internal 'flight' of imagination so that, through an imaginative listening to what is 'immanent in the real', we might discover what is immanent in us.

BIOGRAPHY HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP

She has taught courses in Acoustic Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and is giving lectures, and conducting soundscape workshops internationally. She is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and was the editor of The Soundscape Newsletter between 1991 and 1995. Her compositions have been performed and broadcast in many parts of the world.

The majority of her compositions deal with aspects of the acoustic environment: with urban, rural or wilderness soundscapes, with the voices of children, men and women, with noise or silence, music and media sounds, or with the sounds of different cultures, and so on. She has composed film soundtracks, sound documents for radio and has produced and hosted radio programs such as Soundwalking and Musica Nova on Vancouver Co-operative Radio.

In a number of compositions she has combined her treatment of environmental sounds extensively with the poetry of Canadian writer Norbert Ruebsaat. She also has written her own texts for a series of performance pieces for spoken text and tape. In addition to her electroacoustic compositions, she has created pieces for specific "sites", such as the Harbour Symphony and école polytechnique. In pieces like Visiting India she explores the deeper implications of transferring environmental sounds from another culture into the North American and European context of electroacoustic composition and audio art culture. Most recently she collaboarated with her Indian colleagues Mona Madan, Savinder Anand, and Veena Sharma on a sound installation in New Delhi entitled Nada-an Experience in Sound, sponsored by the New Delhi Goethe Institut (Max Mueller Bhavan) and the Indira Ghandi National Centre for the Arts.

By focusing the ears' attention to details both familiar and foreign in the acoustic environment, Westerkamp draws attention to the inner, hidden spaces of the environment we inhabit.