Acoustic Cartography: Re-listening Vancouver

Description:

Acoustic Cartography was a project presented in collaboration with the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia that brought together an interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students to explore the urban geography of the Lower Mainland through sound. 

The students were prompted to formulate a theme that guided a series of soundwalks and recording sessions towards the creation of a sonic archive. The audio generated through these collaborations were uploaded to the Urban Sound Ecology website where the spatial locations of the recordings were collected and layered on a cartographic map of Vancouver.
 
The day began with an hour-long deep listening session led by Hildegard Westerkamp. This was followed by a workshop of the students’ audio pieces; as well as a panel discussion with scholars and composers Barry Truax and Geraldine Pratt, who contextualized the works from their respective disciplines of acoustic ecology and urban geography.