Hildegard Westerkamp’s 'Kits Beach Soundwalk'

Kits beach soundwalk an aural meditation


A walk on Kits Beach will never be the same after you listen to Hildegard Westerkamp’s “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” You may have often paused to admire a pretty seashell or a dreamy cloud formation, but when was the last time you stopped to listen to the barnacles?

Westerkamp is a sound composer; she records ambient noises and edits them to produce original works. One of the sounds highlighted in her Kits Beach piece is the clicking made when water recedes from a barnacle-covered rock. We’ve all http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifheard it; few have noticed it.

“Once you record, your ear shifts tremendously,” Westerkamp explains.

“Just as looking through a camera you see the world differently, when you begin to record you hear the world differently.”

Westerkamp began working with ambient sound through Vancouver Soundscape, a recording project undertaken in 1973 by a group of SFU composers and academics, and led by composer R. Murray Schafer.

Follow this fantastic link to inspire you to get away from the computer and go on soundwalk of your own today

Soundscape Vancouver Documentary

Soundscape Documentary feat.Vancouver B.C
thanks Vancouver and all it sounds.
Andres Santana

Sonorous City - London Soundscape Project

Sonorous City is an immersive surround-sound installation exploring the relationship between the soundscape and our perception of the urban environment. A series of soundwalks stemming from the River Thames form the basis of the work, which reveals an experience of London lead by the ear.



Sonorous City is the result of a 2 year (part-time) MA research project in Digital Arts.

Steve Barsottii

Steve Barsottiis a Seattle based improviser, sound artist, instrument inventor and educator. His work explores notions of reduced listening through close examinations of easily bypassed sonic details; sounds that can only be heard through contact microphones and amplification or the sonic qualities of materials and objects found in everyday life. He invites the listener to forgo an attempt at literal connections with the sounds and to focus on the sounds in and of themselves. Steve is chair of the Pacific Northwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Sound in the City

University of Warwick Professor Paul Jennings is leading a team researching how sound affects the perception of environments, which people have generally seen as full of unwanted noise. Professor Jennings suggests that the right sound has many positive aspects and should be considered in the design of urban soundscapes and buildings such as hospitals.

A Silent Swaying Breath

A while ago I submitted a small sample of a recording which I had made with my hydrophone on holiday in St. Ives. Audio gourmet were proposing that anyone could donate a sound which they would then use to create an album which would be compiled in order to help those people whose livelihoods were effected by the riots which occured accross the UK several months ago. I think me sample of the air pockets in the sand, which occur when the tide is at it's highest, feature on the track titled 'Dust, Illuminated', however it is rather hard to tell as there seems to have been quite a lot of post production. Well, here is a link to the album which would be great if you wanted to donate some money to the cause whilst also obtaining a tantalizing collection of strange and ephemeral sounds.



SoundFjord, Audio Gourmet's Harry Towell (Spheruleus) and Bartosz Dziadosz (Pleq) have come together to curate an album created "by the people, for the people", to raise funds for those that has beenaffected by the recent unrest that ravaged cities across the country.

The album, a statement and monument to collaboration and community, brings together works selected from short unedited recordings gleaned from artists, musicians and the general public across the globe.

Spheruleus and Pleq sensitively weave together an eclectic selection of field recordings, samples, spoken word pieces and instrumentation, creating momentous emotional landscapes for the listener, delicate, tender moments and most of all, a yearning tumult of haunting quietude: a silent, swaying breath.

All profits raised by sales of this album go towards assisting thosethat have lost their homes and livelihoods and to provideopportunities for philanthropy, creative expression and collaboration within local community projects.

Athanasius Kircher SJ - 'Musurgia Universalis', 1650.

Online at the University of Strasbourg


"Kircher's best-remembered work is also his second largest. Musurgia Universalis is an exhaustive compendium of musical knowledge at the transition point between sacred renaissance polyphony and secular Baroque music. Much of Musurgia is dedicated to a survey of contemporary music, including the first published mention of the baroque 'doctrine of the affections' in which music is ideally analogous to human emotions. Many surviving compositions by Frescobaldi, Froberger and other baroque masters are due to Kircher's extensive transcriptions and reproductions of scores in Musurgia. Kircher speculates on the music of early cultures and reproduces a melody he claimed to have seen on a manuscript in Sicily dating back to ancient Greece, making it (if authentic) the oldest surviving example of musical notation. A large part of the book is devoted to the history of instrumentation, including the anatomy of voice and hearing, and an extensive theory on acoustics entitled 'Magia Phonocamptica, sive de Echo', in which he described sound as 'the ape of light'.

Dan Knight - Sound Sculpture

The Trust made its latest award to Dan Knight in 2010. It takes us into a new area for the Trust – a mixture of craft and performance. This is partly what attracted us to Dan’s proposal. Dan wanted to build a bottle-organ and give a public charity performance with a newly commissioned piece. What also attracted us were the proposal’s simplicity, modesty and clarity of purpose. Dan describes his work as

“…. sculpture that transforms energy to create movement, sound and light and my work can often be manipulated by a viewer. I am also interested in waste and detritus and giving things a new life.”

He built his first organ 11 years ago and experimented with different versions then

“I had the idea to make a big version that has every note that can be got from a bottle and I had the vision to make it like a small room that you can go inside and be surrounded by the sound.”

Glasgow Speakers Corner

Glasgow's first ever "Speaker's Corner" will launch on the 10th of July, and every Sunday thereafter, located at the fountain (near the Skate Park) in Kelvin grove Park in the West End of Glasgow; between the times of 12pm - 4pm.


A Speakers’ Corner is an area where open-air speaking, debate and discussion are allowed. Members of the public can stand up and make a speech on any subject as long as it is considered lawful - this is the same right to free speech which applies to everyone in Britain. The one in the north-east corner of Hyde Park, next to Marble Arch in the centre of London, is more than 150-years-old and is renowned throughout the world. Throughout history orators to frequent Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner included revolutionaries Karl Marx, George Orwell and trade union leader Ben Tillett. Other cities in Britain are now known to have their own Speakers’ Corners including Leeds, at Victoria Gardens in front of the Leeds City Art Gallery, and in Nottingham at the Old Market Square. But no UK cities have been as successful as London in their quest to create an open-air speech area for the public. The debate spots also exist in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and in Sydney, Australia. Glasgow has never had its own Speakers’ Corners but organisers hope it will capture the imagination of the city.


Our aim is to promote public debate and active citizenship, which is essential to rebuilding trust and participation in Britain’s civil society and developing vibrant civil institutions. The Glasgow’s speaker’s corner should become an influential and long lasting aspect of Glasgow.