07 Hildegard Westerkamp – Beneath the Forest Floor
The work of Hildegard Westerkamp came to us circuitously. There was a time––and really, it wasn’t that long ago––when Sam and I were woefully unexposed to works of audio outside of radio and podcasting. Lord, even with the latter we were (are!) rather unfamiliar. But as we got deeper into our work at The World According to Sound, this necessarily had to change.
One of the biggest leaps in our sonic education came with the online listening series we made during the pandemic. These were 75-minute shows made up of maybe 20 smaller pieces around a general theme. Sam and I made a bunch of these pieces, but we also included works from other soundmakers and artists. And naturally, in order to include other people’s work, we had to listen to them first.
One of these artists was the electronic music duo Matmos. We actually made an entire show out of their work, and such an undertaking required a lot of planning and meetings. Martin Schmidt, one half of the duo, mentioned offhandedly to us Hildegard Westerkamp’s work Kit’s Beach Soundwalk in one of our planning conversations. Neither of us had ever heard of it. But Schmidt insisted on its beauty. We listened to it. He was right.
Kit’s Beach Soundwalk (1989) is not the subject of this week’s Listening Club, but if you haven’t heard it, it’s definitely worth your while. It’s arguably Westerkamp’s most famous work, and from the title we are introduced to the idea of a soundwalk. As she defines it, “A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are…Wherever we go we will give our ears priority. They have been neglected by us for a long time and, as a result, we have done little to develop an acoustic environment of good quality.”
Westerkamp almost has to be in motion to make a sound recording. As we move through space, our heads––those primal microphones––move also, shifting the placement of our ears and bringing more into focus what we hear. But more important, going for a soundwalk often means interacting with nature. Even in an urban environment, if we walk around our neighborhood, yes we will hear cars, buses, trains, people. But we will also pass trees, parks, and birds; be confronted with the wind and sun. This connection to nature, and really listening to it, is central to Westerkamp’s work.
The soundwalk is a Westerkampian offshoot of a more formal concept: the Soundscape Composition. This genre, which I learned about long after our conversation with Martin Schimdt of Matmos, has old roots and can help further our understanding of one of the Listening Club’s major questions: what exactly is a “work of audio,” and how can we talk about them critically?
This week we listened to a classic soundscape composition by Hildegard Westerkamp, Beneath the Forest Floor (1992). She made the piece out of recording trips to the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island, as well as to the forests close to Cowichan Lake, Galiano Island, and in Lighthouse Park near Vancouver, British Columbia. Trees older than 1,000 years inhabit these forests, which, at the time, were under major threat of deforestation. The piece is made up of numerous natural and identifiable recordings: sounds of running water, birds (most notably a raven), flies, and mosquitoes. But there’s also less identifiable, processed sounds resulting from work done in the studio. To quote an elucidating article on Beneath the Forest Floor by Frédérick Duhautpas and Makis Solomos, “A simple adult raven’s croak can become a deep muffled ‘throb that seems to come from the depths of the earth.’ (Bernstein 1993 quoted in McCartney 1999, 344). This heavy and deep sonority, which regularly returns as a percussive beat to punctuate the piece, particularly at the beginning and the end, was indeed obtained by slowing down the raven’s croak.”
The duality of making a work of audio out of (1) field recordings that have gone through no studio processing or alterations, albeit arranged and composed; and (2) field recordings that have been processed or altered (as in the case with the raven’s croak at the beginning of the piece: the original recording was slowed down several times and thus lowered several octaves to achieve a sound that no longer could be identified as a raven’s croak)––this duality has long been on my mind from a practitioner’s perspective, but I’ve never had the language or training to talk about it in any meaningful way.
There are in fact terms for these two phenomena in audio:
Found Soundscape, or Phonography––recorded soundscapes with minimal or no alterations that can be listened to as if they were music, in the sense of an organized sound structure with different levels of meaning.
Abstracted Soundscape––remains clearly identifiable as to subject matter, but incorporates sonic elements that have been abstracted to varying extents from their original source.
Sam and I have unwittingly bounced around continuously between both of these methods for years. Well, I should say we knew we were bouncing around, but we didn’t know why, or what we were really trying to effect, or why we would make some of the decisions that we did (cf. Musical Drawers. It starts off decidedly literal, then quickly goes abstract). It turns out we were working within a tradition: that of the Abstracted Soundscape. This is very different from a lot of the work that Bill Fontana has done, for example. He worked largely with Found Soundscapes. As in his Kirribilli Wharf, Fontana would set up elaborate mic arrays to capture sound from multiple sources simultaneously, and from that highly-arranged recording set up he would make his piece. The whole thing would be composed and recorded in real time. But if you’re not doing that kind of work, how far should one go in the realm of abstracted soundscapes? If you slow down that raven’s croak by a factor of 6, what exactly are you doing and why are you doing it? It doesn’t sound like a raven anymore, so what is it? But does that even matter? Maybe all you want to do is make something sound good, and if that’s the goal, then all alterations are fair game. But is that really the goal, just to make something “sound good”? The manipulation of audio in the studio has always brought up a lot more questions for Sam and me than it’s solved. I think, however, that there are ways to deal with this.
The following observations have been helpful as I try to think through those decisions in the sound work I do. I take them from electroacoustic composer Barry Truax (the first installment of Listening Club was dedicated to him). For him, soundscape compositions are made up of the following criteria:
1. Listener recognizability of source material is maintained.
2. Listener’s knowledge of environmental and psychological context is invoked.
3. Composer’s knowledge of environmental and psychological context influences the shape of composition at every level.
4. The work enhances an understanding of the world and its influence carries over into everyday habits of perception.
We can see these criteria in action in Beneath the Forest Floor. The piece opens with an unidentifiable rumble. It’s rhythmic and has a natural feel to it, but without more information it’s impossible to tell what it is. I know it might have something to do with a forest based on the title alone; and keeping (3) in mind, I feel confident in this assumption. Ten seconds later the unmistakable call of a crow or raven can be heard, followed by the very clear, unprocessed recording of water flowing––invoking (1) and (2). Already I am spurred into thinking a lot more about that initial low rumbling sound. Might it have something to do with either this raven or the water? Good lord, what does that say about a raven if that’s true? I don’t know if I’ll be able to look at a bird the same way again (4). No matter, I’ll keep these thoughts in my head as the piece continues. Some more recognizable bird calls follow; a musical tone begins to emerge––has this been synthesized? A minute and twenty seconds into the piece we hear some other-worldly creaks and groans. I love these, but they are painful; all I can picture are great trees crying out, as if holding out their boughs anthropomorphically in supplication. The mood is eerie, a bit melancholy and dark. This is either a foreboding forest or a forest in danger (2) and (3).
The weaving together of processed and unprocessed sounds in Beneath the Forest Floor are made clear from the outset, but they all seem to serve one purpose: to invoke the feeling of a forest. The sounds aren’t there simply to sound good, to be melodious as perhaps a piece of music might do. They are grounded in the reality of an actual place. Still, this is not simply a field recording of a specific place; it, both literally and abstractly, gets at the feeling of an ancient forest, and thereby Westerkamp’s own experience of that forest.
Experience: another central theme to works of audio that we will explore in the coming weeks.