1. Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946
and emigrated to Canada in 1968. After completing her music
studies in the early seventies Westerkamp joined the World
Soundscape Project under the direction of Canadian composer R.
Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver.
The World Soundscape Project (WSP) was established as an
educational and research group by R. Murray Schafer at Simon
Fraser University during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It grew out
of Schafer's initial attempt to draw attention to the sonic
environment through a course in noise pollution
Her involvement with this project not only activated deep concerns
about noise and the general state of the acoustic environment in
her, but it also changed her ways of thinking about music, listening
and soundmaking. Her ears were drawn to the acoustic
environment as another cultural context or place for intense
listening. Between 1991 and 1995 she was the editor of The
Soundscape Newsletter and is now on the editorial committee of
Soundscape -The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, a new publication of
the WFAE.
The founding of Vancouver Co-operative Radio during the same
timeprovided an invaluable opportunity to record, experiment
with and broadcast the soundscape.

2. Her compositions have been performed and broadcast in many parts
of the world. The majority of her compositional output deals 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. 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 Écolepolytechnique.
She also attends sound conventions and gives lectures in great deal
on her work and sound projects she has completed.
Fur Dich for you
• based on the poem Liebes-Lied by Rainer Maria Rilke and its

3. newest translation into English, Love Song, by Canadian poet and
writer Norbert Ruebsaat.
• The poem speaks of one person’s love to another, but also and
perhaps more importantly about love as an inner state towards life
and the world as a whole.
• In context, the sound sources for the piece consist of specific
sounds from two places that have created a sense of belonging to
her: North Germany, Vancouver and the westcoast of Canada.
Moments of laughter
1:20
• Moments of Laughterexplores the edge between the "wilderness" of
the child's voice and the cultural formations of the female voice.
Türen der Wahrnehmung-Doors of Perception (1996)
The sound materials for the piece were taken from the European
sound collection of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver and from the composer's own collection of
field recordings made in Europe as well as in Canada.
Türen der Wahrnehmung: a door opens and we enter another sound
world. A new sonic space surrounds us and we listen. More and

4. more doors open and we do not know what will meet us. Our ears
are alerted. Radio can open many doors to new (and old) sound
worlds. The creaking door of a radio drama takes us into a haunted
place, a closet door perhaps into "Narnia",
Music from the Zone of Silence-1988
• December/January of 1984/85, 15 artists from 4 cultures camped
together in the so-called Zone of Silence in north central Mexico to
explore the desert environment through their respective desciplines
and to make art.
Laying star shaped with their heads together at the centre of camp,
looking at the stars and doing sound/voice explorations. The event
lasted several hours. This short section on the tape part of the piece
is an excerpt of the longer recording and concentrates on the word
"silence" spoken in four languages.
The materials for the live part of this piece consist of three poems by
Norbert Ruebsaat (The Language, The Fox, Art Camp),words for
silence and/or quiet in various languages and other vocal sound
materials suggested by and/or in interaction with the tape. The piece
can be performed by no less than two and no more than four people.
Cordillerais
Cordillerais a compositional working of Norbert Ruebsaat's reading
of the long title poem from his book Cordillera.The piece combines
the voice with environmental sound from the landscape-the Western
Canadian mountain wilderness-which first inspired the poems, and
thus places them back into their correct context.
the poem describes an ascent and movement through the high country. It
is composed of 17 shorter poems or "snapshots" of specific locations, and
these are each given their own acoustic shape as the composition
proceeds.

5. Cordillerais is about landscape, about wilderness, about the human
presence and voice in places that are still considered by many to be
barren and silent. It attempts to bring back to the city listener the
sense of space, time and acoustic identity we experience when we
manage to tear ourselves from the noise that clutters most of our
daily lives.