Dusk brings a shift of the senses, a change to how the world is known. A similar recalibration can happen when we choose to settle down somewhere and map what our perceptions find there.
A powerful inspiration derives from Hildegard Westerkamp’s pioneering approaches to soundwalking and to soundmapping and, particularly, her sustained commitment to acknowledging the complexities at work when we establish “times for heightened listening, an opportunity to connect more deeply to a place, a sonic moment or situation … to one’s own associations”.
In her compositional approaches as much as in her contributions to the methods of acoustic ecology, Westerkamp has both opened our ears to rich sonorities and located the listener as a creative contributor to encountered meaning.
After a short introduction, we will find our own time for heightened listening at the edge of the University campus, settling down together, each with a stick of chalk and blank piece of paper to document what we hear under the darkening sky, marking out a sonic sketch that could be a soundmap, a score, a diary of acoustic associations.

Durant le bombardement d’Okinawa, en 1945, les habitants ont cherché refuge dans les grottes et les champs de canne à sucre. Ils ont forgé des souvenirs qui habitent aujourd’hui les sons de ces lieux. Un paysagiste, un acousticien et un anthropologue ont travaillé ensemble pendant dix ans pour écouter, enregistrer ces sons et leur donner sens, à travers les récits d’individus qui expriment, comme tant d’autres à Okinawa, l’expérience d’une vie suspendue entre les guerres américaines, le passé, le présent et le futur.