Hildegard Westerkamp (Canada)
Composer Hildegard Westerkamp focuses on listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology. At the beginning of her career she worked with R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project, is a founding and board member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and was long-time editor of its journal Soundscape. She has conducted soundscape workshops, given concerts and lectures, and has coordinated and led Soundwalks locally and internationally. For some years now she has mentored a variety of younger composers, sound designers, soundwalk leaders and people pursuing careers in soundscape studies and acoustic ecology.
Westerkamp’s pioneering musical works and writing at the intersections of environmentalism, acoustic communication, radio arts, listening practices and soundwalking activate an awareness that sound is a decisive dimension of the world, an idea that underpins contemporary thinking across social, political, artistic and scientific practices of environmental respect and concern. (Dr. Alice Eldridge, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK)
Her compositions have been discussed in various articles, and extensively in Andra McCartney’s dissertation of 1999, Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Work of Hildegard Westerkamp, listed in: https://hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/writingsabout/
Excerpts of her compositions appear in Gus van Sants’ films Elephant and Last Days and more recently she collaborated on the soundtrack of Nettie Wild’s film Koneline. Her composition Klavierklang for pianist Rachel Iwaasa had its world premiere at ISCM’s World Music Days in Vancouver, November 2017. Also in 2017 Hildegard’s ways of composing and listening were presented on CBC IDEAS: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-opening-our-ears-can-open-our-minds-hildegard-westerkamp-1.3962163
For more information see also: www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (Netherlands / India)
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, composer, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race and decolonization. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in sound studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, an MA in sound art from Arhus University, and a Diploma in sound from India’s national film school; he recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship. Chattopadhyay has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and published by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). His writings on sound research and listening regularly appear on peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and other publications internationally; he authored three books: The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021) and Between the Headphones (2021).
Website: https://budhaditya.org/
Chris Watson (UK)
Chris Watson was a founding member of the influential Sheffield based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Since then he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals and habitats from around the world. As a composer and sound recordist Watson specialises in creating spatial sound installations which feature a strong sense and spirit of place.
His television work includes many programmes in the David Attenborough ‘Life’ series including ‘The Life of Birds’ which won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ in 1996, and as the location sound recordist for the BBC series ‘Frozen Planet’ which also won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ (2012).
In 2011 Watson received the prestigious Royal Television Society ‘Centre Award’ for the North East & Borders.
Watson has recorded and featured in many BBC Radio 4 and World Service productions including ‘The Wire’ which won him the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Broadcaster of The Year Award (2012). His music is regularly featured on the BBC Radio 3 programme ‘Late Junction’. He has also worked extensively for Irish RTE Radio 1 on series such as ‘Sound Stories’
Watson’s music is released by the London based label and his publisher ‘Touch’. His CD ‘Weather Report’ was voted as one of the 100 best albums to hear before you die by The Guardian newspaper.
In 2013 Watson received a Paul Hamlyn Composers Award.
In 2014 Watson was appointed the Handel Music Fellow for the Foundling Museum in London.
Honorary Doctorate Awards
University of the West Of England – Doctor of Technology 2003
University of The Arts, London – Doctor of Arts 2008
Leeds Beckett University – Doctor of Arts 2018
University of Sheffield – Doctor of Music 2019
Watson’s installations have been commissioned by international galleries and festivals such as;
Sheffield Millennium Gallery, Opera North in Leeds, The National Gallery, London, The Louvre, Paris, the Aichi Triennial in Japan and Unsound in Kraków.
Chris Watson February 2021
Newcastle upon Tyne
Pete Stollery (UK)
Pete Stollery is Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music at the University of Aberdeen. He studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham and was one of the first members of BEAST in the early 1980s. His research interests lie in the area of how humans respond to sound in their immediate surroundings, in particular sounds that are not necessarily intended for listening purposes. A further research theme is an engagement with sound which relates to a notion of place.
His research is predominantly practice-led and results in outputs in a variety of genres including electroacoustic composition, sound installation, web-based sound art as well as text. Recent and current related projects include the Three Cities Project (2010-12), a collaborative intermedia project involving the creation of artefacts using sounds recorded in Aberdeen, Bergen and St Petersburg, as well as community participation in those cities; the internet-based sound mapping projects Gordon Soundscape (2005), Aberdeen soundsites (2012), [M]apping iOS app (2016),Hilton Soundscape (2018) and the COVID-19 Sound Map (2020 – ); and compositions ABZ/A (1998), scènes, rendezvous (2006), Three Cities (2013) Stolen Voices (2017), Clermont Horns (2020) and Cullykhan Water (2020).
Recent related publications include the co-authored book chapter ‘Three types of engagement with place through acousmatic listening and composition’ in I. Russell & C. Ingram (eds), Taking Part in Music: Case Studies in Ethnomusicology (2013) and the article ‘Capture, manipulate, project, preserve: A compositional journey’ in Journal of Music, Technology & Education 6: 3 (2013).
Yang Yeung (Hong Kong)
Yang Yeung is founder of the non-profit soundpocket (2008 – ) and currently its Artistic Director. She is also an art writer and independent curator. She initiated independent artistic research project A Walk with A3 (2015-17) to support the right of art to be in the streets. She is a researcher of the international Institute for Public Art, independent art critics collective Art Appraisal Club (HK), and the International Art Critics Association (HK). She is Co-founder of 1983. She serves on the board of Make a Difference (MaD), a regional platform that encourages social innovation. She was Asian Cultural Council Fellow in 2013-14. She teaches classics in the General Education Foundation Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
soundpocket, founded in 2008, made “listening to everything” its mandate, and from there, explores the possibility of sound in art (the role of sound in existing artistic practices) and sound as art (listening and the sounding of sound and silence as aesthetic experiences). soundpocket’s main activities are the incubation and support of early-career artists. It also builds learning communities among artists of varying experiences and expertise.
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