Acoustic Ecology
Home News/IssuesResourcesSoundscapesAbout UsJoin Us
RecordingsWritingsLinks
Writings
 

Quotes


All things make music with their lives.

John Muir

  I hear the soundscape as a language with which places and societies express themselves. In the face of rampant noise pollution, I want to be understanding and caring of this "language" and how it is "spoken."

Hildegard Westerkamp

I transform sound in order to highlight its original contours and meanings, similar to the manner in which a caricaturist sharpens the contours and our perceptions of a person's face.

Hildegard Westerkamp

 
Sometimes, I get shy and tell people I'm a "nature sound recordist." But actually, I'm a composer for the instrument—or orchestra of instruments—called "nature." And, I'm composing through the whole process of my work.

Jonathon Storm

 

 

 

It took me ten years to learn to record ocean waves.

Bernie Krause

     

If you manage to block out all sound, you will have no trouble looking around at the warp and woof of the world, but you will feel an outsider, detached from the goings on. Sound puts us into the picture, or makes the picture more than an image. As the Inuit asks the visitor coming in out of the cold: speak so that I may see you. Add a voice, even a whisper, so that the other is really there.

David Rothenberg


I hug my knees to my chest and close my eyes, listening to the sound of the river. Or the sounds of the river. I try to pick up each contributing harmony, rhythm, and cadence; the slap of water on the canyon wall, the ripple as it washes upon the bank, the steady rush of it downstream...[MORE]

Andrew J. Kroll

 

 

 

I transform sound in order to highlight its original contours and meanings, similar to the manner in which a caricaturist sharpens the contours and our perceptions of a person's face.

Hildegard Westerkamp

 


My take on all of this is trying to elevate soundscape recording as an art genre, in the same way that photography was recognized in the 1920's.

David Dunn

 

Sound is wonderful, because, different than sight (which is also beautiful, of course), sound connects things, and sound accommodates many voices at one time and they remain intelligible. Whereas with sight, we see one object, and very rarely do we actually have transparencies and reflections. Sound, as a medium, aesthetically allows us to experience environment as connections between living things, and cycles, and rhythms.

Gordon Hempton

     
I compose with any sound that the environment offers to the microphone, just as a writer works with all of the words that a language provides.

Hildegard Westerkamp

 

 

 

 

I have mixed feelings. . . . Part of this is the idea of being able to expand access to the non-human world in a way which is non-destructive; the other side of it is that it ends up being another level of exploitation and commodotizing the environment in the same way we've commodotized every other aspect of it.

David Dunn

 

© AcousticEcology.org, 2001 | Privacy Policy | Site Map