Hildegard Westerkamp is a composer, sound artist and pioneer of acoustic ecology.
She was born in Osnabrück, Germany, in 1946 and emigrated to Canada in 1968. She has since lived on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples (the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations). After studying music at the University of British Columbia, she joined R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, which changed the way she thought about music, listening and soundmaking. She hosted the weekly program Soundwalking on Vancouver Co-operative Radio in 1978–79 and taught acoustic communication at SFU until 1990. In 1993 she helped found the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and she edited its journal Soundscape from 2000 to 2012.Her compositions, performed and broadcast around the world, mostly deal with the acoustic environment, from urban and wilderness soundscapes to children’s voices, noise and silence. They include the site-specific Harbour Symphony, the sound installation At the Edge of Wilderness and the eight-channel Für Dich—For You. Her music appears in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and Last Days, and she contributed to the sound design of Nettie Wild’s Koneline: Our Land Beautiful(2016). Her recent collaborations include Beads of Time Sounding with recorder player Terri Hron and Klavierklang with pianist Rachel Iwaasa, premiered at ISCM World Music Days in 2017 and filmed by Nettie Wild in 2024. The Soundscape Speaks – Soundwalking Revisited premiered at BEAST FEaST in 2021. In 2024, Simon Fraser University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts.
