Hildegard Westerkamp

Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946) is a German-Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist whose work engages with the sonic dimensions of environment, place, and ecological relationship. A central figure in the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, the research initiative founded by R. Murray Schafer that developed the concept of acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, she uses recorded environmental sound as both material and ethical subject. Her compositions, including Beneath the Forest Floor (1992) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), move between documentary precision and poetic transformation, making audible the hidden details of the places they record.