Materiality and aural memory in the Harbour Symphony (St. John’s, Newfoundland)

Abstract

The Harbour Symphony is a collection of site-specific works composed for, and performed within, the soundscape and landscape of the St. John’s harbour. The Harbour Symphony is a creative endeavor intended to unite city and environment, people and their community in an awareness that harbour sounds and the acoustic environment constitute a part of St. John’s heritage – one that should be valued, attended to, and preserved. Since its inception, numerous composers have created works that interpret the soundscape and landscape of St. John’s harbour, particularly the distinct soundmarks of the tugboats, trawlers, and ocean freighters, positioning the city as a unique physical, cultural, and sonic site. This article addresses how the Harbour Symphony exploits the geographies of place and engenders an awareness of the local soundscape through contextual change. Ethnographic voices and aural histories detailing performance experience express the meanings embedded in sound and the power and place of memory. Grounded in ethnographic research, this article argues for an understanding of the shifting roles of everyday sounds and musicalized mechanical sound. The composers who contribute Harbour Symphonies are collectively concerned with issues of sonic experimentalism, the health and value of the acoustic environment, and the spatial- and temporal-contingent characteristics of environmental sound. This article engages with the compositional re-contextualization of industrial sounds and their technologies, and questions how place and soundscape impact and are inscribed in modern cultural expressions and comment upon shifting environments.

Keywords:

• Experimental music
• spatiality
• site-specific performance
• soundscape
• place
• aurality
• materiality
• collaboration

Introduction

The Harbour Symphony is a collection of site-specific works composed for, and performed within, the soundscape and landscape of the St. John’s harbour. The Harbour Symphony was inaugurated in 1983 at the first biannual Sound Symposium; an experimental music festival held throughout the provincial capital of St. John’s, located on the eastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland. The Harbour Symphony is a creative auditory endeavor intended to unite city and environment, people and their community, in awareness that the sounds of the harbour and the surrounding acoustic environment constitute a part of St. John’s heritage. A spatial sonic heritage that should be valued, attended to, and preserved. Since its inception, numerous composers have created works that interpret the soundscape and landscape of St. John’s harbour, particularly the distinct soundmarks of the tugboats, trawlers, and ocean freighters. Although the Harbour Symphony originated in St. John’s it is not solely a local sonic practice, or novelty. Throughout its genesis, the Harbour Symphony as a sonic project has resonated internationally, with international visiting artists participating in the composition and performance of Harbour Symphonies. The performance event has also been adopted internationally, for instance, by the cities of Amsterdam, Gdansk, Vancouver, Montreal, Stockholm, and San Francisco. Cultural stakeholders have recognized the visceral impact that the pairing of city and sonic practice, soundscape and landscape, has on the sonic character of place.

This article reveals how the materiality and sonic significance of the St. John’s harbour shapes musical expression, how the Harbour Symphony shapes participants’ aural memory of place, and how the sonic event has become inextricably connected to St. John’s. The event positions the city as a unique physical, cultural, and sonic site. The Harbour Symphonies transform one of the soundmarks of St. John’s into an instrument, utilizing the surface of the water and harbour as a natural amphitheater, and the hills as a sounding board. Each symphony is spatially and temporally distinct as a result of the environmental, atmospheric, and acoustic conditions. The sonic environment of St. John’s transforms into what R. Murray Schafer refers to as ‘a macrocosmic musical composition’, embracing John Cage’s inclusive definition of music and enabling the compositional application of the sonic spectrum.¹

Composer Paul Steffler and architect Joe Carter invented and founded the Harbour Symphony. The ability of the event to encourage participants to engage with the social and geographic environment of St. John’s, and its soundscape and sonorities, has established the Harbour Symphony as a key performance event of the Sound Symposium. Delf Maria Hohmann is the current curator of the Harbour Symphony.² The Harbour Symphony marks the opening of the nine-day Sound Symposium experimental music festival, and is performed daily at 12:30 pm with a composition by a different composer each day. The City of St. John’s also uses the Harbour Symphony to mark important events that infuse the city with tourism, such as the arrival in port of a luxury cruise ship or a large-scale conference at the Convention Center. These commissions serve as a fundraising tool for the Sound Symposium.

The Harbour Symphony exploits the geographies of place, the technologies of the harbour, and engenders interaction with the local soundscape through contextual change. My understanding of the Harbour Symphony is informed by participant observation during the Sound Symposium, as a listener and field recordist on 2–10 July 2012, and as a performer on 4–12 July 2014. Interviews continued remotely and in-person during the interim period. Ethnographic voices and aural histories detailing performance experience express the meanings embedded in sound, and the power and place of memory and site-specific soundscapes. I conducted semi-structured interviews and listening sessions with participants following the daily Harbour Symphony. I also participated as a performer and conductor, interviewed business owners in the downtown core of St. John’s, talked with the crew of the ships, conducted rehearsals, observed listeners and other volunteer performers, took photographs, and made audio and video recordings from different sonic–spatial perspectives around the harbour (Figure 1).³ I also conducted interviews with composers who had their Harbour Symphony performed. When I presented participants with the task of actively listening to the Harbour Symphony, and we collectively shared our experiences following the performance from our individual spatial positions, I refrained from asking specific questions and requested open-ended responses. I would ask them to write down or orally record any memory, reaction, image, sound, or reference that immediately comes to mind, rather than directing how they digest and articulate their experience through directed questions or a survey. These responses took a variety forms, including prose, poetry, word clouds, audio essays, journaling, drawing and other forms of visual artwork, and stream of consciousness statements.⁴

Figure 1. Listening and recording locations during 2012 fieldwork (map provided by Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism with additional artwork and photos by the author).

As field recordist I was aware of my role in the process of selecting the spatial perspectives from which I would record and listen. As Barry Truax notes: ‘All recordists, as well as photographers, understand that the act of recording is far from objective or neutral, both technically in terms of microphone characteristics and strategically in terms of location.’⁵ Each Harbour Symphony from 2012 was recorded from a different location in St. John’s within no more than a 30-minute walk from the harbour. I also selected a variety of contrasting social spaces to record, such as a café, the observation deck of the museum the Rooms, the National Historic Site Signal Hill, the fishing boat pier adjacent to the Southside Hills, the Battery, and Harbourside Park. Listening from these ostensibly varied sonic, spatial, and social perspectives with both my microphone and my ear yielded a multifaceted perspective on the sonic practice of the Harbour Symphony. Diverse situations of listening revealed how sounds propagate through the city, illustrating the ways in which the built and natural architecture shape the circulation and reception of sonic culture. The locations I selected to collect field recordings were deliberately sites frequented on a regular basis by visitors and residents. These were spaces where I would encounter deliberate and lay listeners of the Harbour Symphony as they carried out everyday activities and listening within urban space. For the 2014 Sound Symposium I relied on the field recordings recorded daily by Hohmann from the furthest pier adjacent to the Southside Hills before one reaches Fort Amherst. I performed a Harbour Symphony each day as a conductor or horn performer, and when it was possible I selected a different spatial perspective within the harbour (or pier) and a different vessel to experience the varied performance forces of the harbour.

When participants ruminated on their aural memory of the event, their reflections combined sonic traces of the ships’ horns with the soundscape of their physical position in St. John’s prior to, throughout, and following the event. The Harbour Symphony and the sonic environment are, for many, intersensorially connected to experienced and remembered place. Intersensorial experience, to invoke Steven Connor’s term, involves an interaction among the senses, where they come into contact, dialogue with each other, and produce meaning.⁶ ‘Sounds emerge from and are perceptually centered in place’ and in the Harbour Symphony we encounter sound as a way-of-knowing.⁷ The place is just as important as what is being heard. Grounded in ethnographic research this article enhances our understanding of the shifting roles of everyday sounds and musicalized mechanical sound. The composers who contribute works for performance are collectively concerned with issues of sonic experimentalism, the health and value of the acoustic environment, and the spatial- and temporal-contingent characteristics of environmental sound. Following the work of Karin Bijsterveld, this article engages with the compositional re-contextualization of industrial sounds and their technologies, transforming instruments of marine industry into instruments of sonic performance, and questions how place and soundscape impact and are inscribed in modern cultural expression and comment upon shifting environments.⁸

On soundscape

Composer, acoustic ecologist, and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer defines the term ‘soundscape’ as ‘an environment of sound (sonic environment) with emphasis on the way it is perceived and understood by the individual or by a society’.⁹ The term first appeared in the pamphlet The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (1969), and was further nuanced in collaboration with the members of the interdisciplinary sonic research collective the World Soundscape Project, and through artistic application in the genres of electro-acoustic soundscape composition and outdoor environmental theater.¹⁰ The World Soundscape Project also investigated the utility of soundscape as a musical object and a performance space. Schafer ruminates: ‘Is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?’¹¹ By examining the acoustic environment of the contemporary world and the impact of society upon it, the World Soundscape Project sought to achieve a balance between the natural and built, the human and non-human aural components of the soundscape.

A key principle in soundscape theory is that a soundscape’s cultural impact is the result of perception and subjective experience. Composer and sound scholar Barry Truax, a founding member of the World Soundscape Project, explains that the term is a function of the relationship between a listener and the environment he or she occupies. Human and non-human citizens of an environment have a direct and immediate effect on the soundscape, and are influenced by the sounds produced within the soundscape. This article adopts Schafer’s work in soundscape to illustrate the utility of the term in examining the performance ecology – that is, the shared relations among sounds and performing bodies – of the Harbour Symphony. The performance is a system of intersectional relations among landscape, urban space, and the sonic environment that fosters social awareness of the unique local soundscape. The interaction among the soundscape, community, and individual fosters a sense of place. Each soundscape is idiosyncratic and contingent upon the actions of sounding bodies situated within, and contributing to the soundscape.

The sounds of the harbour, notably the horns of the ships, are important community sounds, or ‘soundmarks’ that define the acoustic community of a specific area and the social and sonic lives of those situated in that place. The term ‘soundmark’ is defined as a unique community sound. It is a sound with ‘qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community. Soundmarks, therefore, are of cultural and historical significance and merit preservation and protection’.¹² Horns are local soundmarks, but they also serve as modes of what Truax refers to as ‘acoustic communication’, relaying vital information (e.g. navigation, weather, distress) among ships, industry, and society.¹³ ‘The basic model of acoustic communication,’ as Truax explains, ‘is grounded in the understanding that information and meaning arise through listening from both the inner structure and patterns of sound itself and also the listener’s knowledge of context.’¹⁴ The horns may initially read as intrusive industrial noises, however, the sonic materiality and the horn’s socio-sonic function in the marine industries that support the livelihoods of residents positions the sounds of ship horns as meaningful and indexical of place.

Soundmarks characterize places and all sonic life can participate ‘as a vibrant ingredient within community life’.¹⁵ Schafer and the World Soundscape Project addressed the ways in which the soundscape shifted and was re-orchestrated in response to societal and environmental change, acknowledging the need for preservation methods to retain endangered sounds that may become silenced from the soundscape. A soundmark, Schafer argues, once identified ‘deserves protection’.¹⁶ Marine industry in St. John’s continues to shift, from fishing, to trade, to the oil industry, and with each shift the soundscape and the nuances of the soundmarks tethered to the harbour have shifted alongside harbour use. As oil prices fall and oil reserves are exhausted, one must consider whether the sounds of the harbour, namely the horns, will become endangered sounds preserved through Harbour Symphony compositions, performances, and field recordings.

Steffler’s compositions were featured for the first five consecutive days of the inaugural festival, and on the sixth day Schafer contributed a Harbour Symphony. A featured artist at the Sound Symposium, Schafer was invited to compose a Harbour Symphony on account of his seminal contributions to soundscape studies, acoustic ecology, and alternative performance spaces. Schafer’s score for his 1983 Harbour Symphony, although ambitious, is illustrative of the instructions provided to the musicians and demonstrates how these instructions are open to the unavoidable adaptations necessitated by the performance space, its conditions, and the sonic materials available during the time of performance. The summer 1983 issue of Musicworks Magazine features Schafer’s detailed calligraphic score printed alongside his recollection of the acoustic experience: ‘To the casual observer, it might have seemed initially that the harbour traffic was heavier than usual. But as the time passed, the horns continued to blow and blow in changing configurations and harmonies.’¹⁷ The sonic ambiance of the city gradually organized into musical accompaniment as Schafer listened to his Harbour Symphony and the soundscape. Although Schafer espouses on which sounds matter and which do not in The Tuning of the World (1977) and his preference for hi-fi over lo-fi soundscapes, in practice his system of valuation is more fluid and inclusive. Since the publication of The Tuning of the World and its subsequent reprinting as The New Soundscape (1994), Schafer has applied the tenets of soundscape and acoustic ecology to his compositions, and through artistic application Schafer’s argument concerning the valuation of specific types of sounds (e.g. ‘natural’ versus ‘industrial’) has shifted.¹⁸ Schafer’s pioneering work in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies is echoed in the acoustic and aesthetic concerns of the Harbour Symphony initiative. As a highly technologized form of sonic intervention, the Harbour Symphony ostensibly contributes to a meaningful sense of place rather than to a noisy ‘lo-fi’ soundscape.

Harbour Symphony composers frequently referenced the vocabulary (e.g. soundscape and soundmark) developed by acoustic ecology practitioners during the formative years of the World Soundscape Project (1969–1975) when describing their works and the performance space of the harbour. The term soundscape, Ari Y. Kelman argues, through its widespread application ‘has come to refer to almost any experience of sound in almost any context’.¹⁹ The composers and I discussed the genealogy of the terminology at length, including its pitfalls, but also its utility. As specialists of contemporary and experimental music practices, they are aware of Schafer’s early work in soundscape studies and the genealogy of the term in contemporary music studies.²⁰ There is utility in using the term in conversations addressing the performance practice of the Harbour Symphony due to the intersectionality of landscape and sonic environment in these works. Several listeners I interviewed referenced soundscape. My interlocutors attributed their exposure to the term to the attention paid by popular media to the social and sonic use of mobile listening devices in everyday listening culture.²¹ Soundscape, however, provided the lay listener with an easily digestible and accessible frame of reference to discuss the composed sounds of the Harbour Symphony alongside the regional sounds of the natural, built, and social life of St. John’s.

St. John’s as a place, the Harbour Symphony as an event

Following Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot’s voyage to the ‘New World’ in 1497, the citizens of the European continent were informed of abundance of fish off the shores of Newfoundland, and claimed the territory as an English colony in 1583. Newfoundland’s strategic geographical location at the centre of the English migratory fishery on the Grand Banks identified St. John’s as a centralized meeting point for European fishermen. As the Northern Cod fishery expanded throughout the eighteenth century, St. John’s transformed from a modest fishing community into a growing centre of trade, commerce, and residential settlement.

During both the First and Second World Wars, the topography of the port provided natural protection and strategic advantage, establishing the St. John’s harbour as a central naval base for the Commonwealth. There is a photograph from the 1940s of my smiling grandfather transplanted from Toronto, in his full dress navy uniform standing on a steep sidewalk, the familiar, unchanged rows of blue, yellow, and red former fishermen’s houses in the background on Victoria Street. The harbour of St. John’s was a base for trans-Atlantic convoy escorts and he was waiting to go overseas. At that time, there were 52 ships in the harbour and it was a maelstrom of activity. Today, close proximity to oil discoveries on the Grand Banks (e.g. Hibernia oil field) and mobile offshore drilling has significantly boosted the economic and physical development of the province following the implementation of the federal government Cod Moratorium in 1992 and the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery.²²

In 1983, when the Sound Symposium was founded and Schafer composed one of the first Harbour Symphonies heard that week, the North Atlantic cod industry was active. Almost a decade later in July 1992, due to national and international over-fishing that depleted the cod stocks, the Canadian government shut down the industry indefinitely. The government feared that the once-plentiful fish stocks had dwindled to near extinction and would disappear entirely if the fisheries remained open without increased regulation and a period of natural resource conservation to rejuvenate the ecology of the North Atlantic Ocean. The Cod Moratorium had a direct impact on the residents of Newfoundland, putting thousands out of work and ending a way of life that had endured for generations in outport communities without providing an economic alternative. Although the federal government has, at times, permitted occasional summer food fisheries for cod, as of 2015, the cod fishing industry in Canada’s North Atlantic Ocean has yet to achieve complete recovery status in the Grand Banks.

The industries connected to those honks and blasts have shifted. The fishing vessels Schafer scored for, which supported local traditional ways of life are not the exact same soundmarks heard today. The vessels have transitioned along with local industry. The soundmarks, or community sounds heard by the public in the contemporary St. John’s harbour have likely sonorically shifted. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the island and its marine industry have been revitalized by the wealth of offshore oil reserves. Today, the horns of fishing vessels have been substituted for those of oil tankers, offshore anchor vessels, and the ships from the Canadian Coast Guard fleet. The port is inextricably connected to the community of the city and the culture of its citizenship, and the cultural identity of the harbour is shaped by its use as a bustling service centre for general cargo, the fishery, offshore energy, recreation and cultural activities, and tourism.

The Harbor Symphony is a site-specific performance event situated at the nexus of sonic geography, experimental music, and cultural heritage. Many cultural and environmental theorists have observed that visuality overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of the senses, and the Harbour Symphony seeks to destabilize this balance so that participants attend primarily to the aurality of place, and the dynamic sonic hum of the city over its distinct visuality. All the winding, sloped, labyrinth-like streets in St. John’s run down the harbour. It is like the city leans seaward – the buildings’ eyes are directed toward ‘The Narrows’. The recently built art gallery, The Rooms, reflecting the architecture of a fisherman’s shack, looms over the harbour as do the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals. The church bells reverberate against the rocky east side of the harbour as the sun sets behind the city. The winds that constantly blow through the long grasses of Signal Hill, bring in a suffocating fog, and lift seagulls over the harbour where the vibrant cod industry flourished and the Navy ghosts linger. It is a working harbour for the petroleum industry. There are few fishing boats permanently docked and no yacht club. Seasonally, cruise ships arrive and spill out curious tourists who are looking for whales, puffins, and icebergs.

Downtown St. John’s, located north of the harbor, is the business, entertainment, and tourism centre of the city with office buildings, hotels, restaurants, and other services. The cityscape is characterized by a vibrant array of brightly hued wooden clapboard residential buildings and many buildings throughout the city have been designated as sites of heritage (Figures 2a and 2b). However, in recent years developers have reshaped the character of downtown through the construction of structures for corporate businesses, franchises, and condominiums in close proximity to the waterfront that do not integrate with heritage buildings and obstruct harbour views. The city streets in this region run in an east–west direction and parallel to the harbour, providing natural amphitheater ‘seating’ as the city slopes markedly downwards to the harbour. In 1949, prior to Confederation, the streets were narrow and winding, reflecting the city’s system of land tenure. With much of the land in the main commercial–residential area owned by British absentee landlords, following the devastating fires of 1846 and 1892 the government was unable to acquire the acreage required to improve city infrastructure. City officials were unable to build straight, wide streets logically organized in a gridiron plan during the periods of rebuild. Thus, St. John’s has a healthy chaotic urban plan and quaintly disorderly appearance of winding streets, lots of varying size, detached and row houses that feature diverse architectural styles and colours, and picturesque views of the harbour.

Figures 2a and 2b. Images of heritage architecture in downtown St. John’s: (a) detail of clapboard houses and (b) downtown St. John’s (photos by author).

The Sound Symposium is promoted as ‘an international celebration of Sound – a catalyst for the generation of new ideas and new directions in music, visual and performance art’ and ‘brings artists, musicians, scientists and others from around the globe to Newfoundland to collaborate with local artists on bold new projects, to appreciate the joy and excitement of the creative process in action’. ²³ The festival is astonishingly diverse. The Sound Symposium was founded to highlight local talent and bring established international experimental artists into direct collaborative contact with musicians, composers, and artists to highlight the unique cultural and social environs of the city. The week-long festival puts on daytime workshops, evening concerts, late night jam sessions, art installations, and a variety of outdoor free-of-charge happenings in addition to the daily Harbour Symphonies, encouraging participants to ‘soak up the environment, interact, explore, share and collaborate’.²⁴

While many of the performances during the Sound Symposium take place in the LSPU Hall, a repurposed former union hall and community center of the Longshoremen’s Protective Union, through paid ticket entry, several events are staged in open access alternative performance contexts. These free-of-charge events that democratize the performer–audience–organization relationship have been staged on street corners, in basements, the Memorial University of Newfoundland Botanical Gardens, military bunkers and artillery fortifications located at the Battery, on hillsides, in the harbour, near the ocean at Cape Spear, and sometimes in unexpected locations, such as the Marine Institute’s flume tank. Throughout each Sound Symposium the city is saturated with an eclectic and cross-cultural collection of music genres, experimental installations, dance, theatre, gallery exhibitions, outdoor events, film, lectures, workshops, and trail walks.

The Harbour Symphony is heralded as the signature fanfare of the Sound Symposium that transforms the ships in the harbour, and the sonic evidence of place, into an orchestra staged on water. It resonates throughout the cityscape and landscape for the ears of the entire city. Everyday sounds and technologies of industry are recontextualized as music. These are ‘site-determined’ compositions concerned with, as environmental composer John Luther Adams remarks in reference to spatiality and the performance event, ‘finding the music within the place and exploring the music of the place’.²⁵ While recording the Harbour Symphony one afternoon, the event coincided with the summer concert series Music at Harbourside Park. Harbourside Park is a small manicured park endorsed by the Sound Symposium in their programme as the venue for the Harbour Symphony. The park transforms into a site of active, deliberate, and conscious concert attendance (Figure 3). The park was assembled as a formal auditorium with additional temporary seating, designated listening spaces, and the water positioned as the ‘stage’. In the mandate of the Sound Symposium St. John’s is positioned as a unique environment. Therefore, the fact that the Harbour Symphony showcases and musicalizes one of the signature soundmarks of the city is significant. Co-creator Carter remarks:

The idea for the first St. John’s Harbour Symphony was a fusion of the spontaneous annual New Year’s Eve ship horn-blowing [of past soundscapes] with this image of the harbour surrounded by steep hills and sloping city as a large natural amphitheater. Why not orchestrate the ship’s horns into a performance? I wanted the Harbour Symphony to sing the beauty of the unique marriage of city and nature found in St. John’s. ‘This is valuable: let’s take good care of it.’²⁶

Figure 3. Harbourside Park during the 2012 Sound Symposium (photo by author).

Carter attributes the inspiration for the Harbour Symphony to a desire to value and maintain the city’s physical and acoustic heritage.

The audience is comprised of everyone who happens to be in the audible range of the performance event and therefore not all participants are aware that they are engaging in a performance event rather than simply the complexities of the everyday soundscape. This impetus echoes Denise Von Glahn’s assertion that ‘although sonic images may be more fleeting than printed or sculpted ones, and less specific than prose descriptions, they are no less eloquent or evocative; their commentary is no less poignant’.²⁷ It is an inclusive performance event that is directed not only towards listening participants, but also to non-cognizant participants partaking in everyday urban activities.

The process of musicalization does more than rejuvenate Western art music practice by way of an expanded sonic palette and performance contexts to accommodate shifting contemporary auditory environments. The sonic practice of the Harbour Symphony follows the aural aesthetics of the Italian Futurists, Fluxus, and Cage, which involves a democratization of the arts in response to a perceived social and sonic elitism in Western art music practice. All sounds are potential compositional materials and the boundaries separating life and art are in need of erasure. This aesthetic stance extends the field of artistic materiality to all the non-intentional sounds surrounding the performance, that is, as Douglas Kahn posits ‘shifting the production of music from the site of utterance to that of audition’.²⁸ The Harbour Symphony offers another voice in the ongoing debate concerning what constitutes valuable or worthwhile art, and the exploration of the performance ecology of contemporary music. Compositions that use everyday sounds as compositional materials aestheticize the mundane through processes of recontextualization. Within these newly aestheticized contexts, listeners are encouraged to attend to the nuanced relationships in their sonic environment.

The instruments of the Harbour

Carolyn and I scale to the top of the Norwegian ship the Havila Venus, climbing six industrial flights of metal stairs through the internal cavity of the ocean liner, and meeting the captain on the bridge (Figure 4). ‘We are here to perform the ship’s instrument,’ I say, explaining our presence on the ship. ‘We don’t think about it like that. It’s just a horn,’ the captain replied in a thick Norwegian accent. The crew does not consider the horn at the helm of the Havila Venus, or any other marine vessel, musical. The extended use of the horn in a musical composition contrasts the sonic, social, and economic non-musical life of the harbour. We interrupt the sleep of the night crew, arrive during the lunch hour, and, at times, step onto the deck to perform just as the vessel is required to depart from the harbour for a prescheduled assignment.

Figure 4. Bridge operation system of the Havila Venus with performer Carolyn (photo by author, July 2014).

Figure 5. Dem’s not Oars, Dem’s me Sisters’ by Ed Squires (2012) [Player/Boat 5] (photo by author, July 2012).

Figure 6. Hope Harbour Symphony by Jesse Stewart (2014) [Player/Boat 4] (courtesy of the Sound Symposium).

Figure 7. Harbour Symphony by Allan Gordon Bell (2014) [Player/Boat 5] (courtesy of the Sound Symposium).

Figure 8. The Alsterstern (photo by author, July 2014).

Figure 9. The Atlantic Kestrel at Marine Base Pier (photo by author, July 2014).

Figure 10. Volunteers rehearsing the Harbour Symphony (photo by author, July 2014).

Figure 11. The Atlantic Kestrel Bridge Horn Station (photo by author, July 2014).

A ship’s horn occupies an important role in navigational operations. It participates in what Truax terms ‘acoustic communication’ relating listeners and communities to their environments, and the socio-spatial activities that take place in those environments through sound. It is a sonic tool that relays information concerning the vessel’s navigation, manoeuvering, and signalling processes. As Truax notes: ‘The basic model of acoustic communication is grounded in the understanding that information and meaning arise through listening from both the inner structure and patterns of sound itself and also the listener’s knowledge of context.’²⁹ The ships that participate in the Harbour Symphony remain operational during the performance, but crew members were eager to participate when available. The Havila Venus, for instance, was delayed on a job. Docked at the pier, the captain patiently waited for a radio transmission to announce the time and location of where they were required at a designated offshore oil rig. The ship would eventually serve as an anchor handling tug supply vessel (AHTSS), towing oil rigs into location, anchoring them, transporting supplies, and, if required, serving as an Emergency Rescue and Recover Vessel (ERRV). Moored in the harbour since the ship’s arrival in St. John’s via Aberdeen and Invergordon (Scotland) from its native port in Fosnaväg (Norway), the crew waited on-call to commence their operations. In the meantime, they enthusiastically welcome the opportunity to join our experimental music orchestra.

The instruments are the human-operated industrial electric-powered air horns of a select group of available working ships docked in the St. John’s harbour. The air horn has a distinct functionality and utility. An air horn is a pneumatic device designed to create a distinctive sound for signalling purposes. The horns used in the Harbour Symphony produce sound with a reservoir of built up compressed air that is then emitted through a horn via a diaphragm once the button mechanism is pushed. The stream of compressed air vibrates the diaphragm, creating sound waves that the horn then amplifies. The horns were historically operated manually, but contemporary air horns are controlled by an electric-powered airflow control system that regulates the compressed air. The horns are rarely on cue. The attacks spurt, experience delay, and lack precision. ‘When you push the button for the horn on the ship, sometimes it takes a while for the steam or the air to build up in the pipe, and so the horn just goes “pfrrrrrt”!’ Hohmann explains.³⁰ The horn, housed on a vessel constructed from wood, steel, and industrial rubbers and plastics, is delicate. Harbour Symphony lore recalls many an occasion where a volunteer has broken a horn’s mechanism mid-performance, silencing the horn or fixing the horn for the duration of the composition on sustain.

The performance practice of the Harbour Symphony informs which core ships in the harbour (like regular cast members of a theater company) are capable of executing particular notation. The Canadian Coast Guard ships, for instance, are incapable of producing short staccato blasts. The plastic push button mechanism appears to be the same as that of the other ships, but the performed sound is a stark auditory contrast. Coast Guard horns are well suited to compositions that highlight sustained resonant tones and blasts of more than a second in length that score for gradual decay. When Hohmann is unfamiliar with the timbre and functionality of the horn of a new ship, he has been known to ask the captain to play a sample over the phone so that he can appropriately position the vessel in the ‘orchestra’. The opportunity for preparation is rare, as these are working ships whose primary purpose lies outside the realm of experimental music. The timbre and attack of the ensemble is not revealed until the moment of performance. If the opportunity presents itself performers ‘test’ our instrument quickly before the cue from the Coast Guard, approximating the amount of force and release required for short or long blasts, and with what frequency successive tones are sounded with speed and finesse.

Composing and performing the Harbour Symphony

Registered Sound Symposium performers and featured artists are issued an information package containing timeline staff paper, full score manuscript paper, and an invitation for contributions. The organizers treat submissions on a first-come, first-served basis for each available spot. Compositions are no longer than six minutes by mandate. Although many residents and visitors celebrate the Harbour Symphony, this is not a universal opinion. Performances are staged during business hours and potentially disruptive if extended in length. Organizers, thus, have opted to avoid opposition by limiting the length of the performance. However, interviews reveal a notable positive response to the sound event. Some business operators feel it attracts business to their establishment as patrons linger to listen to the harbour, while others feel it fosters increased dialogue among curious tourists and residents who are intrigued by what they hear, and the sonic activity highlights the spatial character of the city.

Each composer creates a work for this distinct performance space without the opportunity to experiment beforehand with the topography and specific conditions of the day. In some cases, returning composers bring experience to the compositional practice integrating previous experience of the harbour into their submission. Other composers are St. John’s residents. The spatial layout of St. John’s harbour is approximately one-and-a-half miles long, and as a result, there is typically an approximately seven-minute delay before all sound elements have reached the listeners on land. The harbour has a large oblong shape with the city situated on the north side and the fairly barren and rugged Southside Hills to the south (Map 1). These topographic features create the opportunity for complex spatial effects, near and far sonic panning, antiphonal effects, and resonate reverb. If composers are knowledgeable of the physical and aural architecture, they can compose for the collaboration between sound and space, providing sections of ‘silence’ that highlight the sonic–spatial unpredictabilities.

Map 1. The St. John’s Harbour and Pier System (courtesy of the St. John’s Port Authority).

The use of graphic, space–time notation, where duration is specified in minutes and seconds, is essential for two reasons. First, although the Harbour Symphony composers are new music specialists fluent in experimental practices that employ alternative performance spaces, spatiality, soundscape, and non-conventional compositional materials, few of the volunteer performers who play the horns and conduct the scores are trained musicians. The graphic notation does not require specific musical knowledge and an extensive period of rehearsal. Second, the notation facilitates the synchronization of spatially distanced performing bodies. Performers operating the individual horns cannot listen for the other entries around the harbour because of the prolonged sonic delay and high-speed winds of the region that mask the audibility of the horn blasts emitted across the water from other vessels. The countdown is announced over the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Control (VTC) Ship-to-Shore radio airwaves on channel 11. Using digital stopwatches as metronomic timekeepers, the conductor on each vessel announces the minutes and seconds, guiding the horn operator through the graphic, space–time score (Figure 5).

The performers play the horn at the appropriate moments in time, for the required durations, and with the scored attacks. Prescriptive and descriptive graphic notation articulates desired texture and the nature of the attack. Composers, however, may choose to include improvisatory sections with written or pictorial descriptions that guide the improvisation. The guidelines distributed to potential composers outline the most frequently used graphic notation used in previous Harbour Symphonies, but composers frequently personalize their notation and include a descriptive key and instructions. For example, filling in a box with solid black indicates that the horn is played for a whole second, while consecutive filled-in boxes indicate that the musician performs a prolonged blast for the indicated number of seconds. Placing a dot on the line or in the middle of a box indicates that a short blast is articulated at that specific time interval. A series of dots of different size transitioning from larger to smaller indicates a gradated succession of attacks from longer blasts to shorter blasts. The score for Hope Harbour Symphony (2014) by Jesse Stewart clearly illustrates the notational alternation between short blasts (circular/dot notation) and longer blasts (filled-in bar notation) (Figure 6). In contrast, Harbour Symphony by Allan Gordon Bell (2014) provides additional directions via written text to further communicate his aesthetic goals (Figure 7). Bell’s explanatory notes dictate and regulate the speed of the blasts. This articulation, however, was difficult to achieve in practice given the functionality and resistance of the electric air horn aboard the oil/chemical tanker the Alsterstern (Figure 8). Rapid blasts of less than a second in length with brief moments of pause between notes were met with silence because the horn necessitated more time than anticipated to build up the amount of compressed air required to sound.

Composers experiment with the placement, frequency, delay, counterpoint, and density of the sound performed by the horns, however, they cannot control or anticipate the pitch of any of the vessels, or the reaction of each ship’s sounding mechanism. The soundscape will also insinuate itself into the compositional texture in performance, and composers often prefer to compose in a style that highlights the acoustic features of the harbour. As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter address in their volume Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture, architectural artifacts are sonically illuminated by sounds in everyday listening situations.³¹ Some listeners who deliberately sought out the Harbour Symphony on their lunch hour engaged themselves in short ‘soundwalks’ through the streets, laneways, and boroughs of St. John’s, including the Battery, Georgetown, the downtown, the trailhead at Signal Hill, and Rabbittown. Andra McCartney defines soundwalking as a practice ‘that involves listening and sometimes recording while moving through a place at a walking pace’.³² The soundwalk – the process of moving through urban space while actively listening – facilitated a listening position where these listeners could engage with the sounds of the harbour in juxtaposition to the heritage architecture of the city.

The importance of the social and geographic site of performance and the interconnected human/non-human relationships tethered to place resonates with Tina Ramnarine’s call to scholars of music and sound to consider how the frameworks of acoustic ecology and soundscape studies can be utilized in the interpretation of environment-centric musics that involve ‘co-creation’ or ‘co-performance’ – that is, performance by both the human performers (e.g. instrumentalists), as well as non-human and unpredictable performers (e.g. soundscape elements of weather or animal life) – and consider ‘the ways in which environments shape musical concepts and creative processes’.³³ Participants observe that each composition transforms in character as the sound disperses throughout, reverberates from, and is absorbed into the city.

The horn blasts are texturized as they reverberate off of, and are absorbed by the built and natural heritage features of St. John’s. Sensory interplay results as listeners moved through the city listening to the sound event while performing everyday activities that commence and continue beyond the temporal limits of the sound event. The built and the natural spaces of St. John’s intermingle during these soundwalks. The harbour is a responsive space. The acoustic principles of reflection, resonance, and absorption, all contribute to listeners’ sense of acoustic space, and promote (and potentially deter) human interaction with sound and space. The sonic materiality of the Harbour Symphony is interlinked with the physicality of the city. Building materials, like the wooden panels of the heritage clapboard houses, along with the landscape, exposed rock, water, and wind velocity contour the resonance of the work and how it is heard. As Peter A. Coates notes, ‘notions of noise, sound, and silence [and also music] – like any other cultural phenomena – are invariably historically contingent, varying according to time, place, and human constituency’.³⁴ In these alternative contexts, as listeners observed, the former associative meanings connected to these sounds are retained and layered upon new ones, enriching the aural experience.

Spatiality and the performance practice of the Harbour Symphony

It is 11:30 am, and volunteers gather at the steps behind the Scotiabank on Harbour Drive, across the road from harbour front security. I hear the jingling of Hohmann’s bicycle bell before he even enters my line of sight. There are six volunteers so far. We will need closer to 10 volunteers unless one of the ships drops out of the performance at the last minute (or, more appropriately, sails away). One of the ship captains will need to serve as our timekeeper if additional volunteers do not arrive. Hohmann arranges the group in five groups of pairs. I am performing the part of ‘Boat 5’ on the Atlantic Kestrel, a Canadian anchor-handling vessel docked at the Marine Base pier located between Harbourside Park and the entrance to the Battery (Figure 9). Following brief explanatory remarks addressing the notation and style of the composition, the group rehearses the piece once, substituting their voice in place of the horns. Volunteers hum, beep, and blarp, mimicking the sonic profile of the ship’s horns with their voice (Figure 10).

The group disperses, travelling by foot, bicycle, and car to their designated pier and vessel. It is a 20-minute process to walk to the Marine Base, check in with security, don a fluorescent orange reflective security vest, cross the industrial loading area, and climb to the bridge of the ship while escorted by a member of the vessel’s personnel. On arrival at the bridge I am directed towards our horn. It is a single black button marked ‘horn/whistle’ in silver lettering (Figure 11). ‘It’s this button here. Feel free to test it. She’s a pretty good sounder. Still young,’ the captain explains, as the Atlantic Kestrel was built in 2012. He is right. There is little resistance, the button requires a light touch, and the horn is responsive. It is 12:30 pm. Static is broadcast over the ship-to-shore radio, followed by an announcement by the Coast Guard: ‘This is St. John’s Coast Guard to all ships. [Pause] Harbour Symphony countdown. [Pause] Four-three-two-one-GO.’ I hear the start of the composition from the small tugboat at neighboring Pier 17 in the Battery, and we count three seconds in for the Atlantic Kestrel’s first blast. I try to maintain my concentration, fixed on the score as I hear other entries, as well as my own, refract off of the Southside Hills across the harbour.

In practice the Harbour Symphony is shaped by the spatial configuration of the ships within the harbour. The composers cannot alter this spatial distribution or select which ships will participate in the performance. When ships enter the harbour they are spatially distributed around the harbour perimeter, docked at different piers (e.g. Pier 17/Battery, Coast Guard Pier, Marine Base, and Cruise Ship Pier 10/11). This wide spatial arrangement makes synchronization difficult. For instance, a rhythmic pattern of short bursts performed by two ships that are spatially distant from each other will appear identical in the score, but there will be a highly variable degree of sonic spread and delay between the two executions of the pattern. Participants regard this unpredictability as compositionally liberating as they explore the acoustic and physical geographies of an unconventional performance space. There are many performance variables that composers cannot predict or score. These vagaries must be left to chance, such as the number and type of ships in the harbour, which horns are available and unavailable, the pitch of the horns, weather conditions, and the spatial organization and distribution of the ships.

Prior to a performance at The Rooms, a cultural space that curates local history, intangible heritage, and expressive culture, listeners in anticipation expected the Harbour Symphony to sound like ‘a chaotic clash’, with the blasts overlapping, creating a découpage of ‘noise pollution’ that would saturate the soundscape and mask all other components of the soundscape. These casual listeners evoked Schafer’s valuation of the soundscape, privileging an acoustically balanced ‘hi-fi’ soundscape over a ‘lo-fi’ acoustic environment saturated with industrial sounds. Several listeners were surprised by how well these everyday sounds musicalize when placed in a ‘new music’ context, selectively amplified by natural and urban topography, and compositionally organized.³⁵ Many Harbour Symphonies challenged listeners to reconsider their value judgments concerning what is art, and how they classify what they consider musical or everyday sound, or even noise.

When participants reflected on their aural memory of the event, their reminiscences combined indelible sonic traces of the ships’ horns, the soundscape of their listening site, and their physical and acoustic position(s) within St. John’s prior to, throughout, and following the event. The creative interpretation of the sonic environment can prove to be an important avenue for both intellectual and public engagement. ‘Sounds emerge from and are perceptually centered in place’ and in the Harbour Symphony we encounter sound as a way-of-knowing, an ‘acoustemology’ to draw on Steven Feld’s term.³⁶ As Feld explains, ‘sounding and the sensual, bodily, experiencing of sound is a special kind of knowing’. ³⁷ This group of women lunching at The Rooms were providing their out-of-town guests with a cultural tour of the city, one that included a performance of the Harbour Symphony with a panoramic view of the harbour and downtown St. John’s following a visit to the cultural centre’s heritage exhibits.

At the national historic site Signal Hill, listeners deliberately sought out an optimal listening site, but not necessarily a ‘quiet’ space. They sought a site with a complementary soundscape that enhances the listening experience through the confluence of the Harbour Symphony with features of the acoustic environment and the hum of local tourism and heritage. As Ellen Waterman contends, ‘an appreciation of the soundscape begins with recovering our ability to listen’.³⁸ In contrast, other participants arrived at Signal Hill trying to locate a site of ‘natural silence’ – an absence of noise, that is, sounds generated by people and their machines, sounds typically viewed as alien to the natural world – to engage with the event. Participants in search of ‘natural silence’ revealed important sonic value judgments. Despite the agency of human activity and machinery in the composition, listeners positioned the Harbour Symphony as an aesthetically pleasing sound rather than what Schafer has termed ‘noise pollution’ when these sounds are framed in the context of experimental music. The extant collection of Harbour Symphonies transform one of the soundmarks of St. John’s into an orchestral instrument, utilizing the surface of the water and harbour as a natural amphitheater, and the hills as a sounding board. Each symphony is spatially and temporally distinct as a result of the physical, environmental, atmospheric, and acoustic conditions.

My reception studies of the Harbour Symphony have also garnered visceral ecological responses from local listeners. For several residents the Harbour Symphony triggers memories of environmental degradation and a need to be environmentally ethical citizens. Long-term residents have conflated environmental issues and harbour rehabilitation with their reception of the Harbour Symphony. The horns reference a time when higher levels of marine industry, water pollution, and a lack of wastewater treatment infrastructure transformed the historic and picturesque vista into an assault on the senses. Raw sewage was historically discarded into the harbour, and the polluted harbour was a sensorial deterrent for locals and tourists to interact with the harbourfront. Plans at the federal and provincial levels to remedy the situation began in the 1970s as the environmental movement gained momentum and citizens became more environmentally aware. It was not until 1997, however, that the comprehensive St. John’s Harbour Clean-up Project was implemented. To participants who remember a time when the ecological health of the harbour was unbalanced, the Harbour Symphony serves as an acoustic reminder to be environmentally ethical and cognizant of the environmental health of the place.³⁹

The field recordings I collected during my fieldwork highlight the impact of the aural architecture of a place, comprised of the buildings, people, vegetation, and landmarks, to name a few, and their characteristics, for example their density, angles, materials, and spatial placement. The distinctive aural architecture of St. John’s shapes how the sound resonates and is disseminated and experienced. The microphone of my field recorder extends into the soundscape capturing sounds beyond the aural reach of the human ear. Listening to my recordings on repeat reveals how sound is shaped by place and how place is shaped by sound and human activity, as traces of automotive activity, café conversations, and seagulls sound in unintentional counterpoint against the horns. Many of the listeners I interviewed noticed that during a performance they experienced place through their ears more than through their eyes, when typically they felt their visual sense dominated their knowing of place. These comments further emphasize Bijsterveld’s observation: ‘The idea that our visual cultural has atrophied the ear and keeps us from careful listening is still around, however’.⁴⁰ This listening experience challenged the perceived visual bias of experiencing environments, what Jonathan Sterne refers to as the ‘audiovisual litany’ in The Audible Past.⁴¹ He questions why the discussion of the historical trajectory of sensory perception must be “a zero-sum game, where the dominance of one sense by necessity leads to the decline of another sense.”⁴²

On return to my field notes, participant listening responses, and field recordings a number of salient acoustic features surfaced. In addition to composing for long, short articulated, gradated, and pulsating horn blasts, composers provided elongated sections of composed silence where the horns reverberate and echo, refracting off the surrounding topography, including the exposed rock of the Southside Hills and Signal Hill and the buildings that border the harbourfront. This ‘silence’ also draws listeners’ attention towards the other, frequently unobserved features of St. John’s soundscape that many participants felt should be acknowledged as a part of the locale’s heritage. Several works blended into the acoustic environment as musicalized soundmarks punctuating the fabric of the comprehensive soundscape, resonating sympathetically with the sensorial environs and forces of nature. The graphic notation can communicate how one approaches composing for the musicalized ships’ horns acoustic collaborations with the aural architecture of the site-specific performance space. Other experiential facets can only be experienced first hand – in performance – including the length, timbre, density of the natural decay, or echo of a prolonged blast. As Hohmann remarks:

The beautiful thing about the harbour symphony [...] is that you compose a piece, and you know what it’s going to sound like on paper, but there’s always a compromise. Depending on the wind direction, the wind speeds, sometimes you get an echo that takes seven seconds, sometimes you don’t have one at all. It can be an improvisation in terms of what nature does with it.⁴³

The performance space, weather conditions, the soundscape, and the sound resources available in the harbour condition the performance event and the composer’s score.

It is through the performance practice of the Harbour Symphony that the significance of the local soundscape is extrapolated. Soundscape composer and soundwalk practitioner Hildegard Westerkamp recalls her Harbour Symphony (1988), noting the soundscape unexpectedly became a part of the acoustic experience of her work. The soundscape voiced itself in the composed silence in the empty measures of her score. She explains: ‘What came as a total surprise, however, while recording the one and only performance of this piece from Signal Hill above the harbour, was that a bird would be singing its song very near my microphone during the opening.’⁴⁴ The ephemerality of these sound installations, which assume a liminal sonic space between experiences of the everyday, challenge listeners to consider the changing nature of place, and how aural architecture transforms sound and site. During the Harbour Symphony, public spaces – like that of a working harbour – temporarily transition into sites of artistic creation.

For the period of performance, the city of St. John’s is transformed. Residents and visitors knowingly and unknowingly become members of the audience. The city streets, neighbouring parks, and landmarks become auditorium seats, and the composed and uncomposed soundmarks and soundscape attributes that symbolize St. John’s become orchestral instruments in a highly unusual performance ensemble. For a few brief days during Sound Symposium the community of local residents and tourists are offered a new way of listening to and perceiving the everyday spaces of the city and its sonic environment. While interacting with urban space listeners engage with the dynamic collaboration between physical and sonic geographies. As one listener notes:

The car traffic that surrounded my listening site in Harbourside Park augmented the experience. It served as a reminder that we aren’t listening to a concert in a concert hall, but ships in a harbour in a city. It crystallized the point that hearing ships making music in the harbour at all is just as important as hearing it well.⁴⁵

Although the Harbour Symphony is scored for the horns of the harbour, these soundmarks are shaped in performance by the human and environmental elements of the locale. All of the experiential and physical features of place participate in the construction, manipulation, and perception of the work.

Conclusion

The Harbour Symphony exploits the physical geographies and materiality of place and strives to engender an awareness of the local soundscape through sonic and performative contextual change. This research joins a body of critical scholarship on performance that understands music – particularly the ecology of live performance and place – as discourse through the ethnographic study of contemporary music practices, illuminating social processes and cultural effects. These compositions seek to expand the boundaries of musical discourse and show how experimental music, like the Harbour Symphony, is a particularly expressive medium for exploring issues of performativity, connectivity to place, the creative application of acoustic ecology, and experimentation with spatiality and the aural architectures of site-specific performance space. In addition to providing a performance ethnography of the Harbour Symphony, this study investigates the diverse and interconnected ways in which contemporary composers working within the peripheries of the eco-conscious avant-garde draw on natural and urban environments in order to comment on listeners’ engagement with place and soundscape. These works draw on experiential encounters with contemporary environments and their sensory materialities, and the collision and collaboration between both human and non-human sounding bodies in a distinctive urban environment.

While some participants try to seek out the ‘best seat in the house’ for the event, many identify that the purpose of the work is the fusion of repurposed soundmarks-as-musical-devices of the harbour with the totality of the St. John’s soundscape. The listening experience and composition modify depending on which part of the city one is in at that time. As phenomenological philosopher Jeff Malpas explains,

what we are as living, thinking, experiencing beings is inseparable from the places in which we live – our lives are saturated by the places, and by the things and other persons intertwined with those places, through which we move, in which our actions are located, and with respect to which we orient and locate ourselves.⁴⁶

Through listeners’ situated experience of the Harbour Symphony participants rehear and recontextualize the culturally and musically valuable community sounds, or soundmarks, of place.

Notes on contributor

Kate Galloway is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place (MMaP), funded by a Social Science and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Fellowship and Insight Development Grant. In 2012 her research received the SSHRC Postdoctoral Prize. She received her PhD in Musicology/Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Her research addresses experimental music practices, music and global environmental change, sound studies, music and geography, technology and media studies, visual culture, ethnographic approaches to musical avant-gardes, the spatiality of unconventional performance spaces, and digital humanities.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous readers of the journal, and the dedication of the editors, whose critical eye and comments strengthened the final form of the article. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2012 joint meeting of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, and Society for Music Theory (New Orleans, LA) and the 2013 meeting of the Society for American Music (Little Rock, AK). This research received the 2013 Society for American Music Cambridge University Press Award and was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship held at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place (MMaP).

Notes

1. Schafer, The Soundscape, 5.

2. Hohmann records every Harbour Symphony from the Southside Shore using a field recorder, high-quality binaural microphones, and a wind reducer. Hohmann’s field recordings from the 2012 and 2014 Sound Symposium can be heard on the Sound Symposium YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkpTQgU7cd2 k-Je7zUUPvFg) and SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/sound-symposium).

3. All names have been changed or left anonymous upon request.

4. Sound scholar, soundwalk practitioner, and sound artist Andra McCartney uses similar ethnographic approaches in her study of Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundscape compositions. See for instance her 2002 article “Alien Intimacies: Hearing Science Fiction Narratives in Hildegard Westerkamp’s Cricket Voice (or ‘I Don’t Like the Country, the Crickets Make Me Nervous’) ”, 45–49. I identify with McCartney’s methodology as it privileges the individualized experience of sound and space. ‘This open-endedness,’ McCartney explains, ‘is important to my work because it encourages surprise and exploration: rather than answering my pre-conceived questions, respondents open up new areas of thinking for me’ (45–46).

5. Truax, “Sound, Listening and Place”, 3.

6. Connor, “Edison’s Teeth; Touching Hearing”, 153–72. See also Ouzounian, "Embodied Sound", 65–79 for more on the aural architectures of the body and embodied listening in sound art.

7. Feld, “From Ethnomusicology to Echo-muse-ecology”. See also Feld, Sound and Sentiment.

8. See Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound. See also Braun, Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century; and the essays in the collection Pinch and Bijsterveld, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies.

9. Schafer, Handbook of Acoustic Ecology, 126.

10. See Schafer, The New Soundscape.

11. Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 5.

12. See Truax, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology.

13. Truax, Acoustic Communication.

14. Truax, “Sound, Listening and Place”, 2.

15. LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 83. See also the essays in the collection Erlmann, Hearing Cultures.

16. Schafer, “Soundscapes and Earwitness”, 8.

17. Schafer, “Harbour Symphony”, n.p.

18. Observation recorded in my field notes (19–29 August 2007). From 2004 to 2007, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Schafer and his performance community for four of his outdoor environmental theater productions from the Patria cycle (1966–present): These include, Patria 9: The Enchanted Forest; Patria 7: Asterion; Patria the Prologue: The Princess of the Stars; and Patria the Epilogue: And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon. During this fieldwork I participated as performer, theater technician, production assistant, creative assistant, and canoeist. I also observed Schafer’s aesthetic and musical applications of ‘soundscape’ and the ‘acoustic environment’ in performance practice. A broad definition of these terms facilitated participatory audience engagement and sought to reconnect listeners with sounds of the natural environment that were potentially absent from their everyday, primarily urban, experience. Schafer is concerned with sonic balances and allowing space for all sounds to be heard. He cautions his performers and audiences to sound sensitively in their daily sonic environments so that subtle sounds are heard alongside sounds with a more dominant sonic profile. See further Galloway, “Roughing it in the Woods”, 30–59; Galloway, “Sounding Nature, Sounding Place”; Galloway, “Pathways and Pilgrimages”, 134–145.

19. Kelman, “Rethinking the Soundscape”, 214.

20. See further Kelman, “Rethinking the Soundscape”, 212–234.

21. See further Bull, Sound Moves.

22. For a more extensive study of the history of St. John's see O'Neill, The Oldest City.

23. Sound Symposium, n.p.

24. Ibid.

25. Ross and Hurd, “Video, John Luther Adams’s Inuksuit,” n.p.

26. Locke, “The Harbour Symphony Music for Ships Horns”, n.p. See also CBC News, “Horns Turn Harbour into Outdoor Amphitheatre.”

27. Von Glahn, The Sounds of Place, 3.

28. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 158.

29. Truax, “Sound, Listening and Place”, 2.

30. Smellie, “How to Compose a Harbour Symphony”, n.p.

31. See Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, 1–66, 127–161. See also the essays in the collection LaBelle and Roden, Site of Sound.

32. McCartney, “Soundwalking: Creating Moving Environmental Sound Narratives”, 212.

33. Ramnarine, “Acoustemology, Indigeneity, and Joik in Valkeapää’s Symphonic Activism”, 197.

34. Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past”, 643. See also Bijsterveld, Soundscapes of the Urban Past, 11–30; Smith, Sensing the Past, 1–18, 41–48.

35. Interview with the author, 11 July 2012.

36. See further Feld, Sound and Sentiment.

37. Feld, ‘From Ethnomusicology to Echo-muse-ecology”, n.p.

38. Waterman, “Sound Escape: Sonic Geography”, 114.

39. Interview with the author, 19 July 2014.

40. Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound, 12.

41. See further Sterne, The Audible Past, 1–29, 32–85.

42. Sterne, The Audible Past, 16.

43. Smellie, “How to Compose a Harbour Symphony”, n.p.

44. Westerkamp, “Program Notes”, n.p.

45. Interview with the author, 10 May 2012.

46. Malpas, “Comparing Topologies”, 231. See also the essays in the collection Feld and Basso, Senses of Place.