Vol. 14 No. 1 (2015): Canacoustica: Canadian Perspectives on Environment and Sound

This winter and spring are like no other. In the far north, the silence of missing icebergs, groans and creaks of tardy ice fields, and the reverberation of glacier walls sheering disrupt ancient requisites in startling ways. In the east, winter borrows its lost measure from the north  –  deep freeze and deep snow relentlessly. In the west, winter is a whisper and early summer coddles early spring. The south creeps steadily northward. In this instability, sound ecology’s diverse local and global concentrations herald extraordinary planetary alteration. In rural and urban soundscapes, we listen and wonder at what was, what is, and what is coming – to how we are shaped as planetary beings, acoustic ecologists, researchers, artists and thinkers in our uniquely local sensibilities and global iterations. Synergies and discourses emerge that are like unanticipated winds and divergent ocean currents, like weather and seasons in flux.

Likewise, the Canadian Association of Sound Ecology (CASE) board members from different regions, backgrounds, and concentrations across this expansive terrain come together to share their thinking and work in acoustic ecology for this issue of Soundscape. The lineages from which these works derive are not limited to Canada, but are nevertheless innate to the now global fascination with acoustic ecology and all its practises. Initially, the symposium’s aim was to collect articles on sound and the environment, but unanticipated conversations emerge among articles that can be construed as a collective ethos. Within this ethos, listening clusters around mapping, phenomenological, nature and community-driven methodologies. Consistently, listener-to soundscape edification interrogates these methodologies and opens them to the imperative of lived experience  –  which finds different means of expression such as artistic and musical compositions, poetics and invocations, gatherings, serendipitous encounters with others and ever-present self-sentience.