DAD 310
Sound Design for Film

The World Soundscape Project

DAD 310 — Fall 2026

The World Soundscape Project began at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. R. Murray Schafer and a group of composers and students set out to study how people relate to the sounds around them. Their work included The Vancouver Soundscape, a 1973 recording tour across Canada, the CBC series Soundscapes of Canada, and a study of five European villages.

The project did more than preserve sounds. It asked listeners to notice how a place changes, which sounds a community values, and which sounds disappear. That work also led to soundscape composition, in which environmental recordings are selected, edited, layered, or transformed without losing all connection to their sources.

Start with Wednesday’s walk

  • Which sound did you notice only because you stopped and listened?
  • Which sounds acted as a constant background, which demanded attention, and which felt specific to that place?
  • Did any sound feel worth preserving? Would everyone in the community agree?
  • How did your presence, route, and attention shape the soundscape you recorded in your journal?

Key terms

  • Keynote sound: a persistent background sound that helps define a place, such as ventilation, distant traffic, or wind.
  • Signal: a foreground sound meant to attract attention, such as an alarm, bell, or horn.
  • Soundmark: a sound that a community recognizes as distinctive or valuable. It is the sonic counterpart of a landmark.
  • Acoustic ecology: the study of relationships among listeners, communities, and their sonic environments.

Try applying these terms to the sounds from the walk. A sound can change roles with distance and context. A bell might be background for someone who hears it every day, a signal when it marks the hour, and a soundmark when the community identifies with it.

Listen together

These recordings move from documenting a place toward composing with its sounds. As you listen, note when you hear selection, sequencing, layering, or transformation.

  1. Vancouver Harbour Ambience focuses attention on the acoustic identity of the harbour. What tells you about the size, activity, and geography of the place?
  2. The Music of Horns and Whistles arranges pitched signals from Vancouver’s port and rail environment. When does documentation begin to sound like music?
  3. Vancouver Soundmarks presents sounds selected for their local identity. Which qualities make a sound memorable enough to become a soundmark?
  4. Pacific Fanfare , by Barry Truax, works more freely with Vancouver’s environmental sounds. Can you still recognize the sources? What meaning remains when a sound changes?
  5. Opening of Island , by Barry Truax, combines recognizable waves with transformed versions of the same material. Where does the scene move from real to imagined?

The Soundscapes of Canada program list describes the ten CBC broadcasts made from the 1973 cross-country recording tour. The Soundscape Vancouver archive places the Vancouver recordings and later compositions in context.

Further listening

If we choose one longer work for Friday, start with Kits Beach Soundwalk. It connects directly to our walk and makes the composer’s movement between an observed place and an imagined inner soundscape easy to hear.

  • Kits Beach Soundwalk , Hildegard Westerkamp. A narrated walk moves from Vancouver’s traffic and waves into the amplified, transformed sounds of barnacles.
  • Lighthouse Park Soundwalk , Hildegard Westerkamp. An early radio soundwalk that combines the changing forest soundscape, Westerkamp’s voice, and writing by Emily Carr.
  • A Walk Through the City , Hildegard Westerkamp. Recordings from a Vancouver neighborhood, a poem by Norbert Ruebsaat, and studio processing turn a walk into a shifting urban narrative.
  • Beneath the Forest Floor , Hildegard Westerkamp. West Coast forest recordings move between documentary detail and an imagined inner forest. Excerpts later appeared in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.
  • Talking Rain , Hildegard Westerkamp. Listen for changes in the density and texture of rain, and for the transitions that make each new place audible.

From soundscape studies to film sound

Acoustic ecology and modern film sound developed at roughly the same time, and they share several habits: recording outside the studio, listening closely to place, and treating environmental sound as material that can be selected, layered, and transformed. That resemblance does not prove that the World Soundscape Project shaped every major film sound designer. The clearest direct connection runs through Hildegard Westerkamp’s compositions and the films of director Gus Van Sant and sound designer Leslie Shatz.

In Elephant (2003), Van Sant and Shatz used excerpts from Westerkamp’s Beneath the Forest Floor and Türen der Wahrnehmung (Doors of Perception) . The latter includes source recordings from the World Soundscape Project’s European research. Forest sounds enter the school setting and loosen the usual bond between what we see and what we hear. The soundtrack stops functioning as a neutral record of the building and begins to express an unstable, subjective experience of it.

Van Sant and Shatz returned to Doors of Perception in Last Days (2005). Location sound, environmental recordings, and composed material often blur together in the film. A listener may recognize a sound without being able to place its source in the image. This is close to Westerkamp’s practice of keeping a recording tied to the real world while changing its scale, context, or meaning.

Listen and compare

  1. Listen to the first eleven minutes of Doors of Perception . Notice how doors connect recordings that seem to belong to different places. Which sounds could pass unnoticed as ambience if they appeared under an image?
  2. Watch this six-minute original-mix excerpt from Elephant , hosted by the Cinémathèque française. It collects the three complete corridor passages in which the film repeats the meeting of John, Elias, and Michelle from different viewpoints. Do not expect a distinct score or a recognizable door motif. Van Sant and Shatz buried Doors of Perception beneath the footsteps, dialogue, bell, and camera click. The Cinémathèque analysis identifies dull impacts, a distant flute, a rolling cart, and faint German speech as parts of that underlying layer.
  3. Watch Randolph Jordan’s open-access video essay, Composing Perception: Hildegard Westerkamp Meets Gus Van Sant . It presents the complete composition alongside sequences from Elephant, Last Days, and other Van Sant films. The Last Days passage follows Blake up the driveway and into the greenhouse. Listen for the whistling, water, bells, and door sounds. Some seem to belong to the scene, while others pull away from the visible setting.
  4. Return to Beneath the Forest Floor . This composition is not heard in clip 2. It appears elsewhere in the full film, including after the shooting begins. What does the peaceful source recording gain or lose when the film gives it a violent context?

For a film sound designer, the useful question is not simply “What does this place sound like?” It is “Whose version of this place should the audience hear right now?” Soundscape study supplies ways to notice and describe an environment. Film sound can then preserve that environment, edit it for clarity, or bend it toward a character’s attention and the story’s emotional pressure.

Discussion

  1. Can a field recording ever be neutral? Consider microphone placement, the route taken, what the recordist chose to capture, and what was edited out.
  2. What is gained when an environmental sound remains recognizable? What becomes possible when it is transformed?
  3. Schafer’s project joined listening with concern about noise and environmental change. Who gets to decide whether a sound is unwanted noise or a valued soundmark?
  4. Which parts of this work resemble what a film sound designer does when building a place for a scene?
  5. In Elephant or Last Days, what changes when an environmental recording does not match the place shown on screen in a straightforward way?
  6. Choose one moment from Wednesday’s walk. Which sounds would you preserve, remove, exaggerate, or transform if the scene were realistic? What would you change if the scene followed a character’s subjective experience?

Readings