<i>Hildegard Westerkamp’s Beneath the Forest Floor and Graphic Analysis. Regrowing the Relationship Between Human, Nature, Society, and Self through Soundscape Composition</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Hildegard Westerkamp (b. 1946) is a German-Canadian electroacoustic composer, researcher, and educator, best known for her work in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. She is recognised for her vast soundscape composition oeuvre, her contributions to the World Soundscape Project, and for shaping and popularising the theory and praxis of soundwalk. Westerkamp’s musical language is characterised by material derived from the real environment and a strong, ecological message. These traits are embodied in the composer’s 1992 piece Beneath the Forest Floor. Based on an analysis of the composition, the paper shows how music can address environmental issues, through the incorporation of real-world natural and human-made sounds. Furthermore, it describes how the electroacoustic transformation of environmental sounds can address their deeper, symbolic, and mythological levels, thus uncovering their cultural and personal associations. The use of totemic sounds in Beneath the Forest Floor will also be discussed as a means of invoking (native) cultures’ close relationship with nature, thus introducing another social and cultural level to the piece. The paper argues that by incorporating these elements soundscape composition may reacquaint listeners and composers with the environment and their inner selves, renew their relationship with the natural world and prompt their engagement with climatic issues. Finally, a graphic analysis of Beneath the Forest Floor shall be presented, to suggest that multisensory experience may serve educational purposes postulated by the World Soundscape Project, and therefore complete the environmental, social, cultural, political, and educational aims and levels of soundscape composition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".