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[A PDF version of this speech is available here.]
Dear Chancellor Vrooman, President Johnson, Members of the Board and the Senate, dear Graduands, honoured guests, friends, and family.
What a wonderful occasion to celebrate with you, dear Graduands, to honour your achievements! For now, you have done enough thinking. Today you can relax and simply listen.
My words to you are meant like a gift, from my heart. Of course, there is no guarantee that they will reach you as intended. We simply cannot predict what happens in the mysterious, liminal space between here (my mouth) and there (your ears). It is in the nature of listening that the unexpected can happen. But that is precisely what makes this moment so vibrant. So, let’s see what happens today...
Think back to the first voice you heard today. Was it a live voice? Or did it come from a device, a loudspeaker, from earbuds, phone or the radio?
BELL SOUND
I came here from Germany in the summer of 1968 at age 22. I am a first-generation settler who since then, has made a home on these ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples, the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. My life and career blossomed on these special lands. I am convinced that the extraordinary beauty and power of this place played a part in allowing for my creative energies to emerge here. For that I am deeply grateful.
In fact, in this auspicious moment I find myself wanting to thank everyone for this honour that has been given to me today. There are many who have inspired and
challenged me throughout my life. Without them I would not be here. A few of them must be named right now!
Thank you, Jennifer Schine and Dr. Milena Droumeva, for nominating me for this honorary degree. You totally surprised and moved me! Thank you, Milena, also for your generous introduction, and for carrying forward in your own strong way the fields of Sound Studies and Acoustic Ecology at this university.
Thank you, Barry - Professor Emeritus Barry Truax – for being my colleague and long- time friend, or shall we say partner in crime, for over 50 years. Together – yet each in our own ways - we took on an enormous legacy after Murray Schafer left SFU in 1975. While I tended to work more effectively outside of this institution, you held the fort here. You maintained and updated the World Soundscape Project’s (WSP) documents and archives and developed a new theoretical base for soundscape studies with your Acoustic Communication courses.
And finally, my heartfelt thanks go to the late Murray Schafer himself, for powerfully waking up my ears in the first place!
Simon Fraser University was a young institution in 1973, the year I started working with the WSP. Without its progressive atmosphere, Schafer would not have been able to develop his ground-breaking approach towards studying the acoustic environment - the soundscape - and ultimately to establish the foundations for the new field of Acoustic Ecology. This is where it all started.
BELL SOUND
Now for a moment let’s climb out of our bubbles, emerge from behind our windscreens, walls and windows, computer screens, loudspeakers and headphones and open our ears directly to this place. “Let’s listen like we have never listened before,” as my colleague from the WSP, the late Howard Broomfield used to say.
Let’s listen to where we are: to this Mall, designed by Arthur Erickson in 1965.
What is the closest sound you can hear?
The most distant?
What is the quietest sound?
What if there was a sudden power outage? Which sounds would stop? Which ones might become audible?
Remember Covid? How quiet the world became suddenly? Which sounds became clearly audible?
Notice the sound of your own thoughts.
BELL SOUND
Your ears may have discovered something new just now, even in this short time, and even though you probably have walked through this mall many times before. Listening in this way can renew our relationship to a place. In fact, listening is a kind of relationship building. What if we were to apply this kind of listening to our neighbourhoods, schools, parks, work places, and to nature?
Indeed, that’s what we do when we go on soundwalks.
Almost exactly 51 years ago, in 1973, I designed my very first soundwalk. It was done right here, in and around this very Mall, with similar suggestions for listening that you just heard. We had organised a Noise Workshop for officials of the Vancouver Regional District, who were in the process of modernizing the municipal Noise Bylaws. Schafer felt that we could support this effort by educating them about environmental sounds, about noise, and encourage them to listen to the soundscapes they were going to legislate.
At that time no one had heard about soundwalks - it was a new word, just coined by Schafer. And certainly, no city official had ever been invited to listen to the sounds of their city in such a way. It was an unusual activity for all of us then. And yet now, 50 years later, soundwalks are done in many places of the world. Perhaps there is a good reason why soundwalks are still meaningful to so many, even today. Without fail, they
inspire. But also, there seems to be a very real need nowadays for the kind of grounding and connectedness that true listening can give us.
BELL SOUND
If you listen deeply enough
You become part of something,
And then it’s harder to destroy.
These are the words of my daughter Sonja who is also here with us today. Thank you Sonja! To me they say it all, whether we talk about listening to nature, or to anyone and anything in our lives. The current wars, the enormity of so many social inequalities and injustices and most significantly the climate crisis, are signals of volatile times and an uncertain future. I wonder if our earth is burning, flooding, shaking so intensely in order to survive, in order to find a new natural balance. Listening deeply to all that, may stabilize us in the midst of such chaos. It may keep us connected to each other and to the places we value. Most importantly it may give us real agency, focus and determination to make changes, and prevent further destruction.
Dear Graduands, I invite you to keep listening with that in mind and with that same stormy urgency that comes from the earth itself right now. We are part of the earth, and none of us, I believe, would want to destroy it any further.
But now let’s celebrate your hard-earned achievements here at SFU. A big congratulations and my very best wishes to you.
BELL SOUND