GENERATIVE GESTURES

Inner City

Vancouver to Hornby Island: A Soundscape Journey from Urban to Rural is a
soundscape composition structured in the spirit of an everyday travelogue that documents
a trip from Vancouver BC, to Hornby island, asking the listener to share in environmental
listening that begins in the crowded city streets of Vancouver and ends in the calm
fullness of a rural northern Gulf Island along the Georgia Straight. This journey was
taken during the Easter Weekend on Good Friday (April 2nd) of 2010, a day in which
weather conditions were “what BC Hydro called the most destructive storm since 2006.”
(Nolan, 2010). This included blustering winds that were accompanied by uprooted trees,
cancelled ferry crossings and torn Hydro lines but that ended in the peaceful residue and
“calm after the storm” of the Hornby Island forested landscape and oceanfront. This
soundscape mirrors the patterns of a storm through the everyday blustering noise of the
city with its mechanical and technological environment that is slowly transformed by the
end of the journey into a walk through the natural rural ambience of Hornby island.
Sound recordings were taken between April 2nd and 3rd of the journey in its entirety. This
included Vancouver’s Sky Train, Bus, BC Ferries, several different rural environments
including forests, streams and coastlines on Hornby Island, docks at Fords Cove and the
Thatch Pub. The transition from urban to rural highlights the literal deafening of modern
travel, displaying the transient soudscapes we all experience when traveling.

Nathaniel Alexander