A soundscape composition of Sydney's downtown boardwalk. These recordings are an experiment of sonic ethnography that engages the listener with the soundscape of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Each soundmark, a term coined by R Murray Schafer, denotes the sound associated with a geographic locale. I encourage you to think in particular about the second soundmark of the waterfront: listen for the sound of the busking fiddler. It is not a live performance, but a recording played out of a speaker mounted in Sydney’s famous World’s Largest Fiddle. In the background we hear ships and the sounds of construction: the changing sonic landscape of a city trying to revive itself and survive in the wake of the shutdown of the steel plant and the coal mine, and reinvent itself as a historic landmark.
