Listening to a Sense of Place: Acoustic Ethnography with Billy Proctor in the Broughton Archipelago, British Columbia

The thesis explores soundwalking, memory and aural history through participatory exploration. My ethnographic work involves extensive documentation of a private museum in Echo Bay, a remote fishing and logging community in the Broughton Archipelago, BC. This museum houses artifacts, many of which have acoustic components. The proprietor and elder, Billy Proctor, has many stories to tell about his collection and how it reflects the history and ecology of the area. My work aims to show how approaching history and memory through listening and soundmaking constitutes a unique experiential methodology, different from visual methods of observation. This qualitative study explores the embodied, sensuous, performative, narrative and dialectic aspects of the documentation, recording, and listening process and practice. In addition, the technique of “memory soundwalks” is added to the lexicon of soundscape and memory studies. The utilization of such creative soundscape methodologies and epistemologies enables this ethnographic work to extend into the public sphere via multiple modes, media, and formats for the general public, for example, as an audio-tourism project for the Billy Proctor Museum, and as multi-media documentations and art presentations, such as the award-winning short film, “Listening to a Sense of Place” (2012) co-created with Greg Crompton.