The ZKM — Institut für Musik und Akustik in Karlsruhe (Germany) presented the “trans_canada: Tendenzen in Akusmatik und Soundscapes / Trends in Acousmatics and Soundscapes” event on February 10 — 13, 2005. Four days of concerts and discussions organized by Sabine Breitsameter and Ludger Brümmer with 9 ZKM commissions and world premières by Canadian composers Francis Dhomont, Darren Copeland, Nicolas Bernier, Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Louis Dufort, Robert Normandeau, and Gilles Gobeil along with conferences by Jean-François Denis, Christoph von Blumröder (Köln), Rudolf Frisius (Karlsruhe), and Daniel Teruggi (Paris).

Canadian electroacoustic composer Darren Copeland focused his work on environmental sound sources. His approach shares similarities with Hildegard Westerkamp’s, but he never reached her level of international recognition. Copeland studied composition at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) with Barry Truax while plundered through the institution’s World Soundscape Collection. He also studied with Jonty Harrison in Birmingham, UK. A man of radio and a gifted creator of theatre soundtracks, he contributed to a few compilation CDs (Storm of Drones, DisContact II) in the early 1990s and released his first album, Rendu visible, in 1998 on empreintes DIGITALes. It was hardly noticed. His interest in boundaries between electroacoustics, radio art and theatre led to interesting but undocumented works, such as his adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play and the live radio event “Wireless Graffiti,” produced during his collaboration with Vancouver Pro Musica. He is now on the board of the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology and runs New Adventures in Sound Art, a Canadian association devoted to developing electroacoustic music as a performance art.