Le ZKM — Institut für Musik und Akustik à Karlsruhe (Allemagne) a présenté l’événement «trans_canada: Tendenzen in Akusmatik und Soundscapes / Trends in Acousmatics and Soundscapes» du 10 au 13 février 2005. Quatre jours de concerts et de discussions organisés par Sabine Breitsameter et Ludger Brümmer présentant 9 commandes du ZKM et créations des compositeurs canadiens Francis Dhomont, Darren Copeland, Nicolas Bernier, Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Louis Dufort, Robert Normandeau et Gilles Gobeil ainsi que des communications de Jean-François Denis, Christoph von Blumröder (Köln), Rudolf Frisius (Karlsruhe) et 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.