Birdsong: When Nature Speaks (Talk)

Birdsong: When Nature Speaks – SALT New Music Festival

Tina Pearson and Paul Walde

Multimedia presentation and discussion

What happens when representations of nature are given sound and voice?

Birdsong: When Nature Speaks invites audiences to reconsider how we listen to the natural world. In this multimedia talk, Tina Pearson and Paul Walde, creators of Music for Natural History, share how they transformed the sounds and imagined voices of museum dioramas into live performance—opening a conversation about listening, representation, and our relationship with the more-than-human world.

At the centre of the talk is Music for Natural History, a collaborative work created by Pearson and Walde in connection with the Royal BC Museum.

Part tragic love song for the wilderness, part performative sound art, the project gives voice to the taxidermied birds and mammals, human-made trees, and painted landscapes of the museum’s Natural History Gallery.

Through careful research, cataloguing, and transcription, Pearson and Walde translated sounds associated with the flora and fauna represented in the museum’s dioramas into scores for live performers. The result invites audiences to reconsider how we listen to the natural world—and what happens when representations of nature are given sound and voice.

The project began with a workshop presentation at the Royal BC Museum in 2012, when Pearson and Walde created living sound scores for the Forest and Seashore dioramas and invited musicians and singers from the community to perform them. It later developed into a full-scale production presented at the museum in 2016.

For SALT 2026: PROXIMITY, Pearson and Walde revisit Music for Natural History through images, audio, video, and conversation. They will discuss the creation and performance of the work, the meeting of natural and human-made sound within it, and the ways artistic practice can change how we perceive and relate to other species and environments.

Presented as part of SALT’s Birdsong series, the talk extends the festival’s exploration of listening beyond music itself: How might listening more closely change our relationship with the more-than-human world?

ABOUT TINA PEARSON AND PAUL WALDE

Tina Pearson is a composer, performer, sound artist, and facilitator whose practice engages with listening, improvisation, environmental sound, and relationships between human and more-than-human sonic worlds.

Paul Walde is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and educator whose work engages with landscape, environment, climate, sound, performance, video, and installation.

Together, Pearson and Walde created Music for Natural History, a project that grew from their shared interest in sound, place, representation, and the ways humans listen to and interpret the natural world.

WHAT TO EXPECT

This is an informal multimedia presentation and discussion rather than a concert.

Tina Pearson and Paul Walde will share images, recordings, video, and stories from the creation and performance of Music for Natural History, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the artistic process and the questions that emerged from the project.

No previous knowledge of contemporary music, sound art, or Music for Natural History is required.

The talk begins at 6:00 PM and is followed at 7:30 PM by Birdsong: Evening, an immersive concert in which the SALT Experiment brings newly commissioned works inspired by British Columbia birds into dialogue with bird-inspired music from across centuries.

Audiences are welcome to attend the talk on its own or experience the two events together as connected parts of the Birdsong program.

ABOUT SALT NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL

The SALT New Music Festival is a contemporary music festival based in Victoria, BC, bringing together British Columbian, Canadian, and international composers and performers.

The 2026 edition explores the theme of Proximity—closeness to one another, to nature, to the universe, and across differences of background, nationality, identity, and generation. Through concerts, outdoor events, movement, and shared listening, SALT creates encounters where new music becomes a space for connection, exchange, and discovery.