ECHOES - Exploring the Contemporary Heritage of European village Soundscapes

In 1975, Canadian composer and scholar R. Murray Schafer, together with a group of students from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, launched an interdisciplinary research project aimed at studying the relationship between humans and the soundscape of their environment in five small European villages. The group became known as the WSP – World Soundscape Project, and the study, titled Five Village Soundscapes, represents the first comparative case study of the sonic reality of different settlements.

Twenty-five years later, in 2000, Finnish anthropologist Helmi Järviluoma, through the research project Acoustic Environments in Change (AEC), returned to the same locations studied by Schafer, adding a sixth village in order to observe how soundscapes and communities had changed over time.

In 2025, another twenty-five years on, ECHOES retraces the same journey together with the new Finnish research group So.Me.Co. (Sonic Mediation and Eco-Critical Listening), led by Heikki Uimonen. Through a new process of documentation, the film explores the relationship between communities, sound, and environment, questioning how people perceive the spaces they inhabit through listening, and how this shapes their everyday lives.