This paper and its audio component are based on research that accompanied my work on Intertidal Room, a site-responsive and time-specific soundwalk composition.* It was developed in summer 2020 to be listened to during low tides while walking along Vancouver's shoreline. The composition explores how the entanglement of historical, environmental, and cultural processes at the city's intertidal zones has been reflected in their present soundscapes. This audio paper focuses more closely on the part concerned with Vancouver and British Columbia's colonial history. It features reflections from my fieldwork, fragments of conversations with Candace Campo, my guide to Vancouver's indigenous history, alongside field recordings from the intertidal zones. Overall, Intertidal Room is an attempt to practically engage in rethinking and reconfiguring some of the assumptions that have underlain the field of acoustic ecology and soundscape studies as conceptualized and practiced by the World Soundscape Project.

With this audio paper and the extended abstract below, I propose that besides manifesting the acoustically present, soundscapes should also be heard as specific archives that comprise both traces and absences of the aural past. If carefully attended to, practices of listening, soundwalking, and soundscape composition can obtain the function of aesthetic and critical modes through which we can sense, access, work with, and give justice to these contested archives of the aural.