About the program

At the centre of the talk is Music for Natural History, a collaborative work created by Tina Pearson and Paul Walde and commissioned by 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. The project later developed into a full-scale production at the museum and has continued to evolve through performance, documentation, and reflection.

For SALT 2026: PROXIMITY, Pearson and Walde revisit Music for Natural History through images, audio, video, and conversation. They will discuss how the work was created, how natural and human-made sound intersect within it, and how artistic practice can shift the ways we perceive and relate to the environments and species around us.

Presented as part of SALT’s Birdsong series, the talk extends the festival’s exploration of listening beyond the concert hall and asks what it might mean to listen more closely to the more-than-human world.