Re-placing the Urban Soundscape: Performative Documentary Research in Vancouver’s False Creek

This chapter addresses how sound in location-based media can challenge established notions of reflexivity in documentary practice as a distancing strategy, emphasizing reception as a critical practice that can account for the necessary performativity in bringing a particular location to life on radio, TV, and film. I offer an intermedial historiography of Vancouver’s False Creek area that situates the audio documentation of the World Soundscape Project in the broader context of media recorded on location to discover the ways in which the city has been continually revealed and written over through the perspectives of diverse media-makers across history. When assessed from a critical distance that allows for hearing performative strategies in using sound and image to engage with place, these works re-inscribe location with otherwise obscured histories and uses that reveal the intersections of geographical, social, and political issues that live at the center of all location-based media.