StudyOutdoor sound works · Pacific Northwest coast
Weather-played instruments for the rain, wind, and dense coastal fog of southern Vancouver Island.
Enter the work ↓Visitors approach a central listening pavilion through a changing acoustic field. Pacific weather supplies the score; material gives it a contemporary voice.
Artists Oliver Hockenhull, Peter Courtemanche, and Keiko Honda are developing a family of outdoor sound works for gardens and ocean bluffs along the Pacific Northwest coast.
The project is being developed for the distinctive weather of the south coast of Vancouver Island: rain, changing winds, and periods of intense coastal fog. These conditions shape the instruments’ construction, water collection, and acoustic response.
These instruments bring the Japanese suikinkutsu—a water-koto cavern sounded by falling drops—into conversation with aeolian harps, pipes, and strings played by wind. Quiet but not silent, they create durable places for listening, meditation, and curiosity.
See forms and scales →
The listening pavilion
The pavilion gathers wind, rain, material, and attention. A redesigned kusari-doi—a rain chain—guides water toward a buried resonant vessel. Below the floor, isolated drops arrive in a shallow pool and the suikinkutsu answers with a deep resonating tone.
The architecture is a threshold: from the broad acoustic field of the coast to a sound discovered by leaning in.
Read the Suikinkutsu page →Aeolian Suikinkutsu is informed by the Japanese tradition of the water-koto cavern: a practice of hidden sound, garden attention, and material care, and equally by the ancient aeolian harp of the west. It approaches these traditions and these instruments as living—not as an aesthetic shorthand—and develops new forms through invitation, consultation, and site-specific listening.
On Vancouver Island, Japanese and Japanese Canadian gardeners shaped important gardens before dispossession and forced removal fractured communities in 1942. The island holds several significant Japanese gardens, including Gorge Park, Hatley Park, and Butchart Gardens; UBC’s Nitobe Memorial Garden is one of the most extensive and acclaimed Japanese gardens outside Japan. The project holds this history alongside a contemporary global acoustic play: how might distinct eastern and western natural acoustic lineages meet here and inform one another?
History and listening practice →Scale
A compact instrument might occupy no more than three feet square, with planting or vines growing around it. A larger version could become a twelve-foot pavilion: shelter from the rain, a listening room, and a place to gather for tea.
Events
The works can become the focus of tea performance, tea ceremony, sound and music, talks, listening sessions, and gatherings related to green space—bringing new audiences into an existing garden.
Collaboration
The artists work with people who care for outdoor spaces. The aim is to make each work belong to its setting, enhance the garden’s own vision, and invite visitors to notice both the instrument and the place around it.
Interactive study
Interactive design studies of the aeolian harp and wind-driven strumming instruments.
A garden conversation
For curatorial conversations, host-site exploration, and funding enquiries.
Who we are →