Lisa Walker, Chief Iyonmon of Ukpetu

Born in Vancouver and trained at the Vancouver Academy of music, Lisa Walker left her classical violin studies to explore a broad range of styles including Jazz, Folk, Blues and Celtic.

Dreamtime Sanctuary, her premiere CD, chronicles a journey from India to Italy, incorporating sounds she captured while travelling throughout various regions of each country: a call to prayer from a mosque on the Ganges, Mass at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the rhythmic rattle of a railcar.

From 1995-1997 Lisa was invited to be an artist in residence at Simon Fraser University’s Graphics and multimedia Research Lab – a position which entailed working with alternate midi controllers such as light beams, Gforce accelerometers and electromagnetic fields with which she created her MIDI violin. She also worked with LifeForms animation, a software that replicates the human body in virtual space. 

From 1996-1998 Lisa was invited to join a research team in southeast Alaska studying the humpback whale. Lisa was drawn to the humpbacks by their intriguing acoustic behavior, and as a musician, was able to recognize subtle patterns in the acoustic activity of the whales that were not readily evident to the scientist.

In her role as sound consultant, she spent many months at sea, travelling and camping in remote wilderness locations, to locate the whales and record their sounds. The violin has the same qualities and timbre as the humpback’s vocalizations and can mimic the call to a point where even the best ears can be fooled. 

This became the inspiration for her second album, Grooved Whale in which Lisa combines recordings of her violin (recorded underwater with the help of a special speaker) with the actual sounds of the whales to create terrains of her own imaginings. 

In 1999 Walker began her own field research, starting in Hawaii where she played an underwater concert to the singing whales and had a whale come underneath her boat and sing with her. Walker was then invited by the BBC to the Cook Islands to document her work, during which she participated in satellite tagging research. 

Walker now travels annually to both Hawaii and Tahiti to record and document the behaviors of the humpback whale, including blue water swims with the animals. She has undertaken a deep study of the rhythms and patterns in traditional African drumming to better understand the rhythmic components of whale song. 

In 2017 Walker was granted a chieftaincy title, becoming the first female Chief of Sobe, Nigeria due to her support of the traditions of this culture.

Walker is now wrapping up her two decade deep dive into the song of another species and will be publishing her follow up album along with her framework and theories for cross-species communication.