Ecomusicology

The world is a “macrocosmic musical composition” to which we are becoming increasingly less attuned, writes Raymond Murray Shafer in his book The Soundscape (1977).  Our environments have become so loud we are constantly tuning out the noise pollution we don’t want to hear, through practice, desensitization, or technology (e.g. noise cancelling headphones). Instead of filtering out noise, however, Shafer calls for a positive acoustics that asks “which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, [or] multiply?” (4). His understanding of acoustic design takes after the industrial design of the early twentieth century, which brought aesthetic considerations to bear on an industry primarily concerned with mass production. In order to empower listeners to become composers of soundscapes, not just consumers, Shafer offers a basic vocabulary to help analyze and describe them.

Soundscapes are characterized by a “keynote,” or the tone that forms the backbone of every soundscape, for example the oceanic sound of the freeway, which, if you were to remove it, would render that soundscape unrecognizable. Then there are “signals,” which are sounds that calls attention to themselves, like alarms, sirens, or melodies. Finally, he introduces the term “soundmark” (cf. landmark), which is a sound that is significant historically or culturally, like the call of the common loon in the Northern U.S. and Canada, or perhaps a advertising jingle that evokes a highly specific time and place. Good acoustic design, Shafer argues, seeks to preserve soundmarks because they “make the acoustic life of the community unique” (10). 

In the natural sciences, recording and preserving soundscapes is a task taken up in the field of soundscape ecology. What Shafer would call soundmarks are often indicators of ecosystem health, and they are easier and cheaper to monitor than many visual indicators. Moreover, studies in bioacoustics have exposed the extent to which humans may be considered acoustically disabled in comparison to some nonhuman animals, for whom acoustic design may not be merely a matter of beauty or aesthetics, but of survival. Think of marine mammals whose sensitivity to sound makes it possible for them to endure actual trauma from extreme sonic disturbances, endangering populations in the long term.

Ecomusicology, which is a relatively recent field that emerged in the 2000s, incorporates insights like these to include the nonhuman in the study of music, whether this means designing soundscapes with multispecies communities in mind, thinking through the material implications of music production, or studying the use of environmental aesthetics and rhetoric in music. We must, however, be reminded that auditory experiences usually occur in multisensory contexts. But sound or music may lead us to explore these other senses more closely: in the (rare) case of synesthesia; or at lower frequencies, when it becomes obvious that “hearing is a way of touching at a distance” (Shafer 11).

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

Shafer, Raymond Murray. The Soundscape. Rochester: Vt. Destiny Books, 1977. 

Two podcasts about bioacoustics and soundscape ecology here and here. 

For a local UiO researcher who studies environmental aesthetics in contemporary music see Tore Størvold's homepage.