Introduction

Soundscape composition is an emerging genre of experimental music that incorporates sounds from natural environments. While soundscape composers utilize a wide variety of mediums, techniques, and performance contexts, they share a common purpose of encouraging audiences to question and reflect on their relationship to the environment in the age of the “Anthropocene,” enabling listeners to re-connect to the places in which they live through sound.

Soundscape composers use their music as an environmental rhetoric that communicates issues like climate change and declining biodiversity in ways that depart from fast-paced, data-heavy portrayals in news media. A soundscape composition asks us as an audience to step into a place of contemplation and simply listen, so that we may hold a space for the voices of soundscapes who otherwise remain unheard. 

This site serves as an audio repository for the pieces discussed in my undergraduate senior thesis, "Soundscape Composition: Music as Environmental Activism," written in April 2017 as part of the Coolidge Otis Chapman Honors Program at the University of Puget Sound. The thesis contains links to different sections of this site. However, this site can also be explored on its own as an introductory tour of soundscape composition. 

My thesis covers only small fraction of the diverse array of artists that have contributed to the world of soundscape composition. I attempted to highlight a spectrum of individuals that represent this diversity, ranging from field recording artists with backgrounds in science to musicians with Western classical training.  In this site I outline four basic approaches used by these individuals: field recordings, soundwalks, sonifications, and interactive events. (Navigate using the table of contents in the upper left corner). Within each category I introduce several “case study” composers and representative pieces of music. These categories are my own and by no means black and white, but they will hopefully provide a helpful framework for appreciating the depth and range of the genre. 

Through these examples, I hope to show that by challenging the ways audiences normally listen and interact with music, soundscape composers challenge audiences’ ways of knowing and relating to the environment, fueling the potential to promote real social, political, and cultural change.

- Megan Reich, 4/17/2017