Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological ApproachMain MenuIntroduction“What Is Music?”: The Historical Roots of Soundscape CompositionNew Noise, New Sounds: The Industrial and Electrical RevolutionsThe World Soundscape Project and the Legacy of SchizophoniaRejecting the Idealism of the WSP: Towards a Postmodern ApproachChapter Two: The Mediating Role of TechnologyPerspectivism: Exploring Nonhuman Spatio-temporal ScalesHearing the Unheard: Forgotten VoicesFamiliar and Foreign: Cultivating a “Glocal” MindsetFrom Specialization to Democratization: The Age of the AmateurChanging Roles: The Value of the ListenerHarnessing the Imagination: Between the Real and AbstractOpen Mind: Towards the Interdisciplinary and MultimodalThe Search for Definition: Beyond CategorizationConclusion: Towards a Qualitative KnowingWorks CitedMegan Reich9858d76d7e90b00d65492e3fcae9efc0de402706
Abstract
12016-08-13T19:04:13-07:00Megan Reich9858d76d7e90b00d65492e3fcae9efc0de402706104671plain2016-08-13T19:04:14-07:00Megan Reich9858d76d7e90b00d65492e3fcae9efc0de402706Soundscape composition is a musical field that has converged from a diverse array of philosophies and methods of listening. Informed by the common mission of raising awareness towards the current environmental crisis, soundscape composers aim to re-connect audiences to the natural soundscapes their everyday lives. To achieve this mission, soundscape composers interact with soundscape ecology, a scientific field that also addresses environmental issues like global warming and declining biodiversity through the study of sound. In so doing, soundscape composers repurpose scientific technology, transforming it from a tool that extracts quantitative information from an exclusively non-human nature to a tool that challenges the traditional nature/culture dichotomy, integrating listeners to their environments through spiritual, emotional, and sensory-based ways of knowing.