Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological Approach

Conclusion: Towards a Qualitative Knowing

For soundscape composition, the concert hall becomes more than just a physical space but an ideology that separates the sounds of music from the sounds of nature. Such a notion is similar to early experimental musicians’ conception of the concert hall came to represent the limitations and restrictions of the Western classical canon. Brian Eno described the concert hall as traditionally designed to present “sounds that are separated from the outside world… a closed space separated from the outside world and the sonic domain of everyday life.”[1] Like Eno and his contemporaries, soundscape composers aim for the exact opposite effect, reuniting sonic imagination and the act of listening with the “outside world.” In his The Tuning of the World, for example, Murray Schafer cites the development of the concert hall as “a substitute for outdoor love.” For Schafer, the stage functioned like a painting, a window “to an increasingly inaccessible natural world.”[2] Schafer compares the window-function of the concert hall to tendencies to respond to nature in illustrative or representational ways (Helmreich’s “evoking” works). Schafer argues that pieces from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Handel’s Water Music to Oliver Messiaen’s bird-inspired music were ultimately an act of trading the outdoors for the concert hall.[3] What was the alternative for this tendency was leaving the concert hall and creating works that involve actually observing and listening to sounds in nature, whether indirectly through field recording or directly through outdoor works. In this way, soundscape compositions represent an extension of 20th century experimental music that sought to expand audience awareness towards receiving all sounds from our aural environment as potential music. But where soundscape break from composers such as Varèse, Schaeffer, and Cage is their assertion that “the sounds of living things are not just a resource for manipulation.” Rather, Dunn describes, “they are evidence of mind in nature an are patterns of communication with which we share a common bond and meaning.”[4] Soundscape compositions are not just works that take place in the outdoors or across the Internet but pieces that break dichotomies between music, technology, and nature, exploring concepts of relationships and interactivity.
 
Frances Dyson argues that we need to change how we respond to ecological and environmental crisis. The “fractured nature” of media and politics today promotes a “process of division, separation, and multiplication” that ultimately contributes to a “highly mediated, controlled, and detached unity through disaster.”[5] Soundscape composition offers an alternative type of response. In the 1970s, the artist Joseph Beuys argued for the potential of art to serve as an ongoing “social structure,” “a process of thought, speech, discussion, and political and environmental action that embraces many disciplines, opens participation, and frees art from its materiality creating an active space of potential.”[6] Soundscape composition is an example of such an ongoing social structure. Rather than protest against the noise of modernity, soundscape composition attempts to incorporate and make sense of it, observing everything with a critical ear and trying to relate to it. Through its unique blend of field recording, sonification, soundwalking, and in situ works, soundscape composition repurposes technology to engage qualitative ways of knowing that broaden perspectives, recognize the “unheard,” unite the local and global, promote the position of the listener, engage with the imagination and interdisciplinary, and encourage holistic thinking. Central to soundscape composition is a relentless search for a truth, a deeper understanding of reality that, in John Luther Adams’s words, “changes us, infusing us with “sense of wonder at the strange beauty, astonishing complexity, and miraculous unity of creation.”[7] We come out a different person from when we entered.
 
[1] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.
 
[2] Schafer, R. Murray. The tuning of the world. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Print.
 
[3] Schafer, Ibid.
 
[4] Dunn, David. “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.” In The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words, thoughts. Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
 
[5] Dyson, Frances. The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology. Cambridge (MA): Leonardo, The MIT Press, 2014. Print.
 
[6] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
 
[7] Adams, John Luther. Winter music: composing the North. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.