Conclusion: Towards a Qualitative Knowing
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.