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Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological Approach

Glenn Gould - The Idea of North (1967)

"Gould used the technology then available to him most strikingly in the treatment of the participants' voices. A train ride northward is the imaginative and sonic foundation of the piece. The speakers are woven in and out of the textures, sometimes alone and clear, sometimes overlapping in dense structures that make a literal understanding of the words difficult if not impossible, much as in an operatic ensemble. The only music that is used is the fifth Symphony of Sibelius that signifies arrival and ends the trainride and the program."

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From Specialization to Democratization: The Age of the Amateur By challenging their audiences to take up an ecological perspective that is at once both local and global, soundscape compositions place the listener in an active, rather than passive role of reception. How does technology facilitate such a role shift? Technology has the potential to exclude people from composing or enjoying music through the forces of specialization and professionalization. But at the same time, it also has the potential to welcome the amateur into the music-making and listening process. Take pianist Glenn Gould, who ceased performing live in the mid-60s, partly, Licht suggests, because he thought records would replace the concert hall. Conceptualizing albums as “a kind of interactive sound installation,” Gould emphasized the increased freedom and agency of the record-listener: “the listener is able to indulge preferences and, through the electronic modifications with which he endows the listening experience [presumable bas or treble controls on a home stereo] imposes his own personality upon the work. As he does so, he transforms that work, and his relation to it, from an artistic to an environmental experience.”[1] Likewise, technology can alter the way we listen to the soundscape in ways that can actually enhance discovery through interaction, rather than fracture it through disconnection. Katherine Norman’s Window (for John Cage) (2012), an online “interactive sound essay” that explores the everyday experience of listening, is a fitting exemplar of this discovery in action. As tribute to Cage’s assertion that “everything is worth a listen,” Norman emphasizes the “deliberate indirection” of the piece, daily recording whatever sounds happened to be outside of her window at a specific time throughout the year. In the work, a user explores the soundscape of different months of the year outside the artist’s window by dragging different elements of the soundscape across the screen and reading text descriptions and window-view images associated with each month. The sounds are quite ordinary – birds, muffled traffic, rainfall, neighbors talking. While irrelevant to the general listener, to Norman, they hold an intimate familiarity, a “dynamic construction of place and the human experience of place through the accumulation of sensory perception, repetition, memory and emotion.” but extrapolated from her personal experience and placed in a public domain of Internet interactivity, a user has the chance to play with these sounds, memories, and associations – attending to the ordinary to “make it extraordinary.” In a choose-you-own-adventure fashion, a user has the freedom to make the narrative experience of the text as linear or fragmentary as they want, and move sounds in their own way to create a “self-constructed place.”[2] Andrea Polli’s ongoing Sound-Seeker project hands agency to the audience in an even more explicit way by allowing them to take part in the creation process. As part of the NYSoundmap project of the New York Society of Acoustic Ecology, Polli’s Sound-Seeker is an interactive digital media work that allows a user to explore the sounds of New York City. Using interactive satellite photos on a Google Maps software, a user can zoom, pan, and search for recorded sounds that have been located and updated by participants via GPS.[3] Bryan Pijanowski’s Record the Earth project takes on a similar approach, but on an even broader scale. A website and app created by the Center for Global Soundscapes at Purdue University, Record the Earth is at once a citizen science and art project. Users can upload sound clips and tag their location on the globe, as well as categorize the recordings as biophony, geophony, or anthropophony, and even assign them with associated “emotions,” making the project not only an effort to “document the diversity of sounds that occur on earth” but also to “better understand how people relate to the sounds that occur around them.”[4] Music scholar Mark Katz suggests that the user-centered perspective of projects like those of Polli and Pijanowski embrace interaction with the amateur by treating the technologies they use as “quasi-musical instruments,” and treating sound recordings made by amateurs as “quasi-performances.”[5] The technology of the smartphone becomes a tool to engage with place, and the outcome of the work represents a collective understanding of the soundscape rather than the filtered perspective of a single composer.

The soundwalk in particular depends on audience perspective and participation. Take Andra McCartney’s Soundwalking Interactions, a documentation of public soundwalk through media including sound recording, still photography, and video recording. Soundwalking Interactions emphasizes the various points of interaction created via the process of the soundwalk, between and among “among audiences, sound environments, research contexts, movements, media, senses, and places.”[6] Concerned with the role of the participant in the soundwalk, Soundwalking Interactions addressing issues such as agency and improvisation. One recent soundwalk that explored relationships between bodily movements and sense of place developed into a presentation of the soundwalk recordings in collaboration with a choreographer and dancers. The project has also led to an interactive installation that allows people to “dance” with sounds.[7] Across much of McCartney’s work, in fact, is the emphasis she places on the embodiment in soundscape recordings. As McCartney has explained, ‘‘Soundwalk work is far from detached. The recordist’s perspective is written into the recording...a recording soundwalker is simultaneously an intensely engaged listener, connected by a phonic umbilicus to the surrounding world.”[8] For McCartney, a participatory embodiment in the soundwalk serves as an important source of reconnection. Following Westerkamp, McCartney’s work uses the soundwalking experience to engage audience and participants in asking questions about their relationships to places and their histories, with the walks culminating in an open discussion in which participants reflect on their experience of the walk.[9]

[1] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.

[2] Norman, Katherine. “Window - And Undecided Sound Essay.” Journal of Sonic Studies, volume 4, no. 1 (May 2013). http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a03

[3] Polli, Andrea. Andrea Polli website, Web. http://www.andreapolli.com/

[4] Pijanowski, B.C., Record the Earth. Global Soundscape Project, Web. 28 Feb 2016. https://www.recordtheearth.org/

[5] Katz, Mark. “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.

[6] Paquette, David, and Andra McCartney. "Soundwalking and the Bodily Exploration of Places." Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no. 1 (2012): 135.

[7] Paquette, Ibid.

[8] McCartney, Andra. "Soundwalking: creating moving environmental sound narratives." Soundwalking interactions 27 (2010).

[9] Pacquette, Ibid.