Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological Approach

Introduction

We attach ourselves to the landscapes we live in. Home becomes synonymous to a horizon of evergreen trees, a big sky, or a distant mountain range. These landscapes, however, change with human activity. We often conceive of the current environmental crisis in terms of the devastating visual impact it leaves – from the jarring empty spaces of deforestation, grassland monocultures, to polluted smog-covered cities. While the earth indeed looks a lot different than it did even a few hundred years ago, the damage is also reaching far beyond what we can simply see - we can also hear it. We might not always realize it, but sound also plays a fundamental role in defining the relationships between ourselves and the environments in which we live. The developing scientific discipline of soundscape ecology explores just this, identifying the mechanisms by which sound impacts the functioning of organisms and ecological processes. Soundscape ecology explores the complex interplay of biological, geophysical, and anthropogenic sounds produced by a landscape over space and time – the “soundscape.”[1] When we listen, things begin to reveal themselves, often in insidious ways. By recording and quantifying soundscapes, soundscape ecologists have been able to identify how anthropogenic sounds (“noise pollution”) affects the communication ability, fitness, survival, and long-term health of organisms.[2]
 
Meanwhile, another developing field has been challenging this same visual bias towards understanding environmental crisis – the musical genre of soundscape composition. Soundscape composition represents a diverse musical genre that has converged from a diverse array of disciplines, philosophies, and methods of listening. Central to this music is the use of “real-world” environmental sounds, through either directly incorporating field recordings into their work or by converting natural processes (e.g. temperature, earthquakes, the aurora borealis) into audible frequencies of sound. Most soundscape compositions fall under the category of “electroacoustic” music, a genre that uses “electronics to modify sounds from the natural world.” While soundscape compositions inhabit a wide variety of mediums, techniques, and performance contexts, they share in common a mission to make audiences question and reflect on their relationship to the environment. The work of both soundscape ecologists and composers speaks to the state of the soundscape as a reflection of the biological and ecological health of natural environments, and stress that an improved connection of humans towards soundscapes is key to preserving the health and vitality of the environments they represent. As two disciplines that can be defined as inhabiting the separate realms of science and art, respectively, soundscape ecologists and soundscape composers naturally approach certain beliefs from different perspectives and methodologies.
But how can music – an art form, not a science - possibly be relevant towards addressing the environmental crisis?
 
In the following essay, I will be demonstrating how a growing number of composers, sound artists, and field recorders are carving soundscape composition into a powerful medium that encourages attitudes of environmental activism and awareness, starting from the ways we listen to the spaces and places surrounding us. To achieve this mission, soundscape compositions engage in interdisciplinary “boundary work” with scientific fields, including sonification and soundscape ecology. In the process, soundscape composers repurpose scientific technology for artistic uses. In the soundscape composition, the microphone, seismometer, or thermometer becomes a musical instrument, translating acoustic data into sound meant for aesthetic appreciation. Rather than measuring and reporting quantitative information to increase an audience’s objective knowledge of environmental crises, these tools instead assist the composer’s goal of increasing the audience’s qualitative knowing from spiritual, emotional, and sensory-based perspectives.
 
This paper attempts an argument for the environmental relevance of soundscape composition through its providence of an alternate “qualitative” relationship to nature, to be carried out through the critical lens of ecomusicology. Ecomusicology is a subset of musicology that interrogates connections between music and nature. The Grove Dictionary of American Music defines ecomusicology as a consideration of “the relationships of music, culture, and nature; i.e., it is the study of musical and sonic issues, both textual and performative, as they relate to ecology and the environment.” Taking up the practices of literary ecocriticism, ecomusicology asks questions about how art reflects, relies on, or is informed by nature. It seeks to address what the study of music can tell us about “humans, other species, the built environment, the natural world, constructed ‘nature,’” and most importantly, the connections between these components. According to musicologist Aaron Allen, soundscape compositions are particularly apt for ecomusicological analysis because they address these kinds of issues in an explicit way, making space for both the general listener and trained musicologist aware of the questions driving their work.
How have soundscape composers and artists have approached the challenges and opportunities of advocating for a more “qualitative” way of environmental knowing? And most importantly, does this alternate perspective have the potential to promote real social, political, and cultural change?
 
This essay will begin its examination of these questions by exploring how the concept of music and natural sound has been approached within soundscape composition’s musical predecessors, experimental music and sound art, and how an understanding of these genres can help us grasp the type of listening soundscape composition requires. Part two is centered on the mediating role that technology plays in soundscape composition. By embracing scientific technology, soundscape composers have ironically brought listeners not further from but closer to nature, calling into question the traditional dichotomy that places nature and human into two distinct spheres. To the soundscape composer, nature, culture, and technology are deeply interconnected. As a tool, soundscape composers have used technology to explore nonhuman spatial and temporal scales, realize the importance of all life forms, cultivate interactive participant-observation mindsets towards nature, promote “glocal” attitudes, invite “amateurs” into the art-making process, and engage interdisciplinary and multimodal thinking.
 
Part three explores how from these technology-aided developments, soundscape composers have established for their genre a unique way of listening that implicates a unique way of knowing - an environmental epistemology that echoes with the new age, postmodern values of Deep Ecology. When listening to a soundscape composition, a listener utilize their imagination to navigate between the real and abstract elements of the work, a personal journey that requires the listener to play an active part in the realization of the composition. Through the process of breaking down of hierarchical roles between composer and listener, along with the merging of mediums and performance spaces, soundscape composition embraces a conception of nature that moves from reductionist to holistic, cognitive to embodied, categorical to integrative. The essay concludes with a discussion of how by promoting this “qualitative” epistemology, soundscape composition can promote real change in the form of activism and awareness and is thus relevant towards addressing the environmental crisis.
 
[1] Pijanowski, B.C., Villanueva-Rivera, L.J., Dumyahn, S.L., Farina, A., Krause, B.L., Napoletano, B.M., Gage, S.H. and Pieretti, N.Soundscape ecology: the science of sound in the landscape. BioScience 61, no. 03 (2011), pp.203-216.
 
[2] Ibid.