Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological Approach

Perspectivism: Exploring Nonhuman Spatio-temporal Scales

Technology makes it possible for a soundscape composer to emulate different sense of time and space through their work. By allowing a listener to feel what it’s like experience time or space on a nonhuman scale, soundscape compositions lend listeners an opportunity to develop an expanded perspective and empathy towards other forms of life. Polli notes, for example, the ability of recording equipment to “amplify barely audible environmental sounds.” In her work, Hildegard Westerkamp will ‘‘position the microphone very close to the tiny, quiet, and complex sounds of nature, then amplify and highlight them...they can be understood as occupying an important place in the soundscape and warrant respect’’ – a technique we see her execute with the barnacles of Kits Beach Soundwalk.[1] Like looking through a microscope and seeing a tiny world of strange organisms in a droplet of river water, changing perspectives has the potential to change our perception of reality.
 
Interestingly, awareness of perspective is also central to soundscape ecology.
 In his article “Soundscape Conservation,” Dumyahn observes that, "We [soundscape ecologists] recognize that how wildlife and humans perceive and respond to sounds will vary.”[2] Dumyahn notes that this concept has been largely influenced by landscape ecology, a field that recognizes that different organisms experience the landscape in different ways. The landscape of a bird, for example, is different from that of a slug in terms of the niches they occupy or their mobility from place to place. In the context of the soundscape, not all organisms occupy the same “acoustic niche." They may not have the same hearing range, or they may use sound to different extents or in different ways (vocal vs. vibratory communication, for example). Recognition of this diversity of perspectives has helped shape the interdisciplinary, receptive attitude of the field. As Dumyahn describes, “...individual human perceptions and responses to sounds also are not universal. With this in mind, we acknowledge that different social and ecological research approaches are necessary to understand these dynamics.”[3] In other words, we realize that there is a lot more to see and hear than what we can detect with our own eyes and ears. Soundscape compositions such as Jana Winderen’s 2015 The Wanderer employ this concept of perspectivism. A 16-channel installation that documents zooplankton and phytoplankton sounds from across the Atlantic Ocean, The Wanderer intends to raise conscious awareness and appreciation for these two underappreciated creatures. In the notes for the piece Winderen describes that “Mammals, fish and crustaceans feed on zooplankton and they in turn feed on phytoplankton” and that “Half of the world’s oxygen is produced by phytoplankton photosynthesis.”[4] By focusing on the insight that can be gained from shifting perspectives and switching frameworks, Winderen’s hydrophone recordings represent a strategy to amplify the presence of organisms vital to life on earth.
 
Sonification, too, can render data audible that normally lies far outside of possible human experience, compressing time “into a few minutes” or shrinking “vast geographical distances” to “the size of a room.”[5] By converging data streams from throughout Interior Alaska into a single location, John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen, certainly falls under the latter category. As Adams describes, “The Place resonates sympathetically with the world outside. In turn, I hope it reverberates back into the world. We enter with our everyday perceptions of the world around us. Inside The Place we hear and see things differently. When we leave, perhaps we carry some of these new perceptions with us.” In this fast-paced Information Age, we seldom stop to “listen beneath the surface of everyday life.”[6] The Place, however, provides us with an opportunity to pause to pay attention to the sounds around us, allowing us to enter another realm where time moves more slowly. Because The Place as a composition essentially never ends, it also refers to the idea of the constant presence of the soundscape, as if one was simply ‘‘dropping in’’ to an ongoing process, which listener also experiences through engaging in the activity of the soundwalk. In this way, The Place speaks to a similar desire of sound artists for an elimination of time – from the notion of conceptual artist Les Levine that “environmental art can have no beginnings or endings" to Piet Mondrian’s vision for a new kind of concert hall where “people could come and go freely without missing anything because the compositions would be repeated just like in movie theaters."[7] Polli notes how ultimately, soundscape composition emphasizes the idea that a soundscape is present before and after a listener experiences it implies a “continuity of the natural world existing before and after human life.”[8]
 
[1] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
 
[2] Dumyahn, Sarah L., and Bryan C. Pijanowski. "Soundscape conservation."Landscape Ecology 26, no. 9 (2011): 1327-1344.
 
[3] Dumyahn, Ibid.
 
[4] Winderen, Jana. “The Wanderer.” Web, https://janawinderen.bandcamp.com/album/the-wanderer
 
[5] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
 
[6] Adams, John Luther. The place where you go to listen: In search of an ecology of music. Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
 
[7] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
 
[8] Polli, Ibid.