Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological Approach

The Search for Definition: Beyond Categorization

Another way soundscape composition embodies the term “holism” is through its rejection of clear categorization. While the term “soundscape composition” has been used by individual artists such as Westerkamp and Polli to describe their own works, it has yet to gain a formal definition. Categories and definitions serve a useful purpose for music, to a certain extent. Distinctions ensure that fans and critics can speak in a common language about the art world, and genres are the primary tool used by the music industry to locate their audiences. However, categorization can become limiting when it is used by subcultures to define one type of aesthetics as inherently better than another or to create boundaries that reject the legitimacy of a type of music.[1] Musical genres have a lot more in common than people think. Music scholars like McClary notes that labels are not absolute, with “many genres that are seen as having nothing in common actually come from the same family tree.”[2] McClary goes  further to point out that most twentieth century music, regardless of genre, shares the same basic attributes of repetition and rhythm and that "the structures of repetition that characterize so much of our music testify to the complex, unpredictable history of our century. . . It owes its emergence to countless moments of creativity, accidents of reception, strange correspondences between distant sensibilities, contributions from long-ignored minorities, and much more."[3] With McClary’s insights in mind, should soundscape composition be formally defined at all? Westerkamp tackles this question in her essay "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." While Westerkamp acknowledges that boundary can produce clarity, she suggests that it might be better to keep soundscape composition as a developing art in “its infant state of total openness and full of potential.” She goes on to warn that labeling a piece as a soundscape composition “just because it uses environmental sounds as its source material” marks it merely as a subgenre of musique concréte.[4] Such an assignment has the danger of ignoring the complex origin of soundscape composition as a confluence of experimental music, sound art, acoustic ecology.  Journalist Evelyn McDonnell describes that it is tempting to think for music writers to "think this [genrefication] will help people understand the mysterious appeal of music. We’re often right. But sometimes we forget that people want to appreciate, not destroy, the mystery. Sometimes we replace description with conscription, variations with labels, people with stereotypes.”[5] There is value to be gained in the mysterious and unknown.
 
The uneasiness that Westerkamp has expressed towards developing soundscape composition as a musical genre parallels sonification’s struggle to be recognized as a legitimate scientific discipline. Sterne notes that because "the field has no obvious epistemic center yet, and overall unclear impact on the arts and sciences,” we cannot restrict the boundaries to soon, and should keep the definition flexible to accommodate future developments, whatever their respective involvement in the arts or sciences might be. But at the same time, a lack of a common vocabulary, "generalizable knowledge, guidelines, or best-practice models” makes it hard for sonification practitioners to form a common front as the community expands.[6]  One answer to this problem? Embrace collaboration. Supper notes that ICAD conferences have already been implementing a certain strategic openness by inviting composers or types of people who might not otherwise come in order to attract a ‘critical mass’ of people interested in sonification.[7] And as we’ve seen above, interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches are core to many soundscape compositions.
 
Researchers in soundscape ecology, too, are determined to have their work recognized as its own separate discipline of merit. As Krause insists in his work Voices of the Wild; “soundscape ecology is no less crucial than spatial or landscape ecology for our understanding of ecosystem function. Animal communication turns out to be as significant a factor in defining material or acoustic real estate as, say, trophic structure - the feeding and nourishment relationships of all organisms in a specific environment.”[8] And indeed, an increasing number of studies in the past decade have been confirming Krause’s notion. In a similar way, Westerkamp notes that through a common emphasis on conscious listening and conscious awareness, soundscape compositions share a responsibility to “ convince other ecologists that the pollution of our soundscape is as much of an environmental issue as the pollution of water and air-that indeed, it is the ‘voice’ which makes the world's environmental problems audible to all those who care to listen.”[9] Is soundscape composition effectively making such an impact? David Dunn has his doubts, pointing out that “The general public is rarely aware of the activities of radical artists working at the limits of technology and only becomes exposed to their ideas through a distribution network that is generally far removed from the artists and their motivations.” However, soundscape compositions appear to strive for the opposite, making their works increasingly available to the general public by leaving the concert hall. Consider museum gallery pieces like The Place, internet experiences like Norman’s Window and Polli’s Heat and the Heartbeat of the City. Other soundscape works highlight themes of mobility and displacement, bringing the soundscape to the place of the listener rather than vice versa. In 2015, for example, Winderen organized the project Dive, “an ambitious 80-channel setting of underwater sounds and deep blue light in a darkened traffic tunnel through the middle of Manhattan.”[10] Leif Brush’s Fjord: Hexagram Wind Monitors beamed wind sounds from Baffin Island in Canada to DeDeolen Hall in Holland via satellite, and his 1982 Teleconstructs Spacework I project, for example, was simultaneously presented in a museum auditorium and on FM radio broadcast throughout the United States.[11]  By blurring the boundaries of performance space, soundscape composers have been able to reach out to a wider audience.
 
[1] Faulhaber, Edwin F. “Communicator Between Worlds: Björk Reaches Beyond the Binaries.” Doctoral Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008.
 
[2] McClary, Susan. "Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture." In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.
 
[3] McCLary, Ibid.
 
[4] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
 
[5] Faulhaber, Edwin F. “Communicator Between Worlds: Björk Reaches Beyond the Binaries.” Doctoral Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008.
 
[6] Sterne, Jonathan. and Akiyama, Mitchell. “The Recording That Never Wanted to be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
 
[7] Supper, A. “The search for the “killer application”: Drawing the boundaries around the sonification of scientific data,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, T. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld, Eds. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012.
 
[8] Krause, Bernie. Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes. Yale University Press, 2015.
 
[9] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
 
[10] Winderen, Jana. Jana Winderen website, Web. http://www.janawinderen.com/.
 
[11] Brush, Leif, and Gloria DeFilipps Brush. "Monitoring Nature's Sounds with Terrain-Based Constructions." Leonardo (1984): 4-7.