The World Soundscape Project and the Legacy of Schizophonia
The WSP was founded with the purpose of studying “the acoustic environment and the impact of technology on it.”[3] The WSP’s conception of the acoustic environment was not necessarily the “natural soundscape” of habitats and ecosystems that soundscape ecologists study, rather, it referred to the soundscape that we humans encounter in our everyday life, and how that soundscape affects our ability to connect to our community. The WSP’s goal revolved around finding solutions for an “ecologically balanced” soundscape, where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is “in harmony.”[4] Through active listening and “ear-cleaning” exercises, the WSP emphasized the responsibility that the listener has towards his or her soundscape.
According to the WSP, the listener should acknowledge the soundscape as an “intimate reflection of the social, technological, and natural conditions of its area” where “listening and soundmaking stand in a delicate relationship to each other.”[5]
Industry and technology, however, was a force that disrupted this balance. Schafer feared that Schaeffer’s acousmatic listening via technology would separate people only further from their soundscape. In his seminal work The Tuning of the World, Schafer uses the term “schizophonia” (conjuring the notion of schizophrenia or mental dislocation) to describe Schaeffer’s separation of the sound from its source. For Schafer, a soundscape “cannot and should not be separated from its geographical location” – exactly what emerging methods of electroacoustic composition were doing.[6] For Schafer, modern technology was changing how people made and listened to sounds, and not in a good way. In this sense, Schafer would agree with medieval scholar Christopher Page, who makes the point that with technology we ironically lose some of the “tricks of past trades.” Because, Page argues, “we are accustomed in the West to associate change with improvement,” we assume that technological development have improved standards of musicianship.[7] Page, however, refers his readers to a 1909 recording of the Westminster Cathedral Choir singing part of Palestrina’s Mass, where the singers were “crowded around a [phonograph] horn and probably making adjustments… to overcome the limitations of the recording medium,” “being told to project and hammer the notes to get them onto the wax cylinder” and disregarding any previous respect towards historical performance practice.[7] Schafer interprets Schaeffer in a similar light. Without knowledge of the “historical” source of the sounds they are hearing, a listener of musique concrète is forced to piece together a fragmented construction that lacks the larger context and meaning of an integrated whole.
Hildegard Westerkamp, however, argues that the WSP was about more than just combating technological and industrial noise pollution. After the original WSP research group dissolved when Schafer left SFU in 1975, the ideas of the WSP lived on through teaching and research programs in acoustic communication at SFU, Truax’s 1984 publication Acoustic Communication, and the compositions of individual composers, most notably from Westerkamp. In 1993, Westerkamp helped found the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and 1993 and served as editor of the Soundscape Newsletter. Today, the WFAE connects groups and individuals from a diversity of backgrounds and disciplines who share a common concern for the soundscape. Westerkamp describes that the goal of acoustic ecologists to design more “healthy and attractive sonic environments” and contribute to an “innovative preservation of worthwhile sounds of past and present,” with the ultimate mission of “turning of the negative spectre of a polluted sound world into a vision where the sonic environment becomes a place for renewal and creativity.”[8] It is this “tuning” that today’s soundscape composers, whether or not they agree with the WSP’s ideologies, try to instill in their works.
[1] Truax, Barry. “The World Soundscape Project.” Simon Fraser University, http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html
[2] Westerkamp, Hildegard. “The World Soundscape Project.” The Soundscape Newsletter 01, August 1991. http://wfae.net/library/articles/westerkamp_world.pdf
[3] Westerkamp, Ibid.
[4] Westerkamp, Hildegard, Woog, Adam P., Kallmann, Helmut, and Truax, Barry. “World Soundscape Project.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/world-soundscape-project/
[5] Westerkamp, Hildegard. “The World Soundscape Project.” The Soundscape Newsletter 01, August 1991. http://wfae.net/library/articles/westerkamp_world.pdf
[6] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
[7] Page, Christopher. “Ancestral Voices.” Sound. Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry, eds. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[8] Westerkamp, Ibid.
