Acoustic ecology made its international debut in 1977 with The Tuning of the World , the most popular and widely cited publication to emerge from the research carried out by the World Soundscape Project (WSP) under the direction of composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Acoustic ecology is an interdisciplinary framework for documenting, analysing, and transforming sonic environments: an early model of the cross-boundary thinking and multi-modal practice now common across the digital humanities. Yet, in the past 40 years, acoustic ecology has not prompted the global rethinking of architectural design or urban planning that the field prescribed, and instead, questions about its biases and research methods have dominated academic conversations. With the emergence of sound studies and the burgeoning expansion of âecologicalâ thinking across a wide variety of disciplines in recent years, much of what interested early acoustic ecology has been taken up in differing contexts at a wilful distance from the problematic constructions of the original WSP . This volume will serve as a comprehensive investigation into the ways in which current scholars working with sound are re-inventing acoustic ecology across diverse fields, drawing on acoustic ecologyâs focus on sensory experience, place and practice-based research, and attendance to social structures and politics. From sounding out the Anthropocene across diverse cultural contexts, to rethinking our auditory media landscapes, this volume brings acoustic ecologyâs central problems to questions around space, cultures, technology, and mediated sensorialities.
Contributors include two leading figures from the original generation of the WSP , Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, along with leading scholars in sound studies today like Jonathan Sterne and Karin Bijsterveld and a host of other key figures contributing to the discourse. We open with a section on theorizing the field where prominent voices in contemporary sound studies problematize and explicate rich aspects of acoustic ecology histories, drawing germane conversations to the fore. The volume then moves on to consider the ways in which environment and community have been investigated in and through sound, bringing together a variety of settings and perspectives. The third section is focused on culture and society, including mediation, technological and otherwise, in the study of sound. Together, this collection demonstrates the livelihood of ecological work that engages with sound today, allowing the original concerns of acoustic ecology to dialogue with a wide range of work being done in critical sound studies, radical cultural history, science and technology studies, media theory, eco-humanities, and the digital arts.
As editors of this volume, we are using this introduction to chart pathways through the intersections of sound, media, and ecology along three lines: the historicity of ecological thinking across disciplines, acoustic resonances of the Anthropocene, and the spaces of new sound pedagogies. What follows is a telematic dialogue (as we work on the collection from the West and East coasts of Canada) about themes and ideas that have most inspired our thinking about where this volume fits in the contemporary landscape of sound-based research and practice across art, media, and ethnography. Above all, we grapple with one of the central tensions at the very heart of ecology: understanding how ecological systems work requires a sense of totalizing knowledge at a distance, while the prevailing wisdom of ecological thinking argues that we can only ever understand an ecosystem from inside, as part of the system. This has been a long-standing source of tension in the field of acoustic ecology. For example, the implied mastery of Schaferâs goal of comprehensive acoustic design stands in marked contrast to the participatory engagement of Hildegard Westerkampâs prescription for soundwalking and sound art as a mode of âspeaking from inside the soundscapeâ (Westerkamp, 2001). The tension between these macroscopic and microscopic perspectives can be charted across the WSPâs impulse towards exhaustive documentation, sonic cartography, historical contextualization, and all the things that make ecological study itself a difficult balancing act. Needless to say, the spread of ecological thinking into disciplines and fields outside the natural sciences has created multiple permutations of how we might do research and create art along ecological lines. Here are our thoughts about how these struggles are made manifest within the pages of this volume as a reflection upon the state of soundscape research today.
Act 1. Everything New Is Old Again
Milena:
I was listening to a podcast recentlyâas so many stimulating ideas seem to come from these daysâin which the host was interviewing someone about a utopian community based on the principles of something called âsocial permaculture.â Permaculture, if you havenât heard, is the fashionable new term for urban farming, or small-scale vegetable/food production for oneself. People from North America go to expensive workshops all the way to Bali and Indonesia to study permaculture: the art of working with the soil and natural conditions, a sort of harmony of elements working together to produce sustainable long-term food supply. The podcast was drawing on that term to articulate utopian community relations as a kind of social permaculture: a society (a commune really) that functions in tune with the environment, in balance with nature and with respect and fairness to the reproduction of equitable social order. A society that presumably has transcended what bell hooks calls âcapitalist white supremacist patriarchal orderâ (2000) in favour of liberation for all in a permanent, sustainable way.
What struck me about the idea of âsocial permacultureâ was its remarkable resemblance to the âecologicalâ thinking of the 1960s and 1970s that brought us acoustic ecology in the first place. An anti-modernist return-to-the-human-scale of things, acoustic ecology has always seemed a utopian term, an attempt to transpose arguably romanticized notions about the natural-ness of nature into fraught social relations, to avert tensions by striving for balance. Acoustic ecology offers a proposal for reclaiming humanistic values and has long been a movement to quiet an increasingly loud, diverse, challenging, technologized world.
Fast forward several decades, utopian social permaculture is similarly an attempt to navigate an impending climate crisis, as well as salvage humanity from a world of political upheaval, and the omnipresence of artificial intelligence in modern life. The story of acoustic ecology can actually serve as an invaluable model for addressing anxieties produced by the pluralistic, industrialized city: sound is the symptom, ecology is the remedy. In this vein, Schafer famously likens the sounding universe to an orchestration, âin which we are simultaneously the audience, the composers and the performersâ (1993, p. 105). While many have critiqued this view as too aesthetically driven and oversimplifying of both problem and solution, Schaferâs notion of the soundscape encompasses many more lesser known relational statements that cast acoustic ecology as a complex and flexible system of understanding the socio-political dimensions of sound:
The electric revolution has this given us new tonal centres of prime unity against which all other sounds are now balanced. [âŠ] to relate all sounds to one that is continuously sounding is a special way of listening. (Schafer, 1977, p. 99)
Embedded in Schaferâs thinking are fundamental ideas of relationality, of listening as a form of social relation. In the contemporary moment, sound ethnography is working precisely at those points of tension, and what contributor Vincent Andrisani calls âin-betweennessââreferring to the permeability of sound in the cultural environment of Havana, Cuba. Listening, in fact, can be thought of as a form of civic action that comprises pragmatic, as well as historical forms of listening (Andrisani). In 2010, at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in Koli, Finland, contributor Andra McCartney introduced the concept of ecotonality . It is derived from the term ecotone, which in the ecological context means a transition area between two ecosystems or biomes, such as between forest and grassland, or the intertidal zones between ocean and shoreline. With this term she expands our thinking beyond Schaferâs polarizing concepts of hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes and their equally polarizing critiques, into the much more complex areas of the transitional and the in-between.
One of the shifts we see in this newer work in acoustic ecology is a central focus on the political, and on redressing social justice. Sometimes I wonder, as we see ideas cycle through time, whether everything in the 1970s seemed so political that to construct listening as political seemed obvious. Of course, in McLuhanâs words the rear-view mirror is 20â20 and folks then didnât think of their own positions as politically hierarchical or their own presence as someone elseâs absence. Today, we have no such privilege.
Randolph:
While Schaferâs thinking on sound certainly emphasized relationality, it was also imbued with ways of thinking about these relations informed by a notable bias towards a very particular moment in the history of settler colonialism: that moment when Europeans decided they were going to stay and become Canadians. As Mitchell Akiyama unpacks in his contribution to this volume, much of the work of early acoustic ecology under Schafer romanticizes the state of civilization that made settler colonialism possible along with its attendant technologies: the steam trains, foghorns, and church bells that transported, guided, and gathered people together in this new place (at the expense of so much, and of so many that were already here). In the idea of social permaculture, there is a strain of this drawing of lines in the sands of history, a return to a moment in the past made possible by the privilege of living it from the present, a position that does not demand the truth and reconciliation with indigenous cultures that real harmony with the environment requires. Todayâs acoustic ecology must function from a different vantage point: one that tells a different story about how the world is and how we want it to be, to acknowledge the privilege upon which the field was founded and find new paths out into society at large.
In the film This Changes Everything (2015), Naomi Klein recounts a shift in humanityâs thinking about how we relate to this thing we call âthe environment,â precipitated by the formation of the Royal Society and their anthropocentric notion of humans as striving for mastery over the Earth and its resources, a marked break from indigenous emphasis on sustainability. Kleinâs premise is that these are simply stories that we tell ourselves about our relationship to everything around us, and that just as indigenous cultures have maintained their ideological positions through the act of storytelling from one generation to the next, so too is our current capitalistic moment the product of the stories that settler cultures have been perpetuating for the past several hundred years. It seems hopeless, at this juncture, to think that we can back away from the course that global warming is charting. For Klein, however, itâs a matter of changing the stories we tell ourselves. History shows that stories can and do change regularly. Stories can change everything.
The field of acoustic ecology, as it developed under the direction of R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s, began by telling a new story about th...