Acoustic Ecology
Definition
Acoustic ecology, sometimes called ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between human beings and their environment.[1]
Acoustic ecology is informed by two traditions: acoustic ecology, which began in the late 1960s among composers and communication scholars and is concerned with human perception, community identity, and noise, and soundscape ecology, which emerged from biology in the 2000s and uses recorded sound as a quantitative instrument for measuring habitat condition. See Biophony for the second.
World Soundscape Project
Acoustic ecology started with R. Murray Schafer, 1933 to 2021, a Canadian composer, writer, music educator, and environmentalist, working with a team at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.[1][2]
The World Soundscape Project was founded in 1969 as a research and educational endeavour, and established the modern field concerned with raising public awareness of sound, documenting environmental sound and its changing character, and establishing soundscape design as an alternative to noise pollution.[3] Its stated aim was an ecologically balanced soundscape in which the relationship between a human community and its sonic environment is in harmony.[3]
Schafer's associates in the early stages included Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Adam Woog.[3] Funding came from the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Canada Council, and UNESCO.[3]
Research covered studies in new sounds, studies of schizophonia, an archive of lost and disappearing sounds, a glossary of sounds in literature, sound association tests, soundscape analyses of events and community soundmarks, the sonic environments of schools, the design of acoustic parks, sound typology and morphology, the semantics of sound, and the meanings of silence.[3] The group produced publications, radio broadcasts, and an audio archive of several hundred hours of environmental recordings.[4]
Founding members joined representatives of the international community to form the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in 1993.[4]
Schafer's vocabulary
Soundscape. The acoustic environment considered as a composition with structure, rather than as an undifferentiated quantity of noise.
Keynote sounds. Named after the key of a piece of music. These are usually not heard consciously and instead form a sonic background. They are ubiquitous, which gives them substantial effect on behavior while also expressing the character of the people surrounded by them.[5]
Sound signals. Foreground sounds listened to consciously, carrying information that requires a response.
Soundmarks. By analogy with landmarks. A sound unique to a place, held in regard by the community, and worth protecting for that reason.
Hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes. A hi-fi environment has a favorable signal-to-noise ratio, so sounds can be heard clearly without crowding, each occupying its own acoustic space, and the listener can hear far into the distance.[5][6] Schafer compared this to instruments in a classical orchestra.[4] A lo-fi environment masks its own components, so perspective is lost and the listener can only hear what is close.
Schizophonia. The split between an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction. Schafer's WSP studies examined the pervasive presence of reproduced sound in the soundscape, covering muzak, radio, and portable personal listening devices.[3]
Earwitness. Someone who reports what a place sounded like, treated as a source of historical evidence about environments no recording exists for.
Method
Field recording produces a documentary record of a place at a time, which makes change over decades measurable by comparison. Instrumented measurement records a numerical representation of loudness as sound pressure level, together with frequency distribution.[5]
The WSP archive was built specifically to enable the first, documenting the sonic transformation of particular places over long periods.[6] Its publications include The Vancouver Soundscape (1973) and Five Village Soundscapes (1977), the latter recording five European villages and returning to them later.
The soundwalk, developed by Westerkamp, is one of the field's characteristic exercises: it consists of a walk taken with attention directed at listening rather than looking, in which participants record what they hear and where.
Criticism
Schafer's prescriptive ideals have received critical re-evaluation, particularly by Ari Kelman in 2010, who objected to the normative ranking of natural sound above human sound built into the hi-fi and lo-fi distinction.[7]
Tim Ingold's 2007 critique of the term soundscape itself has been widely cited, arguing that the visual metaphor imports assumptions that do not hold for hearing.[7] Barry Truax, a WSP member, has responded that Schafer's neologisms were intended as rhetorical devices for communicating new concepts to a wider audience rather than as rigorous definitions.[7]
Relation to interface and display
Schafer's position, that we should treat the environments we find ourselves in as musical compositions, converts a hearer into an analytic listener, which is exactly the capacity an auditory display depends on.[8] When an environment produces sounds arising from data and events, monitoring becomes possible by listening rather than by looking.[8]
In auditory display work the term acoustic ecology also refers to the internal ecology of the various sounds within a sonification, meaning how the elements of a designed sound system relate to each other.[8]
The keynote and signal distinction is the operative one for designing device sound. A keynote is continuous and unnoticed and shapes behavior anyway. A signal demands attention and should be reserved for events requiring a response. Most notification sound is designed as signal and functions as keynote, which is a failure to match the channel to the information.
Masking sets the constraint. Over a relatively narrow frequency range, quiet sounds become inaudible in the presence of louder sounds at a lower frequency.[9] A room with many devices signaling in overlapping bands is a lo-fi environment by Schafer's definition, and no individual signal in it can be relied on.
Further Reading
- Biophony
- Low Resolution Indicators
- The Feeling of Space
- Rhythm Science
- Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art
- The Silent Language
- Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
- Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environment
- The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
- Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography
- Space is the Machine
- Place: The Networking of Public Space
Key texts
- Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. Knopf, 1977. Republished 1994 as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Destiny Books.
- Schafer, R. Murray. The Book of Noise. 1970.
- Schafer, R. Murray. The Music of the Environment. 1973.
- Truax, Barry, ed. Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. ARC Publications, 1978.
- Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Ablex, 1984.
- Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Soundwalking." Sound Heritage 3, no. 4 (1974).
- Pijanowski, Bryan C., et al. "Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape." BioScience 61, no. 3 (2011): 203-216.
External Links
- World Soundscape Project, Simon Fraser University
- World Forum for Acoustic Ecology
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Acoustic ecology, Wikipedia.
- ↑ R. Murray Schafer, Wikipedia.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 World Soundscape Project, The Canadian Encyclopedia.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 The art and science of acoustic ecology, ENT & Audiology News.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 The legacy of R. Murray Schafer, ResearchGate.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 1: The Soundscape, Just Sound Effects.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Editorial, Organised Sound, Cambridge Core.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Haptic Input + Auditory Display = Musical Instrument?, arXiv.
- ↑ An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology, Academia.edu.
