Acoustic ecology

Canadian composer and educator Raymond Murray Schafer summarized his definition of soundscape and schizophony in a booklet published in 1969: The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher]. The handbook was a success, and Schafer and a group of colleagues and students at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver later founded the more ambitious concept and platform ([The World Soundscape Project]). The goal was to document, study, and promote the issues of sound and environment, sound and human, and sound and landscape. In the late 1970s, the concept of soundscape was canonized with the publication of the bestselling handbook [The Tuning of the World] and textbooks by his collaborators - such as composer Barry Truax on "acoustic ecology" Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, 1978, or Hildegard Westerkamp.

Both publications are considered the first studies to elaborate on the concept of "soundscape" in more detail and are still mentioned in most works dealing with theoretical, philosophical and environmental contexts of sound. However, some authors use the term in a very wide range of meanings and sometimes new interpretations can be quite distant from Schafer's original "soundscape", or some are critical of it Michel Chion, Francisco López, Tim Ingold and others. The reason probably lies in the rather broad and metaphorical definition of what Schafer imagined under the term "soundscape". For example, the question arises how interchangeable is such definition of "soundscape" with, for example, "listening"?

However, both terms still resonate today and have become embedded in the vocabulary of sound art and the developing fields of [ecoacoustics] and [sound studies]. If only because the terms "ecology" or (sound) "pollution" are on the agenda even more urgently and frequently than they were when Murray Schafer and [Barry Truax] introduced them, or rather when they linked the two terms into new contexts.