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Soundscape composition is a musical form in which sounds are treated as bearers of meaning within an environmental and social context. The genre was pioneered by Canadian composers in the late 1970s, developing out of the encounter between tape music and acoustic ecology.
Acoustic ecology is a movement dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the sonic environment. Its preeminent figure is R. Murray Schafer, founder of the World Soundscape Project (1969). Schafer defined the term "soundscape" to refer to the "acoustic environment ... the total field of sounds wherever we are. It is a word derived from landscape, though, unlike it, not strictly limited to the outdoors" (Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World, 1977, 1994). The World Soundscape Project created sound portraits of Vancouver, British Columbia, on the West coast of Canada. They released two recordings, two decades apart, documenting the changes in the acoustical environment.
InfoHub: World Soundscape Project
Acoustic ecology approaches sound as a phenomenon that is defined not only by acoustical properties, but by its function as a mode of communicating and conveying meaning. Paralleling this approach, the musical strategy of a soundscape composition is to sonically represent a composer's knowledge and experience of a specific geographic place. The composition evokes memories and associations of that place and its context, sometimes implying commentary about the impact of technology and social, economic and political factors. Sound material is collected through on-site recording, and, often, subsequently organized in a coherent, meaningful manner. The musical goal is to invite the listener to draw associations between the sounds and the places where they were recorded.
Hildegard Westerkamp's 'Beneath the Forest Floor' (1992) captures a forest environment by building a sound collage from the recordings of frog sounds, bird calls and bird wings flapping across a body of water in an old growth forest in British Columbia. She writes: "I compose with any sound that the environment offers to the microphone, just as a writer works with all the words that a language provides . . . I like to use the microphone the way photographers often use the camera ... " (Westerkamp, liner notes from 'Transformations', 1996)
A work that includes social commentary is 'Soft Ash' (1997) by Darrin Verhagen. This composition captures the crisis of lethal environmental incidents at Union Carbide's Indian plant and in Chernobyl.
The strategy taken by the soundscape composer differs fundamentally from the aesthetics of previous tape music. For instance, the composer of musique concrete sought to obscure rather than emphasize associations between sounds and their original source. In the tape collages of John Cage, the composer sought to avoid aesthetic decisions, preferring to use chance operations to select and organize sounds. In his first musique concrete work, 'Etude aux Chemins de Fer' (1948), Pierre Schaeffer organized the sounds of trains without regard for the identity of their source, despite the common source of those sounds. In 'William's Mix' (1951), Cage used chance procedures to cut, paste and juxtapose sounds from three types of sources. For Schaeffer and Cage, sounds were treated as objects to be arranged and juxtaposed with other unrelated sounds. In contrast, the soundscape composer aims to intentionally point to relationships and associations between sounds and their source. In cases when a soundscape composer (Andra McCartney, for instance) uses chance operations to make compositional decisions, the overall compositional goal is to draw upon and establish references to real world places and experiences.
Possibly the first examples of representational tape works are Luc Ferrari's series 'Presque Rien' ('Almost Nothing'). Composer Barry Truax (Acoustic Communication, 1984) considers these to be precursors of soundscape compositions. In these works, Ferrari represents places and scenes that include human and animal sounds, as well as emotions and implied narrative.
The central question embedded within the genre of soundscape composition is the idea that sounds should convey meaning. This idea points to an important paradox implicit within the genre. Sound has at least a dual nature. On one hand, unlike the visual environment, sound is inherently abstract. At the same time, our minds constantly attempt to identify a sound's source and the meaning that it might convey. The tension between these opposing tendencies led musique concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer to instruct his listeners to practice 'ecoute reduite' (focused, or reduced listening) where one listens exclusively to the sounds in themselves, perceiving them as 'object sonores' (sound objects). The "object" of listening is to listen to an "object", a thing that conveys no particular meaning outside of its acoustical qualities. The soundscape composer walks a fine line between the dual - abstract and communicative - nature of sound, erring on the side of meaningful association. Claude Schryer ('Searching for the Sharawadji Effect: Electroacoustics and Ecology', Soundworks 70, Spring 1998) observes:
"Electroacoustic soundscape ... is a technique that treats the acoustic environment as both the subject and the content of a composition, teetering ambiguously on the border between representation and abstraction."
Additional challenges are presented by the subjective nature of listening. A sound may mean something quite distinct to two different people, even within the context of a sound environment. A person with many experiences of bodies of water has substantial, relevant memories and emotional associations to draw upon. These may suggest meanings quite different from those intended by the composer. The freedom of the human imagination allows the listener of a highly representational soundscape composition, to become no less a collaborator with the composer than is the listener of more abstract music. Composer David Dunn refers to hearing as a "perceptual instrument." (personal communication, 2002)
The application of technology to a musical form that seeks to observe and critique the effects of technology adds additional complexities to these questions. Does not the introduction of tape recorders and microphones to a natural environment at very least subtly change that environment and how it can be perceived? David Dunn distinguishes between recordings of environmental sounds from which any signs of technology (over-flying airplanes) have been removed, from soundscape compositions that represent the presence of technology, including that of the composer / recorder within that environment. Dunn observes: "Some of this work seems to exploit the need for people to believe in a romantic description of the natural world and does so by commoditizing it" (personal communication, 2002).
A related genre called a "soundwalk", pioneered by Hildegard Westerkamp and Andra McCartney, developed to address the subjective nature of the technological intervention itself. These composers walk through a soundscape, microphone visibly in hand, recording the sounds they encounter, along with their verbal commentary. One example, by Andra McCartney, is 'Soundwalking in Queen Elizabeth Park'.
Soundwalking ...
Individual soundscape composers utilize a wide spectrum of compositional approaches in response to these paradoxes and complexities. Their strategies range from field recordings treated as completed works to through-composed compositions comprised of highly processed versions of field recordings.
Claude Schryer (1998) identifies several approaches that he has taken in his own soundscapes compositions. A few of Schryer's techniques that are shared by other composers include these, which are followed by examples:
1. Text-based ... draws on a counterpoint and rhythm of the timbre of human voices, of the content of the voices, and the soundscapes in and around the voices ...
2. Single-take ... field recording (which) can stand alone as a composition ...
3. Unaltered / edited. For these I use simple editing and mixing techniques, letting the process be guided by the musical gestures of the recorded soundscapes ...
4. Processed ... includ(ing) unaltered edited soundscapes and additional electronically processed sequences ..."
An example of a text-based work is Hildegard Westerkamp's 'A Walk Through the City' (1981), which integrates poetry by Norbert Ruebsaat within a sonic tour of Vancouver, British Columbia's skid row.
Single-take recordings include Annea Lockwood's 'A Soundmap of the Hudson River' (1989), which captures sonic snapshots of the length and breadth of a major river in New York State and Douglas Quin's 'Antarctic Soundscapes', (Musicworks #69 CD, December 1997), which includes field recordings of sea mammals, birds and an underwater glacier.
Other examples: an unaltered / edited work is David Dunn's 'The Lion In Which The Spirits Of The Royal Ancestors Make Their Home' (1995), in which the composer / sound recorder documents the people and environment of Zimbabwe, East Africa, describing in sound the many components of a complex, changing society. In 'Rainforest Soundwalks' (2001), Steven Feld presents a sonic portrait of the Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea. 'Mutawinji' and 'Lake Emu' are among David Lumsdaine's soundscapes of Australia. Thomas Gerwin's 'Fluss Durchs Ohr: Klangbilder Vom Neckar' (1998) documents the Neckar River in Germany and its natural surroundings and peoples; his 'Wattenmeer-Suite' (1996) traces the experience of a national park in Germany. For an example of a soundscape in a human populated area, Barry Truax's 'La Sera Di Benevento' (1999) reflects upon life in an Italian town.
Some works that mix unaltered and electronically processed site recordings is Hildegard Westerkamp's 'Beneath the Forest Floor' (1996), discussed above, Claude Schryer's 'Vancouver Soundscape Revisited' (1996) is an impressionist portrait of past and present Vancouver. His 'El Medio Ambiente Acustico de Mexico'(1996) is a collection of audio snapshots from Mexico (both are from his CD 'Autour'). 'Le Triangle d'Incertitude' (1996) is a series of soundscapes by Cecile le Prado evoking the French coastline, interveaving sounds of sea, boats, sailors and life on the coast. Le Prado combines highly processed sounds of ship bells and horns, voices and many others, along with untreated field recordings, to craft a surreal and evocative sonic picture of maritime life.
An interesting avenue of musical composition has been electroacoustic composition that stretches the boundaries of soundscape composition, injecting a greater degree of abstraction into with the works. One example is Darren Copeland's 'Rendu Visible' (Rendered Visible, 1998), in which a massive yet sound that the listener cannot clearly identify emerges within a sonic environment filled with sounds of water and birds.
Copeland describes his work in a manner that keenly articulates the aesthetic of soundscape composition: "a composition using real world sounds is able to re-awaken latent visual imagery in the mind of the listener, as if this disc was really an empty canvas or a fresh stock of film." Like more conventional soundscape composers, Copeland invites the listener to use her / his imagination to engage visual and other perceptions, evoking a panoply of mental associations, bringing us into closer relationship with the world around us, helping us appreciate the musical qualities of the sounds of the natural and human environment.
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