Sound, Listening and Environment

Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the number of composers and sound artists directly responding to global environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change, through their creative practice. The philosophical concerns and practical methodologies of these composers and sound artists build on the established field of acoustic ecology, and the related genre of soundscape composition, but also venture well beyond them, setting them apart as a distinct new movement in music and sound art. However, as yet no new terminology has been found to define and describe this movement, either as an academic field of study or as an artistic genre.

Two composers who are at the forefront of this movement, David Monacchi and Matthew Burtner, have each independently adopted the term “ecoacoustic” in reference to their work: a term which this paper will propose as the most suitable to describe this contemporary movement of environmentally-concerned music and sound art. Although some significant differences exist between the artistic philosophies and creative practices of the two composers – which also, therefore, inevitably carry through into differences between their uses of the term – it will be argued that the similarities between them are significant enough for these differences to be regarded as variations upon a core set of principles and methodologies.

Through an investigation into what the term “ecoacoustic” means in the context of the work of Monacchi and Burtner, this paper will identify these core principles and methodologies, employing them as the basis for an initial “definition- in-progress” of ecoacoustic music and sound art. Finally, a selection of other composers and sound artists will be proposed whose work embodies the fundamental characteristics of this new field of “ecoacoustics”.

"Which is the part played by sound in the adaptation to environment? In which degree the sonorous perception and its alteration have influenced in the adaptative process of human beings? By which mechanisms we recodify the auditory information that we give in the spaces we make sound? Which is the part played by the sonorous information in the construction of the public space? We try in this article to answer those questions applying the bioacustic theories to the urban spaces. It is a comparative analysis from the anthropological knowledge using conceptual tools of that discipline in addition of some others, such as Ecology or Ethology which also make research in bordering fields but separated by diffuse borders. Something among sound, silence and music.
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¿Cuál es el papel del sonido en la adaptación al medio ambiente? ¿En qué medida ha influido la percepción sonora y su modificación en el peculiar devenir adaptativo de la especie humana? ¿Mediante qué mecanismos recodificamos la información auditiva que imprimimos en los espacios que hacemos sonar? ¿Cuál es el rol de la información sonora en la construcción del espacio público? Preguntas a las que se intenta responder a través de la extrapolación de las teorías bioacústicas contemporáneas a los ámbitos urbanos. Un análisis comparativo a raíz del conocimiento antropológico mediante herramientas conceptuales propias de la disciplina y de otras que, como la ecología o la etología, estudian campos limítrofes de fronteras difusas. Entre sonido, silencio y música."

This article explores the relationships among place, knowing, and being in environmental histories. Grounding ourselves in the work of Indigenous scholars from North America and the Pacific, we propose a method of listening and attuning that can attend to the dislocation and abstraction often found in work addressing eco-cide and environmental violence. Against the ubiquity of the case-study approach, we propose a method we call "kin study," which invites more embedded, expansive , material, and respectful relations to people and lands. This article frames the issues and then proposes, though a dialogue, how kin studies may be constituted and applied in studying environmental histories of the Pacific and Western Canada.

The article examines my recent multi-channel sound composition: Decomposing Landscape (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally-troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognizable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialization techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is: how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.