Dunn-2008-Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition ...

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A recent composition of mine, FiveMicro-Worlds, includes the stridentscratching of ants communicatingdeep in their underground nest, thequiet wheezing and buzzing noises ofunderwater invertebrates infreshwater ponds, the eerie ultrasonicecholocation bursts and singing ofmany different species of batsreflecting back from rock crevices atnight—pitch-shifted into ourhuman-hearing range—and theinsistent chirping and scraping of tinybeetles chewing through the innerbark of pine trees. These are allsounds that are not audible tohumans without the aid of specialDavid DunnPhoto by Naomi Milnerecording devices, and this is one of the things that I do as a composer: bring forththe sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherentaesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity forinfinite variation in audible communication.Every so often over the past decade, I have had a recurrent experience where uponbeing invited to lecture and present this kind of work at an institution, I find myselfadvertised as an "acoustic ecologist." While I never argue with thischaracterization—I'm usually unsure of the specific rationale for its use—I have neverapplied the original meaning of the term Acoustic Ecology to myself, been affiliatedwith its originators, nor used it to describe what I do (with one notable exceptionwhere it was used to highlight some of the issues addressed by this essay). All thewhile, I remain deeply sympathetic to it. Perhaps there is some confusion afoot in theworlds of art and music about what the term means, but there's also a vagueintuition of its appropriateness for describing a much more expansive domain ofintellectual activity than would have ever been claimed by its original practitioners.This essay is an attempt to put some of these conflicting assumptions into perspectivewhile also clarifying some of my own insights into related issues.The history of the collective of ideas generallyassociated with the term Acoustic Ecology is usuallywritten from a perspective that locates it as anacademic trademark. There is certainly validity in thisapproach, especially for the practitioners of its mostspecific usage to define distinct boundaries for amovement that began in the early 1970s in westernCanada. However, the term's scientific ring hasbeckoned a younger generation to its broaderimplications and many of these newly interestedadherents come to it with more of an environmentalconservation and media art/science background than ahistorically focused knowledge of the ideas of composerR. Murray Schafer—who, most likely, first formallycoined the term. While I plan to give due attention tohis generative role, I wish to place an understanding ofthat role into a larger context that has evolvedsomewhat consciously from its original intentions but, R. Murray Schaferas importantly, from activities that developedindependently, in parallel to, or in reaction against it. Current usage of the term cannow be found to describe any or all of these sometimes contradictory positions.While Schafer's ideas are rich and unquestionably profound, some are also sufficientlygeneral as to be readily summarized:1.Our modern 20th-century culture—but by no means all human cultures whetherextant or extinct—tends to privilege our understanding of reality through oursense of sight; and this preference for visual experience also becomes manifestthrough our predominant use of language metaphors based upon these visualexperiences. Aural experience is largely pushed further into a backgroundperception, and we pay for this diminishment with a loss of sensitivity andawareness towards certain aspects of our environment.
2.3.The framing of the concept of "the soundscape" as a defining metaphor forperceptually pulling forth the auditory characteristics of an environment intoforeground attention and insisting that these sonic attributes be regarded as aconsistent organizing factor—not only for how the environment is defined andexperienced, but as an essential feature for defining the historical and ongoingsocial relationship of humans to that environment.The necessity to heighten awareness of the negative consequences of certainhistorical developments in human societies that have resulted in the loss oftraditional knowledge conveyed through sound or, similarly, the increase ofindustrial "noise" that has both a disintegrating social impact andpsycho-physiological destructive aspect. This concern has often been simplifiedinto issues of "noise pollution" and confounded with the more direct agenda ofenvironmental acoustics.The evolution of Schafer's ideas can be traced through his sequence of extraordinarywritings, starting with many of the general concepts, moving through curriculumoutlines and listening exercises, and eventually to the defining of a lexicon of formallanguage for framing all of these ideas towards heuristic application and research.During the expansion of these concepts, there formed a larger collective of colleaguesthat became known as the World Soundscape Project. Books and recordings werepublished that demonstrated many of the group's core concerns and a standardarsenal of tools and strategies for increasing listening sensitivity to the environmentwere codified: soundscape recording, list making, oral history recording, various formsof sound mapping, amplitude and spectral charting of auditory spatial locations, soundwalks, and many other types of listening exercises that were especially geared foreducational uses with children. Overall the group produced a combination of activitiesdrawn from both the emphasis on experiential education that was burgeoning at thetime and a form of quantifiable communication theory that is more characteristic ofthe social sciences than of musicology. Diaries and field observations of specificgeographic locations (Vancouver and several European villages) resemblingethnographic field notes were made and data collected to subsequently createingenious charts and maps showing correlations between sonic landmarks andpatterns of social organization and history.While the principal metaphor that Schafer used to formulate his concept of AcousticEcology and the World Soundscape Project was the value of listening to thesoundscape as if it were a musical composition—and even participating in how thatsoundscape gets "composed"—there also seemed to be a dramatic schism betweenhis interests as a composer and the maintenance of the WSP as a somewhatabstract—and didactic—research project. The two always seemed separate in his mindand creative output. Acoustic Ecology may have been inspired by music but neverbecame music and, conversely, some of his music may have been influenced byAcoustic Ecology but never became "Acoustic Ecology" except in the mostrudimentary and academic of cases.In recent years this has somewhat shifted. As composer Warren Burt has remindedme, Schafer has been staging a series of ritualistic operas in the remote Canadianwilderness called Patria. Warren has made the excellent point that these eventsrequire a real commitment on the part of the audience—sometimes several days ofhiking to, and living in, the performance locale—and therefore represent a seriousattempt at a renewal of the social function of music, one that moves much closer toreconciling Schafer's earlier music and his Acoustic Ecology concerns.In many ways the current expansion of the term Acoustic Ecology—which otherwiseseems historically appropriate—is reinforced by a largely conservative musicalestablishment—especially in academia—interested in placing experimental musicalactivity into a zone of non-musical status. The term provides for a convenientoutlying conceptual domain where much sound-based art that otherwise isthreatening to traditional musical values can, from that perspective, be exiled withoutuncomfortable argument. This can also be said about the split that has taken placebetween "concert music" and "sound art," where the latter has often been a forcedcategorization for certain kinds of experimental practice that aesthetically conflict withmore conservative musical assumptions: if it doesn't conform to certainpreconceptions about music, then call it something else so those assumptions won'tbe seriously challenged.As a composer, Schafer has essentially been a Romantic Modernist (by no meansmeant as a pejorative) here defined as an interest in expanding the expressivepalette of music while maintaining an essentially 19th-century aesthetic concept of
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