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The Sounding Museum: Towards an Auditory Anthropology
No full textBased on the authors’ field experiences, one of anthropology’s main theoretical reflections in the past decade is used here as a starting point: the relations between humans and non-humans. It reveals that the role of sound is paramount within the Amerindian ontology named animism, especially if compared to Western naturalism and its visual primacy. Consequently, we propose an auditory anthropology as a theoretical concept, underpinned by further examples from the field. Finally, the practical application of an auditory anthropology is discussed. Researchers may make use of cultural soundscape composition in order to supply a museum’s audience with a means to listen to the manifold cultures of the world
Living Out Loud
Get PDFThe term consumer culture is thrown about with relative ease these days, but it is our appetite for deconstruction that is most voracious. We have developed a tendency to break the issues of our time—and our time is precious—into the simplest, handiest terms and phrases and ideas. Now, an argument that can fit in your pocket does travel well, but constant snacking on sound bites can leave us with a real mess on our hands, especially when, seeking clarity, we have carved away the nuances of an issue as a whole. Even worse, pockets full, we may forget that we have pulled the world into a puzzle of our own design, and that the cuts, made for the sake of convenience, are actually quite arbitrary. We then may assume that the world falls to pieces of its own accord, and find ourselves standing idly by, wondering at the rumble
Location, Location, Location: Auditioning the vocalizations of the Australian pied butcherbird
Get PDFA soundscape recordist I am not, although when “ideal” conditions present themselves, I make a stab at it. I am immersed in the sound world of another species, and towards that end I make field recordings. My research celebrates the vocalizations of Australia’s pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis), a mid-sized black and white songbird known for its habit of impaling prey (such as lizards and small birds) on branches or thorns for later consumption.
Other wildlife recordists were generous in sharing their extant recordings with me, but I quickly discovered the advantages of experiencing pied butcherbird vocal behavior firsthand and making my own recordings. “Jazz is like bananas—it must be consumed on the spot,” Sartre recommends (1947, 48). So too, birdsong. Like the town clock, the dawn chorus is a soundmark (Truax 2001) for birds and humans, an aural counterpoint of events with a wide range of frequencies, amplitudes, timbres, and sound sources. Unlike the town clock, with birdsong there are dramas. Feathered choirs compete intensively for broadcasting space and time. The acoustic complexity in these crisscross patterns is the ultimate in perceptual surround sound. When present, pied butcherbirds make a compelling contribution to the dawn (and pre-dawn) chorus
Soundscape studies: the Early Days and the Future
Get PDFSchafer will listen back nearly 50 years to the days when the subject of the soundscape was being first introduced in the Communications Department at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He will discuss the difficulties in finding acceptance for a new subject with new terminology, but also the excitement in discovering how rich the world is in sounds and how it might evolve as we participate in its evolution. Everyone with ears is a performer and a listener in the continuous symphony that surrounds us. Will it be beautiful or ugly
What Should the Soundscape Community Do When Listening to the Soundscapes of Fukushima?
Get PDFA magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the most powerful recorded in Japanese history, struck off the coast of eastern Japan on March 11, 2011; the quake was felt through quite a large area of Japan, and strong tremors shook the Tohoku region especially hard. This quake also triggered an enormous tsunami (tidal wave), which caused severe damage to the Pacific coastal areas of eastern Japan.
The combined disasters related to the earthquake caused immense damage. According to one official document (National Police Agency of Japan 2013), the disasters were responsible for the deaths of 15,879 people, while 2,700 people are still missing. Moreover, 128,911 houses collapsed entirely, and 268,882 houses were partially destroyed.
The quake and tsunami caused secondary disasters in addition to their primary direct paths of destruction, with the serious accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant being one of the worst. It forced residents living within 30 km from the power plant as well as residents living in areas of extremely high contamination, where radiation levels exceeded 20 mSv/year, to evacuate. Although the restricted areas have been reduced gradually, and residents of relatively less contaminated areas have slowly been returning to their hometowns, there are still many evacuees forced to live far away from their hometowns. In addition, many people who lived outside of the restricted areas also evacuated voluntarily.
Fukushima city, where I live, is located 60 km from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. However, a large amount of radioactive contamination reached the city as a result of the direction of the wind on the day of the accident. Therefore, for most of the city, the current radiation dose levels are estimated as exceeding annual public dose limits (i.e., 1 mSv/year). In this situation, a large number of people, including my family (except me), evacuated the city voluntarily. According to a statement by the mayor in 2012, at least 6,000 people, or about 2 % of the residents, evacuated to areas outside of Fukushima. Thus, the daily lives of the city residents have changed significantly compared with before the quake, and in fact their lives continue to change even now. Along with these lifestyle changes among the residents, the soundscapes of Fukushima have also been changing.
Recording changing environments is the true study of soundscapes. Schafer (1977; 1993) proposed we consider the relationship between us and the sounds within our environment to better understand how that relationship is impacted when those sounds change around us. In his essay, The Soundscape, more than three decades later, his question remains relevant, inquiring again “what is the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change? (Schafer 2012, 95). These are the key issues of soundscape studies. Furthermore, we can say that researching the changing of soundscapes and then reconsidering and discussing desirable forms of soundscapes in response to those research results comprise
the process of soundscape design as interdisciplinary as we rely on such knowledge, as Schafer states (2012, 96), “to use these insights in planning future environments for man.” Therefore, I came to the conclusion that I, as a soundscape researcher living in Fukushima during this important period of its history, must record the changing post-accident soundscapes and report them to others around the world. Thus, I started the Fukushima Soundscape Project, in which the changing soundscapes of Fukushima are recorded, and then these records are released through a website (Nagahata 2011–2013). This project comprises one of the main parts of the Soundscape Project for Earthquake Disaster 3.11 (2011–2013), initiated by the Soundscape Association of Japan (SAJ).
This article outlines the Fukushima Soundscape Project and illustrates the symbolic soundscapes of Fukushima after the accident as recorded by the project
Sound Reflections: The influence of acoustic ecology on classroom composition
Get PDFIn the United Kingdom soundscape and acoustic ecology approaches to composition are under-researched and utilised by classroom practitioners. Yet these approaches bridge the gap between the demands of the formal curriculum and the personal values and experiences that pupils bring with them to the classroom. The projects outlined in this paper show that such a creative approach to curriculum planning gives students the opportunity to reflect sonically on physical places, their own and others’ environments in powerful and authentic ways, while the innovative use of technologies in the classroom gives all students a voice for these expressions, regardless of ‘traditional’ musical ability or skill. Furthermore, these projects implement techno-logical and pedagogical strategies that enable “our young people not only to have the opportunity to become soundscape researchers, but [also] soundscape designers” (McGinley 2001, 73).
It was against this backdrop that two innovative projects were completed at Debenham High School, a rural Suffolk comprehensive school of 450 pupils aged between 11 and 16. The pedagogical and compositional dimensions of these projects - Dunwich Revisited and Reflecting Others – have both been described elsewhere (Savage and Challis 2001a & b). The purpose of this short article is not to revisit these ideas but rather to investigate and comment on the positive influence of acoustic ecology within classroom composition
Stockholm Soundscape Project New Directions in Music Education
Get PDFThe challenges facing today’s experimental music educator are increasingly different from those of any other period. With the proliferation of information technology and mass communications media and the ease of access to the Internet, computer games, mobile phones and hundreds of TV channels broadcasting around the clock, the outlook of the student body in any hyper-developed Western country is changing radically.
Many students today are computer-literate and able to handle more information at a higher rate, and for the most part they listen to music through means of electroacoustic reproduction. This situation is, of course, a mixed blessing—the fact that access to more information seldom equals better quality information (improved signal-to-noise ratio) needs no qualification.
What follows are notes towards the documentation of a practical project, with the principal intention of finding ways of extending and developing new approaches to creativity within the framework of a secondary music curriculum. The concept was to take techniques and methodologies developed by the acoustic ecology community and use them directly (in the first instance) with secondary school students
Teaching Acoustic Ecology: An International Overview
Get PDFCollege or university instruction related to acoustic ecol- ogy is difficult to find. Without an established curricu lum in this emerging field, it is often the responsibility of individual teachers to integrate acoustic ecology concepts and principles into existing courses.
A course survey was recently posted on the WFAE Acoustic Ecology listserv. Respondents were asked to outline the learning goals, objectives, activities, and student responses to instruction in acoustic ecology. The following is a summary of the material collected from the online survey as well as other contributions. It illustrates a diversity of on-going efforts by educators who believe studies in acoustic ecology are important
Decoding
Get PDFDecoding delves into my personal experience of growing up in a Western educational system as an undiagnosed neurodiverse student. The purpose of this piece spotlights dyslexia – which in my experience included the daily decoding of written assignments, but also the process of decoding what it meant to be classified as having “poor comprehension” of verbal and social settings in the classroom. I want Decoding to challenge how we think about neurodiversity, and how Indigenous teachings honours the understanding of people in a holistic way in contrast to more compartmentalized approaches found in Western systems