Inspired by avantgarde movements in music and art, the composer and music educator Raymond Murray Schafer published The New Soundscape in 1969 – a small book discussing big questions: What is music? What is noise in a modern world? And how does music and environmental acoustics relate to each other? Schafer's answer is radical: he introduces the concept of the soundscape to bridge the gap between music and everyday environments. Like music, the world that we are embedded in, the sounds of everyday environments, is understood as a soundscape: one big musical composition. Schafer's work gained huge interest in the years to come, among others from UNESCO that embraced the idea of acoustic heritage: like buildings or pieces of art, particular soundscapes are worth protecting from deterioration, Schafer argued. 

In the Tuning of the World from 1977 Schafer unfolds the theory of soundscape based on years of collecting sound recordings, on analysis and composition with his team on The World Soundscape Project at Simon Faser University in Canada. “The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known” (p. 3), he claims in the introduction. Throughout the book Schafer shows how the modern and electrical world and sounds have gradually replaced the more “natural” sounds resulting in an erratic and chaotic state. Instead of resisting this state by noise abatement, Schafer says, we should approach the problem from a musical or design perspective: How would we like the world to sound? What are the acoustic qualities we would like to enforce and multiply?

Schafer's soundscape thinking is closely related to 1970'es environmentalism and has strong currents of civilisation critique. Also, the idea of “tuning the world” into a somehow divine harmony borrows elements from mystic and religious thinking. Yet Schafer’s soundscape project introduces some highly useful concepts and thoughts: most importantly that of ‘the soundscape’. The combination of ‘sound’ and ‘landscape’ managed to capture the sense of spatiality of sound, and it made it clear that the world we move and navigate in is not only a physical but also a sensory environment. The sound of a place is intimately connected to even more ephemeral aspects like memories, feelings of safety and of danger, well-being or irritation. To many extents the sound of a place may be what expresses certain sentiments and feelings the best: the sounds of your parents house, the sounds of your street at night, etc.

Schafer also introduced the concept of acoustic design as a discipline-to-be for the creation of ideal, or balanced, soundscapes, and suggested academies for building such competences. The design of ‘artificial’ sonic environments had been well known since the introduction of sound film in the late 1920’es, but Schafer's suggestion was to have musicians and other artists contribute in designing the sonic environments of everyday life – literally expanding the walls of concert halls to include everyday environments.

Today we could say, that the world Shafer was observing, when stating “the soundscape of the world is changing” (p. 3) was certainly changing. But not only was it, as Schafer noticed, getting noisier, it was also increasingly becoming the subject of design. Along with the increased awareness of noise, sound seems to have stopped being just a random by-product of machines and means of transportation. Today manufacturers design the sound of dish washing machines and of cars. Schafer's acoustic designer has come alive in the form of industrial designers. Yet while Schafer saw the acoustic designer as an architect for the greater good, acoustic design today is a battlefield of all kinds of interests, not the least commercial interests. No doubt, the idea of a greater good as one based on universal aesthetic values remains naïve, but what Schafer really has to offer us today is a reflection in the sounds of the world around us, and some tools for a more critical listening.

Suggested reading: 

R. Murray Schafer: The Soundscape (The Sound Studies Reader). The text is the introduction of The Tuning of the World from 1977 (republished as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World in 1994).