sound, listening and place the aesthetic dilemma

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Sound, Listening and Place: The aesthetic dilemma

Barry Truax

Organised Sound / Volume 17 / Special Issue 03 / December 2012, pp 193 201DOI: 10.1017/S1355771811000380, Published online: 11 January 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1355771811000380

How to cite this article:Barry Truax (2012). Sound, Listening and Place: The aesthetic dilemma. Organised Sound, 17, pp 193201 doi:10.1017/S1355771811000380

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Sound, Listening and Place: The aestheticdilemma

BARRY TRUAX

School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, CanadaE-mail: [email protected] published online 11 January 2012

A purely aesthetic approach may be problematic when artists

wish to deal with the external world as part of their work.

The work of R. Murray Schafer in formulating soundscape

studies is described, as well as the author’s extension of that

work within a communicational framework. Soundscape

composition is situated within a continuum of possibilities,

each with its own practice of mapping or representing the

world. Current technological possibilities as well as ethical

issues involved in the production process are discussed, along

with the author’s work in creating a multi-channel imaginary

soundscape. The evolving nature of the listener’s relationship

to acoustic space over the last century is discussed in

comparison to developments in soundscape composition.

1. AESTHETICS AND THE SOUNDSCAPE

If artists wish to deal with issues involving theenvironment, particularly if they decide to incorpor-ate those issues directly into their artistic work, theywill encounter significant problems that their trainingmay have left them ill-equipped to deal with. In thecase of musicians, composers and sound artists, thelack of formal training in dealing with real-worldissues, as well as acoustics, may be problematic to theextent that artistic concerns have been traditionallyframed in terms of musical sound – that is, soundsprimarily related to each other, and only secondarilyto their possible relationships to the environment orsociety at large. I often refer to this distinction as thatinvolving the ‘inner complexity’ of sound, whetheracoustic or electroacoustic, as opposed to the ‘outercomplexity’ of the real world (Truax 1992, 1994).The issues of relating inner and outer complexity

become particularly problematic if the subject matteris drawn from the soundscape. Do the composer andsound artist become caught in the dilemma of eitheraestheticising the sounds of the environment, forinstance, or else subordinating artistic values in orderto convey a social message? How can the composer’sskills be best used to deal with the external world?The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer attemptedto deal with this problem in his writing in such pub-lications as the booklets The New Soundscape (1969)and The Music of the Environment (1973), throughto his major work The Tuning of the World (1977).

The titles as well as the arguments presented in theseworks heavily rely on musical metaphors to suggestthat we are all composers of the universal soundscapewhich we can become attuned to if we learn to listento it as if it were music, as also suggested by JohnCage if perhaps from a different aesthetic stance.Schafer often referred to acoustic design as ‘orches-tration’, so much so that a recent critic argues that hiswork ‘is a prescriptive text that is often referred to asa descriptive one’ (Kelman 2010: 214).

Schafer’s call for musicians and the public at large tobecome involved with soundscape issues stemmed lar-gely from his frustration with urban, technologicalnoise, as exemplified in his highly rhetorical The Bookof Noise (Schafer 1970), and his experience in framingthe issue within the tradition of anti-noise lobbies(Thompson 2002; Bijsterveld 2008), a negativeapproach which does not lead to positive action orsolutions, only bureaucratic legislation and publicapathy. He wanted to inspire individuals through‘ear cleaning’ by applying a musician’s innate sensitivityto sound in order to value what is positive in asoundscape, while raging against the negative aspects.However, his background was humanistic and artistic,not grounded in the social sciences, and hence, inspiredby the Bauhaus’ insistence on functional aesthetics, hisarguments relied heavily on acoustic design as compo-sition, with all of the attendant aesthetics that such amusical approach implies. Nevertheless, his legacy infounding theWorld Soundscape Project (WSP) at SimonFraser University (SFU) during the 1970s inspiredseveral generations worldwide as evidenced by the 1993founding of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology(WFAE), with its website (wfae.net), listserve, occa-sional conferences, and the Soundscape journal.

Despite my own lack of formal training in thesocial sciences, I had the good fortune to benefit fromSchafer’s positioning of the WSP in the fledglingDepartment of Communication Studies at SFU, nowthe School of Communication. This interdisciplinaryschool based in the social sciences provided a differentconceptual paradigm based in information processingand communication understood as a system of rela-tionships created by that information, including all

Organised Sound 17(3): 193–201 & Cambridge University Press, 2012. doi:10.1017/S1355771811000380

technological mediation. I saw that a communicationalmodel could transcend, as well as incorporate, both theobjective scientific model of sound as energy and signaltransfer, and the purely subjective listener-centredapproach of soundscape studies. The basic model ofacoustic communication is grounded in the under-standing that information and meaning arise throughlistening from both the inner structure and patterns ofsound itself and also the listener’s knowledge of con-text. In other words, both inner and outer complexityinform our understanding of sound. Further, sound isnot merely information exchange, but is capable ofcreating relationships between listeners and their envir-onment in a dynamic process of embodied cognition.This mediating role of sound creates the possibility ofthe ‘acoustic community’, examples of which are out-lined in the Finnish study of six European villages(Jarviluoma, Kyto, Truax, Uimonen and Vikman 2009)that re-visited the five villages the WSP had studied in1975, hence providing a longitudinal dimension to thestudy. This updated study showed how fluid the culturaldynamics of an acoustic community are, as it evolveswith economic and social change and deals with issuessuch as tourism, which commodifies the community andits character.

When I came to write about acoustic design in thefirst edition (1984) of my book Acoustic Communica-tion, I was able to base the criteria for acoustic designnot on musical aesthetics but rather on ‘the analysisof positively functioning soundscapes’ in a shift ‘awayfrom artifacts, and causes and effects, towards process’(Truax 2001: 109, 110). One advantage of under-standing acoustic communication as a process relat-ing listeners and communities to their environmentsthrough sound is that interventions in the sense ofdesign can be effective at any level of the system, theeffects of which will have their own dynamic behavi-our. Change can begin with the sound itself, or thelistener, or the context, as opposed, for instance, toa situation where an ‘expert’ imposes change withoutinvolving listeners in the process. Listeners areentirely capable of negotiating their own relationshipto the environment to achieve their functional goals,as seen by the current popularity of personal portableaudio systems (Bull 2000, 2006, 2007).

Where does the communicational approach leavethe artist and composer? At the very least, it wouldseem to require a broadening if not an actualre-definition of that person’s role. Some new rolesmay be as an aural educator, an informed mediator,a social activist, or as a contributor to an inter-disciplinary team. Clearly, not all such roles may suitany particular individual, and, also clearly, theeducation of future artists will require a broader baseof studies for them to be well equipped for this work.Of particular interest, however, is work that com-bines artistic creativity with social concerns, work

that I broadly refer to as soundscape composition. Byits sheer diversity and use of technological innova-tion, it presents opportunities and challenges thatsurpass more traditional forms of composition.

2. SOUNDSCAPE COMPOSITION: MAPPING

AND REPRESENTING THE REAL

In order to situate soundscape composition, it may beuseful to consider it in relation to two continua, thefirst of which represents possible musical relation-ships with outer complexity:

Internal Dominant

ðtextÞ ��!

External Dominant

ðcontextÞ

On the left side, where the composer concentrates onthe structuring of musical sounds, we can say that‘text’ is dominant and the relation to the outer worldis most often expressed as musical ‘inspiration’. Infact, if one were to believe composers’ programmenotes, one would think that every piece of musicreflects the outer world, as references abound topersonal experience, books read, non-musical intel-lectual concepts, poetry, travel experiences, and soon. However, most of these influences can be read ashaving an inspirational role for the composer, henceof great value, but not necessarily to the listener. Ifone reads these notes only after hearing the work,these sources of inspiration may be curiously sur-prising, but unnecessary to understanding the workitself, which usually falls into a familiar style. At theother end of the continuum, one can imagine workthat is almost entirely contextually driven, as insonification or site-specific sound installations thatare discussed next. Real-world data is mapped ontosound, hopefully with some aural sensitivity but notnecessarily. In between is the range of a balancedinterplay between text and context that is character-istic of soundscape composition.

Soundscape composition may be situated alonganother continuum of practices:

Sonification’- Phonography’- Virtual Soundscapes

The left half of this continuum involves processesthat map the real world onto sound. The direct useof real-world data can be called ‘audification’ if it isliterally interpreted as an audio waveform, or morecommonly ‘sonification’ if a mapping process is madeof that data onto sonic parameters to create somekind of auditory display. In some cases, sonificationis the aural counterpart of the visualisation of data,where it takes advantage of the aural perception ofpattern in appropriate mappings, for instance, whichmay not be apparent in a purely visual approach.This kind of sound design may be thought of as artin the service of science. Installation artists can turnthe approach around as science in the service of

194 Barry Truax

art, where scientific data is mapped onto sound(and possibly visuals) for the purpose of commun-icating that data to the public. Most of the work ofAndrea Polli (www.andreapolli.com), for instance,embodies this practice in the communication ofenvironmental issues such as global warming to apublic unfamiliar with the purely scientific discoursearound those issues. Likewise, sound sculptures andother installations can be activated and driven byforces or data from the real world, which may directthe listener’s attention back to an understanding ofsome facet of that world.In the middle of the continuum, phonography (by

analogy to photography) endeavours to map the realworld onto sound recordings that are usually notfurther manipulated other than undergoing transparentediting or mixing (Drever 2002). All recordists, as wellas photographers, understand that the act of recordingis far from objective or neutral, both technically interms of microphone characteristics and strategically interms of recording perspective and other choices withregard to location. However, the further manipulationof those recordings raises ethical issues for the artists asto representation, of what, for whom, and in whatfuture context. John Drever himself argues for a moreself-reflexive ethnographic approach – as opposed towhat he calls ‘sonic tourism’ or ‘sonic fetishism’, whichwe will return to later.The right half of the continuum clearly involves

issues of representing the real, and it is here thatactivities of composers influenced by the WSP generallysituate their work, moving from a more documentaryapproach to that which is more clearly abstracted,though never completely abstract in the sense thatsounds and context remain easily recognisable (Truax2002). I am going to suggest that further right along thecontinuum we move from the abstracted to the virtual,first in the sense that compositional manipulation isintended to invoke the implicit aspects of soundscapeperception – that is, the inner world of memory,metaphor and symbolism. Even further along the con-tinuum is the creation of a purely imaginary or virtualworld, one that perhaps seems ‘hyper-real’ with recog-nisable elements and structure, yet logically impossible,and possibly interpretable as mythic.This entire range of possibilities in soundscape

composition is based within a technological envir-onment where it has never been easier to obtain,through recording or filesharing, and to processenvironmental sound. I should point out in passingthat in the traditional definition of ‘soundscape’(dating from the 1978 edition) in the Handbook forAcoustic Ecology (Truax 1999), it is emphasised thatthe soundscape depends on listeners’ understandingand interpretation of a sonic environment, and that itcan refer to both acoustic soundscapes and electro-acoustic compositions interpreted as such. Elsewhere,

I have argued that the everyday soundscape isbecoming increasingly electroacoustic in its con-stituents, and contemporary electroacoustic com-position, particularly with the multi-channel format,is becoming more environmental (Truax 2008).

With soundfiles so freely available (e.g. www.freesound.org) and portable memory-based recordersso inexpensive, it is not surprising that the youngergeneration often seems bewildered by the opportun-ities available, and perplexed by the issue of whatone can or should do with all of this material. Inother words, one can easily obtain and arbitrarilymanipulate environmental sounds with no contact orexperience whatsoever of the original context. In fact,one may question whether one has any obligation todo so. Just as Drever’s reference to ‘sonic tourism’implies a transient relationship as an outsider to someparticular context, so too online sound librariescreate a potentially even more distanced relationshipto the material presented. Besides being of usuallylimited sound quality in the recorded representation,these ‘samples’ or files (note the generic reference tothem) are usually accompanied by only cursoryinformation as to their provenance. One is tempted totreat them as ‘text’, not ‘context’.

Sound maps have become increasingly common onthe Internet, where instead of files organised by subjectmatter (or not at all), a Google-style map is used tosituate the geographic origin of the recordings (e.g.www.worldlisteningproject.org). I have found that thesound map is useful to orient people who are unfamiliarwith the soundscape concept to the idea that sound-scape recordings are markers of place. However, lackingany coherent temporal perspective, and usually lackingany interpretative analysis, the listener is left trying toimagine what has been recorded and what significance ithas. An interesting variant of this approach is a livemicrophone in a fixed location that is constantlystreaming audio, thereby linking it to a surveillancecamera, even if the intent is different.

The issues involved with such recording and sam-pling are reminiscent of the ethics of appropriationwith respect to other cultures. Robert Gluck hasprovided a nuanced survey of the motivations andstrategies that have been used by a wide range ofcomposers, and argues for a ‘reflective practice’ (Gluck2008: 143) involving a repeated self-reflexive processat every stage, including feedback from those directlyinvolved with the culture in question. The tone ofrespect and appreciation for the culture being repres-ented seems appropriate for the practice of sound-scape composition being discussed here, and in factGluck makes reference to that practice.

An excellent example of deep involvement byrecordists in the soundscape they are documentingcomes with Gregg Wagstaff’s Touring Exhibition ofSound Environments (TESE) in the Isles of Harris

Sound, Listening and Place: The aesthetic dilemma 195

and Lewis in northern Scotland (Drever 2002). In thisproject and its meticulous documentation, the recordistsnot only engaged the local public via the recordingsthey made, but enabled the locals to make their ownrecordings and facilitated a group composition as anoutcome. In addition, listening exercises and soundjournals were practised in the local school and examplesrecorded. In other words, the soundscape was notinterpreted as raw material to be exploited in a quasi-industrial mining and post-production project, even if itleft the soundscape more intact than the physicalcounterpart does with the landscape. In fact, it seemsquite likely that a learning experience was initiated withthe local population whose eventual influence andresults could not be foreseen.

My own practical suggestion with regard tosoundscape recording and composition is to beginnot with recording or processing in the studio, butrather with the experience of soundwalking in thesoundscape. Soundwalking is best done with the onlyintent being listening, without the distraction ofoperating a recorder. It is arguably the most directaural involvement possible with a soundscape andone where repetition does not dull its effectiveness,since each walk is unique and unrepeatable. It is alsoa good practice to open one’s ears and self to what-ever is inherent in an environment, with minimalpreconception, ideally treated as a phenomenologicalexperience. Several soundwalks in the same area aredesirable at different times of day or even seasons,since any one exposure is a small slice of the totality.This advice is as true for one’s own community as forwhere one is a visitor (but preferably guided by alocal). After various soundwalks have been com-pleted, the listener can make a more informed choiceabout recording, along with what is the best way torepresent the soundscape through recording. Later inthe studio, the question as to what is a reasonablerepresentation of the soundscape can be judged basedon that experience. This is not to say that an inten-tional emphasis or exaggeration cannot be con-templated for a specific effect or to raise an issue.I often use the example of mixing the VancouverHarbour ambience track on the Vancouver Sound-scape recording from 1996 (Sound example 1). Inorder to parallel the 1973 recording of the harbour,we wanted a four-minute mix that would include themost typical elements: waves, gulls, seaplanes, boat-horns, ferry whistle, and the noonday ‘‘O Canada’’horn soundmark (which plays the first four notes ofthe national anthem), now situated at the harbour. Ifa single take had been used, only those soundsoccurring just before or just after noon could havebeen included, and therefore many of the typicalsounds of the area would probably be missed.Instead, up to four simultaneous stereo tracks weremixed together, all recorded from the same vantage

point, such that even the Seabus ferry whistle (whichdoes not occur on the hour) was present. The issuealso arose as to how many seaplanes to include, sincethe choice was arbitrary. In the end, three occurrenceswere included, which most listeners find reasonable.But the possibility existed that, in the spirit of a tourismagency wanting to present an ‘air-brushed’ image of thecity, we could have erased all such references; or else,in order to reflect the high proportion of complaintsabout seaplane noise from local residents, we couldhave ‘made a point’ by including so many that alistener would realise we were making a proteststatement. How to achieve a more neutral, plausiblerepresentation was determined by the experienceof soundwalks in the area that noted the actualfrequency of this element.

3. THE VIRTUAL SOUNDSCAPE

Soundscape composers use a variety of electro-acoustic techniques to expand the communicationalscope of their compositions beyond a seemingly literalrepresentation of actual soundscapes. It is beyond thescope of this article to survey all of their approaches,but perhaps a few illustrative examples will give a senseof their practices. Hildegard Westerkamp includes arunning commentary on some of the processing sheuses in Kits Beach Soundwalk to simulate how listeningto small foreground sounds on the beach might interactwith one’s awareness of the ambient city sounds in thebackground. In Beneath The Forest Floor, she includesa mysterious low, thumping sound along with theforest ambience to suggest a hidden, perhaps symbolicaspect of the forest soundscape; in fact, the sound is aprocessed version of one of the other sounds in thepiece, but she does not reveal the source to the listener,and instead plays on its ambiguity in the listener’simagination. With Into The Labyrinth, she transformsthe spectromorphological shape of the hammeringsounds she recorded in India to give them a clearlymusical and symbolic identity. With my Pendlerdrømpiece, the commuter waiting in the train station andtravelling in the local train falls into a daydream inwhich sounds heard previously in realistic sections ofthe piece return in loops, surrounded by stretched andresonated versions of other sounds from the immediateenvironment. In the various scenes in Island, I delib-erately juxtaposed eight surround-sound tracks ofrealistic ambiences with eight tracks that processed thesame sounds in order to suggest a mysterious andsomewhat magical character to this island visit. Attimes, the transformed sounds signify a distinct, ‘other’element, whereas in other sections, the two types ofsounds fuse together.

Since the early 2000s, multi-channel playback ofsoundscape compositions has provided listeners witha compelling, immersive sonic experience. Even a

196 Barry Truax

simple ring of eight speakers around the audiencecreates a convincing simulated soundscape. Multiplesof those eight speakers, particularly if positioned atdifferent heights, can create a three-dimensional senseof space and volume. If independent (i.e. uncorrelated)sounds are fed to specific loudspeakers, sound sourcesappear highly localised, and, with computer-assisteddiffusion, sounds can also appear to move in traject-ories around the space (Truax 1998). Compositionaltechniques (Baalman 2010; Wilson and Harrison 2010)incorporating spatial elements, along with models fortheir importance in perception and cognition (Kendall2010) have been well documented in recent years, andwill no doubt continue to develop as more composersgain access to multi-channel formats.As soundscape compositions incorporate both

narrative and abstracted elements into their language,a further development is to create completely ima-ginary yet hyper-realistic spaces. Purely syntheticsound design for environmental sounds lags behindthe synthesis techniques for instrumental and vocalsound that have been developed over the last decades,particularly in terms of the possible complexity andrealism of the sound material. On the other hand,processing of recorded environmental sounds tendsto suggest a level of abstraction that leads one awayfrom realism, even if fruitfully as described above.I have discovered an interesting hybrid approach thatinvolves convolution of different classes of environ-mental and synthetic sounds that I used exclusively tocreate my eight-channel work Chalice Well (2009).Convolution is traditionally used to place a dry

recording within a reverberant space by convolving itwith the impulse response of that space (Roads 1996).The process simulates the way in way each reflectionin an enclosed space colours the original sound andadds together with all other reflections to create areverberant field. The theory behind the technique isdescribed as a multiplication of spectra in the fre-quency domain such that frequencies that are strongin both the source and the impulse remain strong inthe output, whereas weak frequencies in either spec-trum get even weaker. However, it is the combinationof the frequency colouration with the temporalcharacter of the impulse that give the results therealism of sound placed in a real acoustic space.The approach I used in Chalice Well was to convolve

different types of textured sounds, those with a partic-ulate quality, mainly water drops, splashes, streamsand trickles, but also glass breaking, bubbles, percus-sive locks and doors, transposed male consonants,and differing densities of granular synthesis textures(as used in my work Riverrun) as both sources andimpulses. Normally when one convolves continuoussounds together, the result is a smeared and quiteblurred texture, but because these sounds comprisednumerous impulses, the results of the convolution were

highly detailed and well defined. Moreover, the spatialqualities of the original soundfiles ranged from dryto reverberant, and so each combination produced awell-defined sense of space: dry convolved with dryproducing a foreground texture; reverberant withreverberant a distant, background texture; and drywith reverberant a middleground sound. Each com-bination (approximately 200 were used) could bedescribed as a hybrid sound, situated somewherebetween synthetic and processed and incorporatingelements of each of its parents. Families of sound tex-tures were created and documented, since each possiblepermutation of sources resulted in a different but relatedoutput. Moreover, convolving file A with file B is notequivalent to convolving file B with file A if one uses awindow function that is not a rectangle, hence thenumber of variants is potentially doubled.

While experimenting with this technique, I quicklybegan to sense the type of imaginary soundscape theresults were suggesting, which was an undergroundcavern in which many types of water flows werepresent. One class of splashing and dripping waterhad in fact been recorded in a resonant well (and hadalready been used in the third section of my pieceIsland), and these sounds made me think of the aurasurrounding wells and caverns in general, and that ofChalice Well in Glastonbury in particular. ChaliceWell is a holy well situated at the foot of GlastonburyTor in south west England, thought to be originallythe island of Avalon from Arthurian legend, and thesite where Joseph of Arimathea placed the chaliceknown as the Holy Grail. According to legend, theTor, a masculine symbol, is hollow underneath andthe entrance to the underworld, guarded by the Grail.The well, on the other hand, is a symbol of thefeminine aspect of deity, and its waters are believed topossess healing qualities. The narrative idea emergedthat a soundscape composition could simulate ajourney down the well into the legendary and highlysymbolic caverns (which have never been proven toexist). Although the convolved sounds were brightand distinct, their hybridity blurred the edges of themore realistic source sounds, and supported the illusionthat one was in an imaginary space.

The well, as noted, has been gendered as femininefor centuries, and therefore I convolved a femalespeaking voice (that of Thecla Schiphorst as usedin my work Song of Songs) with the various watersounds in order to create a disembodied female vocaltexture that could float around the space. The soundsof the Underworld are symbolised by percussive locksand male consonants (those of Norbert Ruebsaat asused in my piece The Blind Man) transposed downone or two octaves and convolved with each other.I created a sonic image of the Grail by convolving aresonant temple bowl with itself and mixing fourtranspositions of the resulting sound. The piece has


four sections, beginning with the descent into the welland the first cavern, followed by what I call theChamber of the Feminine (Sound example 2), thenthe Glass Chamber and the entrance to the terrifyingUnderworld, followed by the appearance of the Grailthat quells the menace, and finally ending in theChamber of the Spirits, where both masculine andfeminine gendered sounds (with wind and waterqualities respectively) appear to coexist.

The spatial deployment of the tracks was achievedwith four sets of eight tracks each – that is, four stereopairs spread evenly around the listener. Because of thefamilial nature of each set of eight tracks, and theirindividual spatial qualities in terms of apparent dis-tance, it was relatively easy to create an illusion of acoherent space of great depth as well as presence. The32 tracks were mixed to eight in a circular format,though when performed in halls with speakers onvarious vertical levels (such as the premiere at the SonicArts Research Centre in Belfast in March 2009), itproved very effective to double the eight tracks ontomore than one height of loudspeakers, supporting theillusion of being in an underground cavern.

Chalice Well represents for me a breakthrough inmy personal compositional evolution related to thesoundscape theme, one that might be indicative of awider trend as well. The goal of this evolution can beexpressed as a realistic, but entirely synthetic, sound-scape. Although one occasionally encounters claimsabout such a realisation, I have yet to hear a convin-cing example involving only sound synthesis, mainlydue to the complexity of synthesising a wide range ofenvironmental sounds. My 1986 work, Riverrun, nowavailable in an eight-channel version, might be cited asan example of a synthesised soundscape because of itsoverarching metaphor of a river from source to ocean,realised with granular synthesis. However, none of itssounds and textures could be mistaken for actualwater. The piece is intended to evoke the grandeur of apowerful river, and my original choice of the rivermetaphor (using Joyce’s more active version of theword from Finnegan’s Wake in the title) was designedto give a simple, coherent form to the aurally richmaterial that emerged from real-time granularsynthesis. The fact that grains as ‘droplets’ couldform high-density textures that had the depth ofactual accumulations of water was an inviting solu-tion at an aural level, just as the ‘lifecycle’ of the riverflowing towards the ocean and eventual evaporationgave the piece its structural rationale.

The example of Chalice Well, though not satisfyingthis goal, suggests at least two avenues of approach.The first is a purely compositional evolution, as I havesketched out above, that proceeds through variousdegrees of processing sounds in ways that createabstracted representations of the real world. I suggestthat these processed sounds appeal to the inner world

of memory, symbolism and metaphor. The listeneris invited not merely to identify the elements of asoundscape, but to meditate on their associations andinherent meanings. In other words, the soundscapecomposition is not entirely focused on the literal, outerrealism of its constructions, but regards the listener’smental participation and interaction with its sounds asequally important. In Chalice Well, the disembodiedfemale and male vocal material, and the symbolicrepresentation of the Grail, are clear examples ofabstracted elements.

The second approach addresses the technicalissues of simulating realism. Sound synthesis ofmusical instrument sounds has traditionally followedapproaches that model either the instrument (phys-ical modelling) or its sounds (synthesis by analysis)(Roads 1996). Both approaches are computationallychallenging for synthesising environmental sounds.Likewise, realistic environmental processing such asreverberation can also be quite complex. However,the use of convolution in Chalice Well to combine anenvironmental sound with either another such soundor a synthetic one is an efficient technique forsynthesising particular types of soundscape material,one that integrates timbre with spatial colouration ina manner that is similar to actual environments. Eachimpulse or impulsive element in the first file triggersa timbrally coloured version of the second file, andjust as multiple reflections add together to producereverberation, so too do the various convolved versionscombine to produce a synthetic texture, one thatacquires whatever reverberant character is present in theoriginal sound. One can argue whether the result is trulysynthetic or merely processed, but I would suggest thatit lies between the two extremes. Just as the computa-tional simplicity of the waveguide approach simplifiedphysical modelling (by avoiding having to solve differ-ential equations), so too convolution by analogy pre-sents an efficient technique for simulating certain kindsof environmental sound textures, even if lacking in thetype of generality that synthesis techniques aspire to.

The goal that is currently attainable, and in someways more attractive than synthetic realism, is thecreation of virtual soundscapes using multi-channeldiffusion (for instance, multiple eight-speaker con-figurations) with abstracted sounds that evoke therealism of the natural world while offering a spacefor reflection by listeners about their relationships tothat realism. To bring us back to the theme of sound,listening and place, one might ask whether suchexperiences in virtual reality will enhance our involve-ment as listeners with the real world, or further removeus from that kind of interaction. In order to gain someinsight into this controversial contemporary issue, itmay be useful to examine the evolution of soundscapecomposition with the parallel evolution of thesoundscape from a social perspective.

198 Barry Truax

4. THE EVOLVING NATURE OF LISTENERS

AND SPACE

One of the many implications of electrification in thetwentieth century is that it fundamentally changedlisteners’ relationships to their everyday acousticspaces by allowing sounds originating from a differ-ent space and time to be introduced arbitrarily intoboth public and private spaces. Whereas mechanicaltechnology had introduced a different scale of noiseintensity into the soundscape, often with negativeeffects on individuals, electrification introduced achoice of sound, most notably music, to be added to aspace, with varying degrees of public acceptance.Although the early experiments with the Telharmo-nium allowed music to be piped into upscale NewYork restaurants in 1907 to create a pleasant musicalambience, and coincidentally to increase liquorconsumption (Weidenaar 1995), it was the electrifica-tion of sound recording and reproduction in themid–1920s that permanently changed the soundscapevia the loudspeaker. The city of New York’s noisestudy in 1929 identified the sound of radios in homes,streets and stores as the third most prevalent sourceof complaints (after traffic and other transportationsounds), which led to a ban on outdoor loudspeakersoutside stores, most notably the vendors on RadioRow in lower Manhattan (Thompson 2002).However, recorded music (and radio) found

favour in factories, its use peaking to an estimated 90per cent of British industries by the Second WorldWar (Cardinell 1948), with the norm not being acontinuous presence, but where its effects were con-sidered optimal during one-third of an eight-hourshift. Radio and music were also popular in privatehomes as a background ambience during this period,prompting George Orwell in 1946 to comment that‘In very many English homes the radio is literallynever turned off, though it is manipulated from timeto time so as to make sure that only light music willcome out of it. I know people who keep the radioplaying all through a meal and at the same timecontinue talking just loudly enough for the voicesand the music to cancel out.’ In the same essay hepredicted that in the ‘pleasure spots’ of the future,besides creating a completely controlled, artificialenvironment, one would never be out of the sound ofmusic (Orwell 1968: 80). The modern theme resort oreven some larger shopping malls would seem to havefulfilled his prediction. In a 1961 survey of 1,000listeners in New York and New Jersey, HaroldMendelsohn (1964) discovered that 78 per cent con-sidered radio to play an important role in their lives,mainly in functional ways such as bracketing theday, as companionship during the routine of boringtasks or to counteract loneliness, to control moodand to provide information that could function as

shared experience with others, what he termed ‘sociallubrication’.

The practice of audio documentation of soundsother than speech or music was much slower todevelop or was confined to specialised bioacousticcollections such as birdsong. Although there wereisolated early experiments, such as Walter Ruttman’s1930 radio piece Week End about the sounds ofBerlin, field recording was not sufficiently portable,accessible or of high enough quality until after theSecond World War with the advent of analogue taperecording. Tony Schwartz adapted an early ‘soundmirror’, as the tape recorder was then called, to allowhim to record the everyday sounds of New York City,and produce various LP records for the Folkwayslabel (Schwartz 1973). Once the microphone wasturned towards the everyday soundscape, it reflecteda different attitude towards what was worth record-ing from a social perspective, and gradually the largersoundscape became not incidental sound effects orbackground noise, but the subject of deliberaterepresentation.

By the early 1970s, both of these trends – music assoundscape, and soundscape as music – converge towhat I call soundscape composition. Not coincid-entally, both approaches use the same analoguetechnology of a recording medium where sounds canbe edited and mixed with usually modest amountsof processing such as equalisation and filtering.Compression started to be used in music recording,but was thought to be unnecessary for soundscapecomposition except perhaps for a limiter on peaksounds. If we use the 1973 publication of The Van-couver Soundscape as a reference point, the tech-niques that were used were largely edited collages ofunprocessed recordings with minimal mixing, theonly exception being the ‘Entry to the Harbour’sequence where a ferry journey into the harbour wassimulated, fairly crudely in fact, by simple mixingtechniques that appeared to make sounds approachand recede. The compositional techniques werelargely fixed perspective, or a series thereof, with theone example of a moving perspective (Truax 2002).However, unlike the intention of background musicat the time to be ignored by what I call the ‘distractedlistener’ (Truax 2001), these early examples of sound-scape composition were designed to engage thelistener in a more active form of listening, even to thepoint of becoming the subject of analytical listening.In other words, whereas the practice of music asan accompaniment medium was intended to imposea mood onto an existing space, one that the listenercould easily ignore and accept as normal, the sound-scape composition’s intent was to bring the listener’sexisting relationship with everyday spaces into a sharperaural focus, both in listening to the composition and indaily life.


Today much has changed on both fronts. Back-ground music gave way to foreground music withgreater specialisation of the choice of music to fit theenvironment, and, starting in the late 1970s, thecassette-based Walkman, followed by the portableCD player called the Discman, and then today’siPod digital files, progressively gave the individuallistener greater choice of sonic material in everydaysurroundings. Whereas background and foregroundmusic could be said to impose themselves on asoundscape, and thereby raise issues of public versusprivate space, the portable accompaniment mediumof the iPod might better be described as a voluntaryembedding of one soundscape within another, withthe listener controlling not only the material butthe degree to which it mixes with the surroundingenvironment. Michael Bull (2000, 2006, 2007) refersto this embedding as creating an ‘acoustic bubble’ forthe listener, and has extensively documented thefunctional uses reported by his informants. Manyadvertisements as well as personal testimonials referto this practice as creating a ‘soundtrack’ for every-day life, implying perhaps that the listener views thedaily environment as a kind of film for which one isa somewhat detached spectator.

There are some fairly superficial comparisons onecan make between the iPod user and the soundscapecomposer. Both can download tracks or files for theirpersonal use, both can sequence or shuffle their mater-ials, and both can adjust levels and perhaps applysome form of equalisation. No doubt, applicationsbeing currently introduced for the myriad of handhelddevices now available will provide much more sophist-icated signal processing models to the point where wecan imagine that the resources for users and composersmay become more or less the same. It is the degreeand type of user control that has changed over thelast century as briefly documented here that bringsabout this potential convergence. Even if aspects of thiscontrol are tightly controlled by the industry to workwithin accepted scenarios and formats, the appeal tothe listener remains the opportunity to create a sense oforder in what otherwise might seem uncontrollabledaily circumstances.

I have argued above that soundscape compositionduring recent decades has moved towards a moreabstracted approach, one that leads to the creation ofvirtual soundscapes. The digital game world hasundergone a similar evolution, but within the form ofa fairly small number of narrative scenarios. It wouldbe a simplification to say that the distinction is merelybetween art and entertainment, though those identitiesare still very much present. From the perspective I haveoffered here, the most significant differences betweenthe evolution of music as soundscape and soundscapeas music are the respective concepts of the listener’srelationship to place. Whether using an iPod or a game

device, the listener is choosing to imbed him- or herselfwithin a virtual environment that is set apart from thereal world, often characterised as an escape from it.The soundscape composer, on the other hand, alwaysseems to be drawing the listener back into the realworld, perhaps to stress an ecological perspective, or torejuvenate the listener’s aural sensibilities. The pro-gression from phonographic documentation to a moreabstracted approach to ultimately a virtual syntheticsoundscape is one that takes the listener from surfacelevel of an environment, recognising its sound sourcesand ambiences, to the mental world of psychologicaland cultural associations, memories and symbolismprovoked by those sounds, and then to the unboundedworld of the imagination.

5. CONCLUSION

The aesthetic dilemma referred to in the title is thequestion of how artistic practices and concerns can fitwith the real-world issues of listening and place, as wellas the social and environmental issues that are related toour being in the world. There is a potentially largeaudience ready to listen if artists have somethingmeaningful to say about their concerns, even if (or per-haps because) the communication arises from outsidethe domain of commercial culture. Clearly, sound-basedart has a strong potential to communicate (and I per-sonally believe that art is about communication) if itappears to be contextualised in real-world experience, asdistinct from a purely abstract world. Soundscapecomposition, in its varied and diverse forms, now hasa lengthy tradition of working with contextualisedsounds, as well as educating aural perception aroundeveryday listening. Contemporary technology and com-munication channels provide new opportunities for thiskind of work, most of which are only starting to beexplored. However, what will give depth to this newform of artistically inspired communication is, in myopinion, a deep involvement with particular social, cul-tural and environmental contexts, and careful thoughtabout what needs to be said about them. The result maynot always be a personal creation, but rather emergefrom a grassroots process of community engagement. Itmay involve technology guided by artistic intent, or itmay remain purely acoustic and unprogrammable like asoundwalk. Whatever path it takes, the role of the artistcomposer will need to be re-defined and expanded, if notreplaced by other roles such as sound designer oracoustic ecologist. But what all of these roles will have incommon is the desire to creatively engage with the worldthrough sound.

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