The sound of climate change
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Other
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Article
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Publication Year
2021
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Abstract
Acoustic ecology has captured the imagination of musicians for decades, and when the habitats they studied are gone, recordings may be all we can ever experience of them
On August 14, R. Murray Schafer, the avant-garde composer who got many to use their ears rather than their eyes, passed away at the age of 88, leaving the world a little more silent. The artist, born in Sarnia, Ont., was a pioneer of acoustic ecology (he coined the term soundscape), practising field recording to capture sounds of all kinds, and often using them in musical compositions.
His interests were as vast as the sonic worlds he committed to tape: He pioneered using graphic notation in his scores, was a visual artist, wrote books and created music theatre such as Apocalypsis, his sprawling 500-person piece from 1980 about the end times, structured in two parts: the world’s destruction followed by its reconstruction. In 2015, it was restaged during the Luminato Festival with a cast of more than 1,000 people, making it the largest musical production in Toronto’s history.
But even more significantly, along with getting Canadian noise laws altered, Mr. Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, which involved education about the idea of noise pollution and the sounds we’re constantly immersed in, as well as recording and cataloguing them internationally to preserve ones that disappear.
There are many others like Mr. Schafer. The composer influenced curious creatives who hear the wild’s distress cries and fill up hard drives with recordings of ecosystems all over the world. Their aim is to create aural experiences, but also to sound the alarm through actual sounds, or the disappearance thereof. In a 2009 National Film Board short documentary called Listen by David New, Mr. Schafer says: “In a way the world is a huge composition, a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time without a beginning and presumably without an ending. We are the composers of this huge miraculous composition that’s going on around us, and we can improve it or we can destroy it.”...
On August 14, R. Murray Schafer, the avant-garde composer who got many to use their ears rather than their eyes, passed away at the age of 88, leaving the world a little more silent. The artist, born in Sarnia, Ont., was a pioneer of acoustic ecology (he coined the term soundscape), practising field recording to capture sounds of all kinds, and often using them in musical compositions.
His interests were as vast as the sonic worlds he committed to tape: He pioneered using graphic notation in his scores, was a visual artist, wrote books and created music theatre such as Apocalypsis, his sprawling 500-person piece from 1980 about the end times, structured in two parts: the world’s destruction followed by its reconstruction. In 2015, it was restaged during the Luminato Festival with a cast of more than 1,000 people, making it the largest musical production in Toronto’s history.
But even more significantly, along with getting Canadian noise laws altered, Mr. Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, which involved education about the idea of noise pollution and the sounds we’re constantly immersed in, as well as recording and cataloguing them internationally to preserve ones that disappear.
There are many others like Mr. Schafer. The composer influenced curious creatives who hear the wild’s distress cries and fill up hard drives with recordings of ecosystems all over the world. Their aim is to create aural experiences, but also to sound the alarm through actual sounds, or the disappearance thereof. In a 2009 National Film Board short documentary called Listen by David New, Mr. Schafer says: “In a way the world is a huge composition, a huge musical composition that’s going on all the time without a beginning and presumably without an ending. We are the composers of this huge miraculous composition that’s going on around us, and we can improve it or we can destroy it.”...
Description
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-climate-change-wont-just-destroy-species-and-land-soundscapes-are/
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1
