Excerpts from

Samuels, D. W., Meintjes, L., Ochoa, A. M., & Porcello, T. (2010). Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 329-45.

by Nancy Van House

R. Murray Schafer (1994 [1977]), … frames the soundscape as a publicly circulating entity that is a producedeffect of social practices, politics, and ideologies while also being implicated in the shaping of those practices, politics, and ideologies.

Soundscape opens possibilities for anthropologists to think about the enculturated nature of sound, the techniques available for collecting and thinking about sound, and the material spaces of performance and ceremony that are used or constructed for the purpose of propagating sound.

Sound’s intimate connections to contexts of time and place.

Attention to the acoustic environment.

Natural vs cultural, fortuitous and compose, improvised and deliberately produced.

Relations of sound, place, and space.

At once futurist and nostalgic, sound recording also shifted the felt nature of memory, time, and place, disrupting the naturalized chronotope of live performance and producing an epistemological divide between face-to-face and mediated communication in a way thatthe invention of the telephone had not. Sound recording as well promised to bring the fullnessof performed vocal and sonic presence of the past to future generations, and as a technology of memory, sound recording was quickly incorporated into the idea of the archive.

Thinking of sound on tape as itself a “sound object” (l’objet sonore), that is, an entity independent of its acoustic origin, Schaeffer framed this relationship between the sound object and its missing source as acousmatic, borrowed from Pythagorean philosophy but which in its modern coinage referred to sounds “of which the cause is invisible” (Chion 1983, p. 18).

Discussions of film sound that focus on the acousmatic enter the purview of anthropology because they strongly implicate relationships of sound, place, and space. Even prior to the commercial success of the Vitaphone process (Lastra 2000, pp. 92–122), musical accompaniment was usually heard in the theaters that exhibited so-called “silent” films, and the traces of the presence of musicians on the film set can be seen in the rhythmic coordination of movements of the actors on the screen in the finished film.

 

A number of film scholars have therefore avoided using “soundtrack” in favor of “soundscape,” a term in film studies traced more often to Stilwell (2001) than to Schafer. Stilwell’s framing of soundscape is intended to prod scholars to think holistically about film soundtracks, not only as the music that accompanies the sequence of scenes in a film, but as a complex layering of dialogue, music, and sound effects that together helps to anchor the viewer’s experience of the film.

Except for linguistic anthropology and ethnomusicology, anthropological training has tended to invest little in learning to work with sound recording and editing technologies, in developing techniques of interpretation or acoustic “texts,” and in refining ethnographic language to articulate the poetics of sonic forms. In producing recordings, however, field recordists make decisions behind which lie histories of ideas about what needs to be made audible.

 

Such recordings are derived as well from extensive ethnographic knowledge and consultation about the sounds recorded, combined with concerns on the part of the recordist with the politics and poetics of representation. These recordings are themselves statements: creative, interpretive, empirical, hermeneutic, analytical texts rendered in acoustic form.

music ethnographers working in rainforest societies made a vital contribution to globalizing soundscape studies (Basso 1985, Feld 1990 [1982], Roseman 1991, Seeger 1987). The dense rainforest canopy was a sensorially exceptional ecological environment in which one could hear further than one could see. With this emphasis on acoustic experience, their ethnographies showed social worlds to be at once imbricated in spiritually, ecologically, and sonically dense environments.

The holistic approaches to sound, history, environment, and place of these rainforest ethnographies provided the inspiration for successive work on aurality in metropolitan, ambient, and cosmopolitan environments and in places in which forms of social struggle made coherence itself difficult to find.

 

…also call attention to the ways in which listening is space- and place-specific, as well as to the multiple ways of listening to the acoustic components of sound.

Work that highlights megacities as products of voyages and circulation and the daily movements of people within them has led to ethnographies of emplaced auditory landscapes and media usage…

 

Scholars and composers have long suggested that one of the difficulties posed by sounds, as compared with images, is the inability to extract sounds from their temporal constraints. Sound recording allows for the temporal dislocation of a sound from its time and place of origin, but does not facilitate the ability to do the auditory equivalent of sustaining the gaze on an image for as long or as short as one desires. Thus even though sounds can be reproduced and replayed, sound is often considered to have, by its nature, a kind of ephemerality…