‘Mother Nature Had Been Digitalized’: Collecting Sounds and Naturalising Interior Soundscapes

Abstract

In the late 1960s, composers and sound engineers began to regularly step out of the recording studio. The street sounds and nature sounds they collected, processed, and produced as records and radio broadcasts were intended to be functional. That is, for individuals such as Tony Schwartz, Irv Teibel, and members of the World Soundscape Project, the compositions were expected to generate specific effects, from socio-political change, to altered moods, to environmental conservation. Though part of the sonic counterculture, their efforts also fit into an arc of functional background music from Edison, to industrial music systems, to Muzak, to foreground music and, presently, streaming audio. Using the methodological framework of the history of the field sciences that focuses on collecting practices as well as storage, analysis, and the importance of the specificity of location (versus the universality of the laboratory or studio), recorded musical and non-musical sounds came to be understood as mobile; collectible. I trace the implications of these mobile recorded sound for the way people understood their environment and, in turn, naturalised their built spaces.

Keywords:

• Collecting Sciences
• Environmental Psychology
• Environmental Sounds
• Soundscape

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Alexandra Hui is an Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and Co-Editor of the journal Isis. Her monograph, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (2012), several articles, and co-edited 2013 Osiris volume and Testing Hearing: the Making of Modern Aurality (2020) focus on music, sound, and science. Her two current research projects examine the co-development of listening and background music technology and how scientists listen to the environment.

Notes

1 Pade’s A Day at Dyrehavsbakken (1955) and Ferrari’s Presque rien No. 1 ‘Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer (1970) to be quintessential examples of Schaeffer’s musique concrète.

2 In the American context, the efforts of anthropologists and natural scientists to define and professionalise their discipline were co-constitutive with the various federal institutions’ goals of consolidating power. See Darnell (1998), Hinsley (1981), and Vetter (2016). British and French Anthropology, in the decades following WWII, struggled through a crisis over their colonial origins. See Stocking (1991) for an example of efforts to resolve this crisis. The German colonial context can be contrasted further still, since their governance system was not particularly interested in surveying colonial resources, at least not initially. See Penny and Bunzl (2010).

3 discogs.com metadata: https://www.discogs.com/genre/non-music.

4 The practice of cognitive mapping is a nice illustration of how environmental psychology research drew out these processes. In cognitive mapping, researchers tried to understand how individuals learn about their spatial environment. They employed various strategies to access individuals’ mental images of their environment. Stanley Milgram and Denise Jodelet (1976), for example, asked their research subjects to draw maps of Paris. Others observed subjects navigate a space or measured individuals’ responses to photographs of various locations. Cognitive mapping, it was determined, was affected by factors that were both physical and social (Orleans 1973; Francescato and Mebane 1974).

5 Kohler (2007, 444–446) argues that there are four shared, defining features of the collecting sciences: First, collecting is space specific; Second, its practitioners are socially diverse; Third, the practical work of collecting becomes assimilated into composite professional roles; Fourth, collecting sciences retain ‘distinct vestiges of the vernacular cultures from which they sprang’.

6 Gilmore recounted this as does Eley, who also notes that this was the most widely circulated story about the record.

7 R. Murray Schafer’s Five Village Soundscapes (1977) was even more explicitly historical though also a more superficial study (up to ten days only in each village to collect sounds and local history).

8 I spent two days with Barry Truax in Vancouver, Canada in March of 2014. We had several informal conversations as well as a formal interview (March 19). This discussion is paraphrased from my transcript of that interview. I thank Doug Forrest, my research assistant, for his diligent transcription efforts.

9 Jennifer Iverson (2017) argues that the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio’s application of psychoacoustic solutions to technical problems informed the WDR sound. Mody and Nelson (2013) also suggest that the highly interdisciplinary structure of the Stanford University computer music center fueled the creative work there. I differ slightly from these theses in my point here. The field as studio as lab, as it very loosely exists in the cases I present in this article, was a place where applications were tested.