For most of history, music meant sounds made by instruments and voices. In the twentieth century artists began to ask a radical question: what if any sound – a train, a city, the wind – could be listened to as music? The answers shaped electronic music, sound art and the practice of field recording.
Musique concrète
In 1948, the French radio engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer broadcast Étude aux chemins de fer, a short piece built entirely from recordings of steam trains, edited on shellac discs. He called the approach musique concrète: music that starts from concrete, recorded sound rather than abstract notation. Schaeffer developed the idea of reduced listening – hearing a sound for its own qualities (its texture, shape, grain) rather than for what caused it.
His work led to the founding of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris in 1958, which remains one of the world's leading centres of electroacoustic music. Composers such as Pierre Henry, François Bayle and Luc Ferrari followed – Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1 (1967–70) is little more than a day on a beach in a Dalmatian fishing village, compressed and gently shaped: an early classic of field recording as composition.
Acoustic ecology and soundwalks
In the late 1960s and 1970s, R. Murray Schafer and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Canada founded the World Soundscape Project. They documented the sound of towns and landscapes, coined terms such as soundscape, keynote sounds and soundmarks, and argued that we should design our acoustic environment as carefully as our visual one. Schafer's book The Tuning of the World (1977) became a founding text of acoustic ecology.
Composer Hildegard Westerkamp, part of the project, developed the soundwalk – an excursion whose main purpose is listening. Her Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) guides the listener through a Vancouver shoreline. Listen to soundwalks from around the world in the soundwalk theme.
Sound art and deep listening
Meanwhile artists took sound out of the concert hall. Max Neuhaus hid a continuous drone beneath a subway grating in New York's Times Square in 1977 – a work passers-by discovered by chance. Pauline Oliveros developed Deep Listening, a practice of attending to all sound, including one's own internal listening. Contemporary sound artists build installations, radio works, participatory performances and sound maps that ask audiences to hear familiar places anew.
Sound maps
The internet made it possible to share field recordings geographically. Projects such as radio aporee ::: maps, begun in the 2000s by Udo Noll, invite anyone to pin recordings to a world map – tens of thousands of moments from streets, forests, stations and homes. OttoAnna's field recordings section is built on its openly licensed recordings.
Practise listening
- Two-minute listen. Sit anywhere, close your eyes, and list every sound you hear – near and far, continuous and sudden.
- Reduced listening. Pick one sound and describe only its qualities: pitch, rhythm, texture, envelope. Do not name the source.
- Soundwalk. Walk a familiar route slowly without headphones, noticing where the soundscape changes.
- Record and replay. Listening back through headphones reveals what your brain filtered out.
You will never hear a place the same way again.
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