Land Acknowledgement
The University of Montana acknowledges we are in the aboriginal territories of the Seli’š and Qlispe’ people. We honor the path they have always shown us in caring for this place for the generations to come. For many generations the Salish, Kootenai, Pend d'Oreille and other tribes, including the Blackfeet, Nez Perce, Shoshone, Bannock, and Coeur D'Alene, have shaped and influenced the landscape, purpose and impact of education in the Missoula Valley.
UNIVERSITY SOUND
a CEP by Max Barton
ATTENTION: The webpage you are seeing is an abridged version of my project University Sound. You can read the unabridged version in this pdf.
INTRODUCTION
This project was conceived with the goal of examining soundscapes as aesthetic objects. During the course of the project, the remit grew to include the ethical criticism of soundscapes. As a public project, University Sound raised awareness about the University of Montana soundscape and introduced the practice of soundwalking to community members.
CONCEPTION
I had the idea for University Sound one morning as I was rushing between Eck Hall and the forestry building (a few hundred yards across the University of Montana quad). Late to a lecture on Early Modern philosophy, I was focused on everything but my surroundings. The too hot coffee sloshing in my hand, the lecture notes disorganized in my head, the time– oh the time! I half jogged the awkward way academics do– with messenger bag flapping and hands clutching coffee and loose pages– toward the forestry building only to suddenly halt before the door. A sound, almost out of earshot, familiar and strange, shook me from my self-focus. Among all the hum and commotion of the campus at ten in the morning, the busy road and whirring air conditioners and footsteps slapping concrete, there was, poised in a tree, just off the footpath, a group of black-capped chickadees, singing sweetly. Perhaps there were three or maybe four. They sang in hocket-like turns carrying one another’s melody and punctuating solos with a flap or a hop between boughs. For a moment, I forgot my frenzied dash. The sun warmed my beard. The wind breathed in my ears. I turned my back to the door, and then, stepping away from the path, I walked through the grass toward their tree, laying down my things to rest in the shade of its branches. Finally disarmed, I thought to myself, this is how campus is supposed to sound. Such a thought was, of course, unburdened by philosophical reflection; but, there was something in this flash of emotion. “Why,” I asked myself, “do we put so much time and energy into perfecting the visage of our mountain campus, the part which is put to cameras and canvases; why do we carefully craft this picture-ready identity from flowers and trees and brick and commissioned sculpture; why do we fuss about architectural style and landscaping philosophy; why do we fret over all of this when we so casually ignore the way our campus sounds?” “Why,” I pressed, listening to a crew of jackhammers bucking three hundred yards away,“is it taking so long to construct the new food zoo?”
I had a lead. And a mix of hot emotions– righteous indignation, awe before the mountains and the songbirds which music them. It felt good. I knew that I was onto something. But, if I was to take this critique seriously, then I would first have to understand what it means for a place to have an auditory aspect at all. There I was, under a sun-soaked poplar dancing with happy birds, poking at the danger of novel philosophical territory. Pretty soon I was spending late nights in the library, snacking over my keyboard, pouring through the literature. Pretty soon I was tearing through the pages of a book which promised a method for tuning the world like a violin.
By the end of the semester, I had recorded two shows for Missoula’s high-powered community radio station, KFGM, focused on the local soundscape, and I had led my very own soundwalk across campus. I did this in an attempt to understand what it means to live in a world which is not merely composed in color and shadow, but in sound. In music. As with any philosophy project there were challenges as well as moments of complete elation. This webpage, and the longer report (found here: pdf) attempts to document just this, while giving a theorectical basis for my decisions.
University Sound (US) is first and foremost an environmental philosophy project. It is designed to bring attention to an oft-ignored issue in the literature of environmental philosophy (though much discussed in scientific literature), the aesthetics and ethics of the soundscape, and to impart a practice of listening which people might use in their everyday lives.
A community engagement project is focused not only on environmental philosophy in the void, but practical contributions to sustainability and environmental justice.
People notice hills and cliffs and shining rocks and smoggy clouds and barreling storms and rotting trees, but there is much about the environment that is hidden from the eyes. There is an ecology which exists only in sound. This ecology is made up of both the prima facie anthropogenic aspects of the environment (the screech of steel cars, the drum of aluminum air conditioning units, the roar of rubberized souls on cement) and the prima facie non-anthropogenic aspects, often marked by an adaption to the anthropogenic aspects (the heightened pitch of bird song, the eerie silence of white-tailed deer standing on sod, the loud chattering of people). The distinction between natural and non-natural is certainly of conceptual interest to University Sound, but there are also less conceptual and more empirical problems of environmental justice. For instance, how do certain sounds affect the health of both human and non-human neighbors? Who has the power to alter their sonic environment toward aesthetic and ethical ends? How do we practically craft our sonic environment?
- Hildegard Westerkamp taking a recording at Banf National Park in 1993. credit: Peter Grant
- R. Murray Schafer issues an important directive. A screenshot of the short film "Listen" by David New
- The author fields challenging questions before leading a soundwalk. credit: Vibi Bakshi
- The author leads a soundwalk across the University of Montana campus. credit: Zoey Ballard
- Author (right) and friend in KFGM Missoula community radio studio. credit: KFGM instagram
Soundscapes
The concept of soundscape has gone through many permutations since R. Murray Schafer’s first definition of “the quality and type of sounds and their arrangements in space and time." Schafer’s original intention behind the term soundscape and its concomitant practice soundwalking was to expose, using an empirical method, the emergence of noise pollution in urban environments as a threat to human health and moreover the human relationship to nature and ecosystems. For the purposes of this project, I have largely stuck to Schafer's original definition. A soundscape is the content of all sound contained within a delimited area in space and time.
Soundwalking
Soundwalking is a practice in acoustic ecology by which humans encounter the soundscape– by noticing detail, rendering judgments, interacting with sonic neighbors, composing novel noises and anything else involving sound. We are sound-making beings. Our bodies are kept alive by rhythms: our heart, our breath, the clicks and puffs and sighs of language, even how we chew our food and sip our water are unavoidably sonic. Soundwalking is designed not only to help one realize the soundscape around them, but to understand their role as sound producers in, not apart from, the soundscape. For the purposes of University Sound, Soundwalking was the principal way which I encountered, and invited the community to encounter, the University of Montana soundscape.
Theoretical Applications
The challenge for University Sound is to enable folks– Missoulians, students, staff, faculty– to analyze and make purposeful aesthetic judgments about the soundscape in which they live and work. For this to be effective, I had to be careful not to employ tendentious metaphysical distinctions, say between nature and culture. There are, after all, many different sounds I encounter everyday around campus that help me realize the unique excellences of this place: our clanging carillon, fallen leaves scraping across concrete, intellectual chatter in the halls, singing native birds, and so forth. The question is: how do we make judgments about the soundscape without being unfairly partial toward, say, natural sounds? And further, how do we isolate the things about the University of Montana which makes its soundscape unique? Unique to what?
Taking inspiration from Kendall Walton, I decided that finding a category for the University soundscape would give the necessary context from which to make judgments. In practice, this looked like sketching the features of a generic university soundscape. From here, I could analyze the features of the University of Montana soundscape which were standard, variable, and contra-standard according to the broader category (Walton 339).What I wanted more than anything to get across to people was that there may be unique excellences of the University of Montana soundscape that we would want to endorse communally and so cultivate in our practices. Prior to the soundwalk I led across campus, I asked the group to brainstorm specific sounds they would expect to hear on most any university’s campus, and then sounds they thought would be unique to the University of Montana. I wrote all of their ideas down and then, at the end of the walk, we returned to these notes and amended them.
The recognition that the experience and design of soundscape has not only an aesthetic, but an ethical character, means that the soundwalker makes decisions about whose interests count in the soundscape. Does it matter that songbirds must compete with band noise? Or that squirrels must bear the incessant barking of dogs in a local park? Ought certain animals to be able to express themselves in the soundscape?– think of people who put electric bark collars on their dogs, or those who kill cicadas out of frustration over their incessant chirping. What impacts do I have on the soundscape? Are their ecological ramifications when I, alone in the woods, blast music from my speaker?
Realizing that a soundscape is not only an important phenomenon for humans, but also for non-human animals is a natural extension of philosophy of animals.
Recognizing that non-human animals are part of and participants in the soundscape reveals another fact about soundwalking: as hard as we try to make it otherwise, soundwalking is anthropocentric.
In the public-facing portion of University Sound, I settled on a virtue ethics approach to what I call being a “sonic citizen.” During my radio program I outlined four virtues that could be associated with good sonic citizenship. This is by no means an exhaustive or profound list. It is, like many other programs in University Sound, a start. There may be new virtues that arise, and certainly the classic virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice will all be needed to some degree to be a good sonic citizen.
Humility – Firstly, it is impossible for us to understand the scope of the soundscape or the gross product of the sounds we as humans create– or our machines create for us. This is down to pure physical fact: we cannot hear below 20 hz, and we generally do not hear much at all above 17,000 khz. Bats and elephants live in these lacunas. There are colors of the soundscapes we will never see and which may make a world of difference to those who can. We must be humble, though not meek or self-effacing in our sonic production. Moreover, there are community members with misophonic triggers. We should always be aware of these possibilities. Our sounds may not be as beautiful to others as they are to us.
Neighborliness – We must understand that a soundscape is by nature democratic. And that it leaks into the lives of everyone no matter whether they want it to or not. We must also understand that we are not alone in the soundscape. We have neighbors, friends, and collaborators. They play a part in the composition just as much as we do and we should honor that and honor their needs. This goes too for social justice. The WHO calls noise pollution an “environmental nuisance,” but I don’t think they go nearly far enough. Exposure to noise pollution has been linked to all sorts of nasty ailments, from hearing loss to heart disease. Because those who most often live near roads are marginalized economically and socially, soundscape issues are social justice issues, and the sonic citizen recognizes that.
Open-mindedness – I’m very open to the importance of reflecting historical continuity and tradition in our soundscapes, preserving this based on aesthetic or moral obligation (it isn’t quite clear whether or not there are pure aesthetic obligations), but, there may be competing ideas of what a soundscape ought to be like. Take for example debates in landscaping over the use of native vs exotic species– these debates can be very tricky to mediate. It makes sense that, being as a soundscape is democratic and non-voluntary, there will be disputes over values and goals which are incommensurate with each other. Being so, a sonic citizen understands that there is not one answer to any problem. Imagine a scenario where a band wants to play on the oval– this will cause distress to some, certainly, especially the birds and deer who make their home here and thrive in the off-hours, and perhaps to those who are not fond of the music. But imagine that the band is native, and imagine that the event is communal and celebratory, and imagine that it honors the history of the land. The sonic citizen must be open-minded. They must see the good in an out-of-tune carillon or a rock concert.
Attentiveness – By attentiveness I mean to say that we must pay attention to not just ourselves but everything around us. Being a sonic citizen means recognizing that you are part of the soundscape: every breath you take, every clapping step, every word uttered, or bag rustled joins the composition in its totality. It is as if we were living on a canvas, carrying wet paint brushes strapped to our clothes. We cannot avoid or pretend to be apart from the soundscape. And so the sonic citizen uses not just their ears alone, but their eyes, their noses, their scientific and aesthetic and historical and social knowledge, and anything else when making judgments about the soundscape.
ATTENTION: The webpage you are seeing is an abridged version of my project University Sound. You can read the unabridged version in this pdf.
Thanks
University Sound would not have been possible without the generous assistance of my professors and peers. Thank you to Dr. Christopher J. Preston for his generosity and for always pushing me to apply my theory, Dr. Soazig Le Bihan for her sage council during my many Friday afternoon breakdowns, Dr. Matthew Strohl for encouraging my work in aesthetics, and Dr. Charles Hayes for being a constant pillar of support. Thank you to my peers Vibi Bakshi and Zoey Ballard who supported me through the process and generously attended my soundwalk. Finally, thank you to everyone in Missoula who indirectly supported my work on this project: the folks at Free Cycles and KFGM, the support staff working late into the night to keep our buildings clean, our amazing admin staff, Cady and Laura, the folks who generously stock the campus food bank, all the donors that enabled me to complete my degree at the University of Montana without taking on debt. Thank you.