First of all, the initial idea of the project was simple. It was begun by my personal experiences. As I am the person who really love natural sound; I seek the nature rather than the city. Therefore, I had listening lots of experiences about natural sound and I was interested in the attraction of the original natural sound. The project idea was started to share my experience. This project is community art based on acoustic ecology about the interaction between nature and people. It is the field of studying sound-related phenomena in the natural environment. The project will explore the relationship between individuals and the sounds of the environment that surround them. The aim of this project is to investigate the effect of natural sound on human's sense of emotion moreover, encouraging preserve the soundscapes and natural sound environments of nature.
In this blog, I will represent what is the soundscape and will introduce Murray Schafer (1933) and Bernie Krause (1938) who are well known in the acoustic ecology field.
Soundscape, derived from Murray Schafer, is a compound word of the suffix scape, meaning sound and landscape. Accepting landscape with the ear, that is, it means an auditory landscape. The sounds we generally think of are artificial things like music. On the other hand, in the case of the soundscape, it refers to a combination of various sounds surrounding us, from natural sounds to urban noises to artificial sounds. Through the 20th century art movement, the possibility that the object of music can be not only the sound of an instrument but also all sound s was confirmed. In 1993, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) , a world soundscape forum, was established, and scholars, designers, and musicians from various fields are actively conducting research. More related journals can be found in https://www.wfae.net/journal.html.
Who was a Bernie Krause?
He is an American musician and soundscape ecologist. He spent more than 50 yeats studying the sounds of 15000 species of habitats on Earth. Through The Great Animal's Orchestra, he makes us naturally think about human arrogance toward nature, such as environmental harmony, climate change, and primeval forest deveopment. Here is the the example sound of The Great Animal's Orchestra.
Krause says that the sounds of nature are not chaotic and disorderly expressions. Various specires, such as insects, birds, and mammals etc, each make their own volume and frequency(; pitch), and claim that they combine to form a kind of orchestra. In fact, when you listen to his work, the sounds of various creatures sound like an orchestra. A varuiety of interesting sounds can be found, such as thin and resonant sounds like a flute, the cries of animals with high-frequency ranges like a violin, and the sounds of thick and low-frequency ranges like a tromobne.
In 2013, he also illustrate the impact on the environment at the TED talks, showing an example of an acoustic analysis that was changed by a logging company in 1988. Here are the two examples of spectrogram which he showed at the conference.
This spectrogram shows the result of recording under the same conditions in the same place. First of all, the above spctrogram shows before the logging company cur down trees. The spectrogram represents the region of frequency from bottom to top. The
frequency at the top is the result of the analysis of birds' chirping. However, if you look at the recording results in the same place a year later, you can definitely see the missing high frequency which is birds chirping sound. He claims that through sound we can find the impact on the environment.
[Check out more details in his book the Great Animal ORchestra (2012) and TED Talks.]
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