Abstract
As far as I know, the first scholars to use the term “acoustic space” were Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter in their magazine Explorations, which appeared between 1953 and 1959. There, McLuhan wrote:
Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this dark bog.
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space, shrouding the voice; it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. Speak that I may see you.
Writing turned the spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.1
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Notes
Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter, eds., Explorations in Communication ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1960 ), p. 207.
Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities ( New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973 ), pp. 35–37.
Publications of the World Soundscape Project include R. Murray Schäfer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); R. Murray Schafer, ed., The Vancouver Soundscape (Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1978; book and two cassettes); R. Murray Schafer, ed., Five Village Soundscapes (Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1977; book and five cassettes); R. Murray Schafer, ed., European Sound Diary (Vancouver: A.R.C. Publications, 1977); Barry Truax, ed., Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Vancouver A.R.C. Publications, 1978). See, also, Sound Heritage, vol. Ill, no. 4, (Victoria: Provincial Archives of British Columbia, 1974), which is devoted to a discussion of the World Soundscape Project; The Unesco Courier, November, 1976, which is given over to soundscape articles; and Keiko Torigoe, “A Study of the World Soundscape Project,” (Master’s thesis, York University, Toronto, 1982 ).
Translation of the word “soundscape” is a good case in point. The French translation, le paysage sonore, has caused little difficulty and is now widely employed. The Poles translated it as sonosphere and understood at once what it meant. But when the word was rendered into German originally as Schwallwelt, it had little impact. Klanglandschaft has also been employed. Klangschaft, which would be most accurate, seems unacceptable to the German mind and as a result there is little interest in the subject in the German- speaking countries.
Proust wrote of the sound of the bell as “oval.” A few years ago, when I had a group of students draw spontaneously to sounds played on tape, the bell was one of the sounds evoking the greatest circularity. The other sound was that of the air conditioner. See R. Murray Schafer, The Music of the Environment (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1973), p. 21.
See European Sound Diary, p. 16.
See Five Village Soundscapes, p. 15.
Sei Shonagan, The Pillow Book, Ivan Morris, trans. ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1967 ).
See The Tuning of the World, pp. 51–52, 76, 114–115, 179, 183.
For the sound profile of Vancouver radio stations, see The Vancouver Soundscape, p. 40.
S. Giedion, Merchanization Takes Command ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1970 ), p. 302.
Personal communication, December 16, 1974.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962 ), p. 32.
Marius Schneider, “Primitive Music,” The Oxford History of Music ( London: Oxford University Press, 1957 ), p. 44.
Personal communication. For an amplification of this subject, see Steven Feld Sound and Sentiment: Birds Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982 ).
Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976 ).
Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, p. 37.
There are numerous instances of this experience in the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper.
Marco Polo, The Travels ( Atlanta: Communication and Studies Inc., 1948 ), p. 154.
There is a striking instance of this long-distance hearing recorded in C.C. Bombaugh, Oddities and Curiosities (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), p. 280. On June 17, 1776, a slave heard the battle of Bunker Hill at a distance of 129 miles by putting his ear to the ground. The same source records that the human voice has been heard a distance of ten miles across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Notker the Stammerer, Life of Charlemagne, Lewis Thorpe, trans. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969 ), p. 136.
Marco Polo, p. 232.
Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, p. 33.
Cosmogonie mythology is full of examples and they occur in Egyptian, Indian, Mayan, Maori and other creation stories as well as in the Bible. See “Ursound,” in R. Murray Schafer: A Collection, B.P. Nichol and Steve McCaffery, eds. (Bancroft, Ontario: Arcana Editions, 1979 ), pp. 79–92.
Personal communication, December 16, 1974.
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© 1985 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Schafer, R.M. (1985). Acoustic space. In: Seamon, D., Mugerauer, R. (eds) Dwelling, Place and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_6
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