Sound ecologies: recording and listening practices between research, creation and environments

Abstract

This introduction presents a special issue devoted to sound ecologies, considered as an interdisciplinary field at the crossroads of musicology, the humanities and social sciences, life sciences, sound art, and environmental studies. Using Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk as a starting point, the authors demonstrate that listening is never neutral: it is situated, mediated by technical devices, cultural frameworks, and specific forms of attention.

The aim is to understand sound as a relational process involving environments, technologies, social uses, and forms of coexistence. Recording, capture, and broadcasting devices are not mere tools: they shape what becomes audible and participate in the production of relationships with the world. This is why the authors write about sound ecologies, in the plural, given the diversity of approaches.

The text traces several historical trajectories. Modern recording techniques first transformed the status of sound by making it transportable, manipulable, and archivable. Pierre Schaeffer developed musique concrète and reduced listening, centered on sound as an autonomous material. Luc Ferrari then reintroduced the narrative, contextual, and documentary dimensions of recording. In the 1970s, R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project shifted attention to acoustic environments and their social and ecological transformations. From the 1990s onward, the humanities and social sciences have invested heavily in this field. Authors such as Steven Feld, Jonathan Sterne, Brandon LaBelle, and Salomé Voegelin consider sound as an operator of social relations, situated knowledge, and the politics of perception.