Two Way Traffic

Mediation of identity through sound, and sound through identity

Abstract

It is by now a truism in popular music studies that one of the primary mediators of individual and collective identity is music (Stokes 1994). And it is equally recognised in acoustic ecology that a major identity marker is the local soundscape (Järviluoma et al 2009). The two converge when a composer or musician seeks to represent that soundscape in musical terms. Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica incorporates literal signifiers of locality through the sound of a polar blizzard, while more oblique representations of a soundscape include the use of reverberation to evoke senses of place, such as the open ‘home-on-the-range’ (see further Doyle 2005). I want to present some thoughts on the relationship between music, sound and Australian identity from two directions. The first is the more obvious one that I have just sketched; that is, the use of music to mediate national or local identity. Then, however, I want to move in the opposite direction to a connection much more rarely, if ever, made. That is, how place mediates sounds which are categorised as music.