Vol. 13 No. 1 (2014): Music and ecologies of sound: Theoretical & practical projects for a listening of the world

In recent music as well as in sound art, sound has emerged as a crossroad of theoretical and practical questions. Many of these questions concern the permanent interaction of sound with what surrounds it: physical space, environment, the audience. Instead of taking sound as a reified entity and using it as mere material at their disposal, musicians and sound artists began to consider it more carefully, and to view it as a fragile entity, which exists only through this interaction. In this view, we can speak about an ecology of sound. “Ecology” means here, the way of thinking which views oikos, i.e. the common home, our world, as a set of relationships rather than separated objects. The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari (1989) designates three ecologies: environmental, social and mental. Thus, we could say that, through the ecology of sound, musicians or sound artists explore the way sound appears, develops and disappears through its interaction with nature, society and human subjectivity, inviting the active listener to reconstruct his own interaction with the world.

The feature articles printed in this issue of Soundscape were presented as papers in a symposium, which tried to promote this idea of the ecology of sound. Entitled Music and Ecologies of Sound; Theoretical and Practical Projects for a Listening of the World, this symposium wished “to give priority to the analysis of practices and theories, which aim not only to develop our knowledge of the interactions between sound (music), the environment, society and subjectivity, but also to think about the possibility of changing the world for the better”. Organized by the University Paris 8 (France) in May 2013, it gathered many artists and scholars from various countries. We choose here five papers to illustrate the plurality of the approaches that were developed during this symposium.