ABSTRACT
Simply put, the term “soundscape” refers to an area defined by specific sounds. In this essay, the concept of soundscape is modelled after Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Schafer [1977]1994). Schafer’s work predates Arjun Appadurai’s five notions of “-scapes” in his well-known essay, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1990). A music composer, Schafer emphasizes the importance of understanding sound in spatial terms, and how sounds, including music, intersect with our everyday lives, and how we may expand our understanding of our physical and social environment by exploring sounds. Appadurai, a cultural anthropologist, coined his concept of “-scapes” as a framework to understand contemporary cultural flows through the global intersection of people, media, technology, finance, and ideologies, particularly useful in the context of changing power relations between former colonisers and colonies, Euro-America and Asia, us and them. Schafer demonstrates how sounds have the potential to mark acoustic spaces that generate specific sets of social meanings and values. Appadurai proposes a conception of space defined by different interactions of social practices across conventional demarcations of geographical and/or political boundaries.
