ABSTRACT
A chapter that intends to produce greater awareness of the importance of acoustic space must include excerpts from the mind-and ear-opening book by R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the Wor!"- just quoted. Through the power of his writing, Schafer is able to make us imagine sounds and silences we have never known. Most of his book serves to awaken the reader to the noise pollution of industrialized SOciety, a good part of it the result of mass-mediated sound reproduction. He does not go so far as to say we should shut off all radios and TV s and go back to Crickets, but in reminding us of what a natural high-fidelity sound environment is like, he proVides the historic baseline from which all electronic sound-making has departed. If radio production and performance people desire to attract and entertain listeners in today's soundscape, they must do so cognizant of the natural acoustic environment that mankind has inhabited for all of previous human history. Millenia of experience with that natural sound environment have become a part of our instinctive behaviors. When radio production and performance lack certain of the familiar
sound cues of the past, some listeners might react strangely, or might fail to react at all to certain sound stimuli.
