ABSTRACT
In one of his most telling pieces of writing, Schafer (1969) discloses his commitment to recording and controlling the overflow of noise as a mission that is both aesthetic and moral. In his ‘Middle East Sound Diary’, a series of notes he wrote about the noises that accosted his ear during his 1960s trip to Turkey and Iran, he complains in the note of April 5 that ‘the contemporary sonic environment … is becoming identical the world over, whereas the visual environment may still retain vestiges of the idiosyncratic and vernacular’. Later, however, he questions the accuracy of his comment on the homogenization of sonic environments. In the note of ‘June 18’, he suggests that it might after all be good to make a sociological survey of sounds in different parts of the world. The premise that there are likely to be interesting differences in the kinds of sensory experiences available in various areas of the globe underlies the plan of this volume and the particulars of auditory experiences are the concern of this chapter. There would, no doubt, be a great deal of interest in a systematic collection of sounds from the Middle East. Schafer’s impressionistic diary provides no more than a hint of how such a survey could be carried out or analyzed systematically.1 He does, however, state repeatedly that it is necessary to overcome what he heard as noise; his goal was to tabulate sounds that are available as music and to adapt environmental sounds to music. From very early on in his teaching career, he encouraged students and colleagues to apply his approach and indeed highly interesting work appears in publications that describe soundscapes in Europe and in Canada (Schafer 1977, 1978a, 1978b).
