ABSTRACT
Introduction to Schafer’s Concepts In a publication about McLuhan nobody needs to point out the protagonist’s signi cance. However, one cannot presume that everybody knows about the signi cance of the Canadian sound pedagogue, researcher and composer R. Murray Schafer and his idea of ‘soundscape’ and ‘acoustic ecology’. Up to the present day, the latter has been one of the very few consistent theories on sound in the most comprehensive meaning of the word. Schafer built up a consistent terminology through which listening as well as auditory phenomena are clearly rooted in a critical approach to societies and their values, as well as their technological, economic and cultural phenomena. Schafer’s terminological framework has changed the general notion of sound from being amorphous – and therefore beyond a scienti c and scholarly approach – to providing an order to sonic phenomena together with an order of auditory perceptions.
