ABSTRACT
R. Murray Schafer and McLuhan were contemporaries and compatriots, one generation apart. Schafer's framework includes terms such as 'keynote sound', 'soundmark', 'sound signal', 'hifi' and 'lofi soundscape'. Two remarkable similarities in terminology highlight McLuhan's formative influence on his successor: his famous 'global village', quite a fashionable buzzword from the 1970s onwards, is very likely to have inspired Schafer's term 'global composition'. McLuhan's 'field approach' leads directly to the i.e. of 'environment', which both Schafer and McLuhan share. Schafer explains the visual bias as an expression of industrialization as well as of economization, rationalism, consumerism and commodification. Although McLuhan rarely used the term ecology, it emerged as one of his central ideas, describing his overall methodology. In 1971, Neil Postman founded the 'media ecology' programme at New York University (NYU), which attracted worldwide attention. Schafer applies ecology's systemic as well as biological implication and takes it further, with the current course of time, into the practical political realm.
