ABSTRACT

In this essay three issues are addressed: the prospect for applying concepts from ecological psychology within ecomusicology; the way in which ecological psychology refreshes our understanding of the relationship between music and noise, and the way in which free improvisation might play a role in helping students in higher education understand the boundaries between culture and nature. Ecological psychology (the work of Roger Barker and James Gibson) has recently been applied to music perception by a number of scholars, notably Eric Clarke. However, it is the potential to reconnect action with perception that I explore most directly by applying the work of Harry Heft and Edward Reed to music-making. Applying these insights to the ecomusicological project (here personified in the work of Malcolm Troup) helps provide a critique of the implied opposition of music and noise, and hence culture and nature. In conclusion, I argue that addressing the direct perception of instruments and their affordances through free improvisation is an essential component in musical education to be revisited at all levels – most importantly in higher education – as a corrective to our inevitable enculturation and exposure to increasingly mediated experience that creates a dichotomy between nature and culture, noise and music.