ABSTRACT
The late experimental composer John Cage often said: “Music is all around us; if only we had ears,” going on to suggest that concerts were taking place everywhere in the world, 24/7. His radical statement confronts all of us with that age-old question: what is music? His predecessor, Edgard Varèse, invented the term “organised sound” as a means of describing his own music. The difference between Cage's view of organised sound and Varèse's is that Varèse implied but did not state that the sounds were to be organised into musical works for concert performance, yet Cage needs nothing more than those two words. Another interesting challenge that Cage poses, by asking us to open our windows or go for what today are known as listening walks⃰ (or soundwalks—we shall return to these two terms in a short while) focusing on our aural experience of the environment including both forms of nature—that which we associate with rural environments and human nature-affected urban environments—is the assumption that sounds in nature are organised and worthy of our attentive listening. It has often been shown that there are geometrical patterns in nature (think of the design of leaves, rivers and the like) and we are all aware of birdcalls and how animals communicate with each other spatially. Sonic patterns and communication can be perceived musically. Therefore, Cage's idea is by no means odd to me.
