Kitchener, Dec 29, 2018, 3:51 pm (reading Schafer)

Action notes: Reading Schafer’s introduction to The Soundscape, I was struck by the doom of one of his opening sentences: “These new sounds, which differ in quality and intensity from those of the past, have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life” (3). Schafer’s project in arguing for the importance of attending to soundscape is both to attend to the sounds of an increasingly industrialized environment, and to suggest that the problem is that we are not trained to listen as carefully as we are trained to look (though I agree about the primacy of eye over ear since the Renaissance, I think we are really not trained to look very well either!).  Instead of careful listening, Schafer warns, we are trained to ignore unpleasant sounds, and it is only when we learn to listen well that we will stop sticking our sonic heads in the sand and take more care of our acoustic worlds.

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