Like Quails Clucking: Landscape, Soundscape and a Noisy Future?

This work was delivered as a conference paper, and published as a 4500-word paper, in the edited conference proceedings East Meets West in Acoustic Ecology. “East Meets West in Acoustic Ecology” was a conference organised from November the 1st to November 5th, 2006 and held at Hirosaki University in Japan. The conference was held under the auspices of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, an institution that has its origins in the 1960s where R. Murray Schafer, working at Simon Fraser University, first conceived the concept of ‘soundscape’. Since then, Schafer’s work (and the WFAE) has been funded by UNESCO, has developed representative organisations in four continents, a peer-reviewed journal and holds the WFAE conference every four years. Like Quails Clucking, the paper, explored the origins of the term 'soundscape' and sought to trace connections between that term and the concept of landscape. It was argued that although what might be considered the proliferation of ‘scapes' is not without its potential problems, nevertheless, the concept of soundscape could receive greater rigour and, ultimately, find more coherent application, if it were to enter into a new dialogue with ideas that have emerged from the discipline of critical landscape studies. One of the most innovative benefits of such a dialogue, it was argued, was the opportunity to develop an inter-cultural soundscape studies