Acoustic Ecology

Acoustic ecology, sometimes called ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between human beings and their environment.^[1] Acoustic ecology studies started in the late 1960s with R. Murray Schafer a musician, composer and former professor of communication studies at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) with the help of his team there^[2] as part of the World Soundscape Project. The original WSP team included Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, Bruce Davies and Peter Huse, among others. The first study produced by the WSP was titled The Vancouver Soundscape. This innovative study raised the interest of researchers and artists worldwide, creating enormous growth in the field of acoustic ecology. In 1993, the members of the by now large and active international acoustic ecology community formed the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.^[3]

The radio art of Schafer and his colleague, has found expression in many different fields.^[4] While most have taken some inspiration from Schafer's writings, in recent years there have also been divergences from the initial ideas. The expanded expressions of acoustic ecology are increasing due to the sonic impacts of road and airport construction that affect the soundscapes in and around cities where the human population is more dense.^[5] There has also been a broadening of bioacoustics (the use of sound by animals) to consider the subjective and objective responses of animals to human noise, with ocean noise capturing the most attention. Acoustic ecology can also be informative of changes in the climate or other environmental changes since every day we listen to sounds in the world to identify their source such as bird, car, plane, wind, water. But we don't listen those sounds as a network , a mesh of relationships that form an ecology.^[2] Acoustic ecology finds expression in many different fields that characterize a soundscape, which are biophony, geophony, and anthrophony.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_ecology