Talking About Soundscapes

“If you’ve ever used the word ‘soundscape,’ you owe a small debt to the late Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. You can repay that debt by simply taking the opportunity to listen—and doing so in an ‘openly attentive’ manner, as Schafer put it in his 1969 book, The New Soundscape.”

And that’s how my new essay at JSTOR Daily begins. It’s all about the origins of the modern usage of the word “soundscape,” and it follows up an earlier piece I wrote for JSTOR Daily, last year, about the sound design of the film American Graffiti.

I’ll have a bit more on the piece in the coming days.