Imagining Acoustic Spaces through Listening and Acoustic Ecology

Abstract

Using the concept of acoustic ecology as his bulwark, Barry Truax theorizes listening as an embodied interface to our auditory environment. Acoustic spaces, Truax argues, should be understood as simultaneously real and imagined, and he discusses how such forms of dual perception exist in both everyday soundscapes and technologically mediated soundscapes. He contends that memory, imagining, and anticipation are closely connected to all stages of listening. These aspects of listening are further used to explore and define what Truax calls the “acoustic community”—that soundscape that emerges as a product of collective individual imagination.