Enactive Listening: Perceptual reflections on soundscape composition

Abstract

The aim of this article is to gain insight into how the perceptual act of everyday listening may influence, shape or inform the compositional process, specifically in regard to soundscape composition and its relation to the environment. I place listening within the wider context of enactive perception, and emphasise the embodied and multisensory nature of cognition in the formation of an understanding of our world. Acknowledging music as a sociocultural activity, I utilise musical narrativity to frame the discussion on affordances for a listener ’ s enactive perception. With a particular focus on soundscape composition, I discuss the affordances for a listener offered by divergent compositional processes, contextualised within the wider electroacoustic domain and its sociohistorical context. Moreover, I argue that by explicitly incorporating as part of the compositional process, soundscape composition moderates the affordances for a listener by aligning various narrative modes.