Sound and vision blog

To celebrate World Listening Day, the World and Traditional Music section has made available, to listeners in British Library Reading Rooms, a collection of field recordings from five European villages, which form part of the World Soundscape Project Collection. These recordings can be located in the Sound and Moving Image catalogue between call numbers C1064/6 and C1064/42.

The World Soundscape Project (WSP) was a small group of researchers and composers dedicated to studying the acoustic environment. It was based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and led by Raymond Murray Schafer (his birthday, July 18th, was chosen to celebrate World Listening Day). The WSP took an inter-disciplinary approach to the environment, integrating, amongst other things, acoustics, architecture, music theory, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and history. This allowed for analysis of the acoustic environment in all its complexity. The research became the basis of ‘Acoustic Ecology’, a discipline that R. Murray Schafer developed to further investigate ‘soundscapes’, which are understood as the sonic interface between living beings and their environment.