by Jeff Todd Titon
Originally published in the Fall/Winter 2012 edition of the Smithsonian Folkways Magazine.
Today the air is filled with discussion of commons as a democratic principle of access, sharing and use, particularly the so-called cultural commons1 and the digital commons. I believe that it is also helpful to think in terms of a sound commons, and that we ought to be managing it instead of damaging it. Why? So that all creatures (ourselves included) may communicate in our acoustic niches in the soundscape. It isn’t just because all creatures have the right to life (and they—we—cannot live if we’re prevented from communicating in our sound-worlds). I also make a utilitarian argument concerning, as ecologists put it, the beneficial consequences of sound communication to (1) biodiversity in ecosystems, and to (2) ecosystem resilience in the face of disturbance—such as human noise.
In the far northern Canadian wilderness, noise from helicopters flown by mineral explorers and from mining company construction confuses caribou, upsets their communication and has caused them to change their migration routes. Not only does the soundscape pollution impact the caribou, but also human groups such as the Innu whose traditional lifeways (food, clothing, shelter) were fully dependent on caribou hunting—a practice they attempt to continue still, to maintain their culture, even though these former nomads are now settled in villages. And yes, the Innu have songs about caribou hunting. One of them translates roughly as follows: “You [caribou] are so far away, I cannot reach you. I’ll catch up with you and call my friends.”2
It’s all connected: music to sound, human to animal, culture to nature. Just as sound is enveloped by environment, so is culture, by both the human-built and natural environments.3 When back in the 1950s and 1960s, Moses Asch published sound recordings of New York City sound environments alongside recordings of sounds of sea creatures singing in the ocean, sounds of the office and sounds of steam locomotives, sounds of birds in the forest and frogs in the desert, he must also have understood this. Work in cultural sustainability—which Folkways and the Smithsonian’s Center of Folklife and Cultural Heritage always has supported on the grounds of musical and cultural equity—is intimately related to work in environmental sustainability and cannot proceed successfully without it. A sound commons, where all living beings enjoy a commonwealth of sound, embodies the principle of sound equity, encouraging free and open sound communication, and playing its important part in environmental, musical, and cultural sustainability.
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1 Lewis Hyde, Common As Air. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010.
2http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-sound-world-of-innu.html
3 The emerging humanities field of ecomusicology (ecology + music) has risen to address these issues. The field attracts ethnomusicologists, musicologists and others interested in combining the study of music, sound and nature with ecocriticism - itself a branch of the humanities in which scholars study the relation between literature and the environment in a time of environmental crisis.
