Schafer, Murray R — The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World

129 published claims from this book.

• A parish is defined acoustically by the range of its church bell.
• A park’s central feature can be a building dedicated to silence
• A perfect unchanging sound would be perceived as silence.
• A resonant cavity can isolate a single frequency from complex sound.
• A room’s fundamental resonance can be found by singing different notes.
• A sound envelope is defined by attack, body, transients, and decay
• A sound object is analyzable into attack, body, and decay
• A sound’s mass is its predominant bandwidth in the spectrum
• A soundscape is composed of audible events rather than visible objects
• A stormy sea produces full-spectrum white noise that is not articulated into waves
• A village’s electrical devices can coherently harmonize into chords and melodies
• Acoustic design improvement must begin with internal mental silence
• Acoustic ecology must be studied on location, not in the laboratory
• Acoustic park design should let natural sounds speak for themselves.
• Acoustic prominence depends on culture and attention, not loudness
• Aerial projection was a more imaginative leap than actual flight
• An ancient Malta chamber amplifies only deep male voices at 90 hertz.
• Ancient builders sited and shaped structures with acoustic intent.
• Balinese gamelan orchestras are staffed by the whole community, not professionals.
• Balinese irrigation bamboo produces a natural percussive soundscape from many mills.
• Before electroacoustics every sound was unique and unfalsifiable
• Bells and sirens are opposing community signals despite shared loudness
• Cicadas held profound spiritual symbolism across multiple ancient cultures
• City-dwellers judge natural sounds more benign than rural people do
• Classification systems function like surrealist art in revealing new relationships
• Cold-climate civilizations developed rich specialized vocabularies for snow and ice
• Communities can be defined by sound range rather than territory
• Crusaders may have brought garden culture and song from the East
• Distance and atmosphere transform church bells into evocative legato sound
• Distant wind can be heard across intervening stillness without being felt
• Earth mounds can refract and deaden street noise from quiet groves
• Electroacoustic reproduction gives sounds an independent existence from their makers
• Emergency siren loudness proxies track ambient noise rise over decades
• Every echo implies a ghostly alter-ego hidden behind the reflecting surface
• Every real sound is physically distorted at its onset by inertia.
• Extreme acoustic congestion can erase the ability to distinguish any signal
• Figure, ground, and field map onto signal, keynote, and soundscape
• Gothic cathedral acoustics may echo the reverberation of primeval evergreen forests
• Gothic cathedral acoustics shaped the sound of Gregorian chant
• Hearing functions as touch at a distance and fosters sociability
• Hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes differ by whether individual sounds survive masking
• Hi-fi gadgetry creates a synthetic soundscape where machine sounds direct modern life
• Human ear and voice are the standard modules for measuring soundscape
• Human ears add distortion when sounds begin
• Hunting and post horns encoded opposite directional relationships to landscape
• Inconspicuous everyday sounds vanish from the soundscape unnoticed by locals
• Indoor concert music arose as the outdoor world grew too noisy
• Industrial deafness was first studied in a 1713 work on workers’ diseases.
• Industrialists inherited the clergy’s license to make noise
• Isobel and events maps offer concrete soundscape notation methods
• Keynote sounds are noticed only when they change or vanish
• Keynote sounds shape behavior without needing conscious attention
• Keynote sounds underpin and rhythmically shape daily life
• Landscape art imitating nature grew as cities swallowed the countryside
• Learning to respect silence is the first task of the acoustic designer
• Listeners verify perception by reproducing sounds, not narrating them
• Literary evocations of quiet halved across two centuries
• Literary mentions of silence fell steadily from 1810 to 1960
• Lo-fi soundscapes erase the distinction between signal and noise
• Modern immersive listening re-creates primal ocean-womb acoustics
• Morphology classifies sound changes over time or space
• Much age-related hearing decline stems from environmental noise, not aging itself
• Music and machines have traded acoustic effects both ways
• Music can function as the sonic expression of a built environment like suburbia
• Natural sound virtually never exceeds safe human hearing and vocal thresholds
• Nineteenth-century musical form and instruments mirrored industrial aggression
• No part of a sound is ever truly stationary
• Noise abatement is futile because sound cannot be prohibited outright
• Noise by-laws function as ethnographic records of cultural sound attitudes
• Noise is fundamentally subjective rather than an objective property of sound
• Noise legislation is a documentary register of acoustic phobias
• Noise pollution persists because music education neglected soundscape awareness
• Noise represents wasted energy in any engineered system
• Noise went unrecognized as harm because it could not be measured
• Only music can duplicate the complexity of the soundscape
• Ordinary objects can be transformed into musical instruments through attention
• People draw rounded shapes for steady interior drone sounds.
• Personal acoustic space expands while physical space shrinks.
• Plato sized the ideal city at the reach of a single speaker’s voice.
• Pre-metronome musical tempo was set to the human pulse
• Prohibiting sound is futile, so acoustic design must replace noise abatement
• Property law protects only the ground, not the acoustic space above it.
• Proscription’s honor makes silence the ultimate acoustic power
• Quieting internal mental noise precedes acoustic redesign work
• Rapid sound change drives nostalgic fictionalization of past sounds
• Recorded vocal sound is no longer tied to a specific body or place
• Recording technology made musical repetition disposable and music a stabilizer
• Religious sound signaling correlates with missionary intent.
• Repressed taboo words re-emerge elsewhere as profanity shifts to virtue words
• Reverberation time is defined as a 60-decibel energy decay
• Sacred Noise is authority to make sound without censure
• Seashore breakers match the relaxed human breathing rhythm
• Silence takes its meaning from surrounding sound
• Siren loudness has risen from 95 to 122 dBA over a century
• Siren volume has risen steadily across a century.
• Snow’s sound changes character with falling temperature
• Sound descriptions are trustworthy only when the writer heard them directly
• Sound events can be compared historically and geographically by mapping
• Sound grain is regular modulation, opposed to isolated transients
• Sound maps are built from repeatable measurement methods
• Sound mass is predominant bandwidth while grain is regular internal fluctuation
• Sound measurement has shifted from flat physical scales toward human-perception-weighted scales
• Sound power constitutes a form of imperialistic acoustic domination
• Soundmarks uniquely define a community’s acoustic identity and deserve protection
• Soundscapes can be deliberately orchestrated like musical compositions
• Soundwalks use mapped scores to guide attention to specific sounds
• Standard acoustic diagrams poorly match natural human hearing instincts and cause confusion
• Steady-state flat-line sound is rare in nature and emerges only with the Industrial Revolution
• Taoism offers a philosophy that makes noise legislation needless
• Telephone hold music measurably slowed Parisian callers
• The ear is an erotic organ, taking in sound like a lover’s tongue
• The entire soundscape can be treated as one ongoing musical composition
• The human body provides the scale for comprehending acoustic rhythms
• The legally protected siesta lengthens with latitude toward southern sun
• The mechanical clock made audible time audible for the first time in history
• The nails-on-chalkboard aversion resists single-discipline explanation
• The splitting of sounds from their sources coincided with the soundscape’s decline into lo-fi
• The tape recorder enables reclaiming lost aural discrimination
• The three-minute pop song length predates and outlasts its technical cause
• The world’s soundscape can be treated as a musical composition we co-author
• Tuning the lengths of irrigation bamboo would produce musical melody.
• Urbanization shortened the distance humans can hear and see
• Visual dominance and devotion to machines, not crowding, create sonic degradation
• Water concerts could emerge from sculptor-designer collaboration
• Water produces different sounds when striking different surfaces and materials.
• Weber’s elective-affinity method relocated ideology analysis from content to structural homology
• Western dynamic hierarchy in music is a trained perceptual illusion
• Western linear time consciousness was acoustically enforced by church clock bells
• Wind harps invented independently in Asia produced distinct single tones