I’ve thought a lot lately about the effect that sound, and par­tic­u­larly music, has on our envi­ron­ment. This is what peo­ple fre­quently call Eco­mu­si­col­ogy, though I’m not crazy about that term.

Basi­cally, do we have a right to make noise? How must it feel for a bird liv­ing on my street? Does it enjoy (or notice) the sounds of cars, air­planes, peo­ple play­ing soc­cer in the park across the street? Maybe the bird doesn’t but the squir­rel might.

In a purely phys­i­cal sense, any unin­tended noise made by a machine through the use of a non-renewable energy source is waste, though of course cer­tain orig­i­nally unin­tended noises have devel­oped social pur­poses (for exam­ple, silent cars would be quite dan­ger­ous). But we can’t be faulted for not being per­fect right off the bat; I’m sure the world will get qui­eter as the energy cri­sis becomes more acute.

Now what about the noise of music? In the past, you only ever heard music when peo­ple played it in front of you, and this was rare enough and bound by suf­fi­cient social con­ven­tion that most peo­ple gen­er­ally enjoyed it (the excep­tion being street musi­cians who would try to annoy the locals so that they would get bribes to per­form else­where). Nowa­days, how­ever, music of all kinds is every­where. The expe­ri­ence of hear­ing music is the norm rather than the exception.

Music is cheap and plen­ti­ful, and indi­vid­ual per­for­mances (whether live or recorded) have as much value as any other indi­vid­ual mass-produced object; that is, close to none. Yet music is not free to cre­ate; there is an eco­nomic and eco­log­i­cal cost, as well as the psy­cho­log­i­cal cost of being exposed to vary­ing degrees of noise at var­i­ous times, often not of our own choos­ing. The use of music has mea­sur­able phys­i­cal effects on the world around us.

I sup­pose if we all had unlim­ited finan­cial resources and mobile social ties, we could all choose to live in the sonic envi­ron­ment of our choice, includ­ing decid­ing on the kinds of music we want to be exposed to. This would at least reduce the psy­cho­log­i­cal cost of music-making, although not the eco­nomic or eco­log­i­cal ones. We might there­fore choose a range of expo­sure from “none, except when I play it myself” to “sur­prise me as much as pos­si­ble, I like vari­ety”. But this isn’t really real­is­tic, so most of us suf­fer through less than ideal sonic envi­ron­ments, usu­ally by learn­ing to uncon­sciously tune things out.

That’s too bad, because lis­ten­ing can be very enjoy­able, and is one of the few truly unique expe­ri­ences left in our mass-produced envi­ron­ments. The “sound­scapes” (to use R. Mur­ray Shafer’s term) of dif­fer­ent places are very different–San Diego, Toronto, New York, Ams­ter­dam, Cologne, London–these cities all sound very dif­fer­ent from one another. And guess what? They also enjoy dif­fer­ent kinds of music scenes. I’m sure there must be a cor­re­la­tion, although clearly eco­nomic, cul­tural, and other incen­tives play a role too. But those other fac­tors also play a role in the sound­scape of the city, so in a sense, how the city sounds is tied to how its music sounds.

So I can’t help but think that as our cities evolve to become “greener” and nec­es­sar­ily qui­eter, our music will change too. It will become more respon­si­ble, as will the ways that we use it. Last year we reached the point where over 50% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion now lives in cities, which are arti­fi­cial places, cre­ated by peo­ple for peo­ple. Our music will there­fore increas­ingly become city music (what­ever that may be), appro­pri­ate to the lives of city dwellers. This is obvi­ous when we look at the sharp decline in the cre­ation of so-called “pas­toral” music in the 20th cen­tury. How many peo­ple nowa­days have ever spent an after­noon lying in the sun in a sheep pas­ture? Dif­fer­ent cul­tural expe­ri­ences for a dif­fer­ent time…