Page 193 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

176 Dorothea E. Schulz

media engagement, and debate (Nelson 2001, ch. 7; Hirschkind 2006, ch.
4; Schulz 2004, ch. 9; 2006).
How can the concept of soundscape help to elucidate the complex and
dynamic process of religious mediation and of making religious subjectivities
in Muslim contexts and beyond?

Soundscape: origins and uses of the term
The origins of “soundscape,” sometimes used interchangeably with “acoustic
space,” can be traced back to three fields of scholarly debate since the 1950s.
The first field of scholarly debate in which it gained currency is represented
by the journal Explorations (1953–9) created by McLuhan and Carpenter,
who, in their endeavor to counter predominant scholarly assumptions about
the hegemony of vision as principal mode of perception in modernity,
introduced the notion of acoustic space. Their University of Toronto Center
for Culture and Technology project focused on media transformations and
sought to reinterpret a Western history of orality and literacy from the
vantage point of twentieth-century electronic communications. Though both
authors shared an interest in relating studies of perception to transformations
brought about by new media technologies, they pursued distinct analytical
trajectories. Whereas McLuhan in his later work tended to contrast different
sensual forms of perception and thereby risked to replace visualism with
a similarly fallacious “audi-centrism,” Carpenter came to emphasize the
interrelationship between these perceptual modes. His article on acoustic
space (1960) explored the cultural implications of the “earpoint,” whereas
in later publications, he looked at the interplay between the visual and the
auditory as combined forms of perception.
In the mid-1950s, the term auditory space also gained currency in
scholarship reflecting on new developments in music studies. Here, it was
introduced by the music philosopher Zuckerkand (1956) who, while drawing
on Heidegger and Bergson, coined the term to emphasize the interpenetration
of auditory space and time. Other authors, among them Murray Schafer, used
the term to pinpoint the artificial nature of the distinction between “music,”
“sound,” and “noise” and to argue that what was commonly referred to
as “music” should be appreciated by reference to its location in a wider,
culturally and historically specific topography (or “scape”) of sound forms.
Influenced by the anthropologist Carpenter, Schafer was instrumental in
organizing the World Soundscape Project centering on an exploration of the
complexities of the “soundscape design” and “acoustic ecology” of Western
society and synthesized in Schafer’s “The Tuning of the World” (1977; also
see Attali 1977; Russolo 1986). Developments in installation arts similarly
focused on explorations of soundscapes by emphasizing the synaesthetic and