Nature and Culture, Noise and Music: Perception and Action

This brief chapter has three goals: 1) to introduce some ideas from ecologicalpsychology into ecomusicology; 2) to use these to expose and critique assumptions we may have about the distinctions to be made between nature and culture, noise and music; and 3) to apply this ecological thinking to how we teach music, particularly in higher education. A number of writers and musicians have helped highlight and critique the sharp distinctions between music and noise made in folk and academic aesthetics, or to show how such distinctions rest upon and indeed mirror wider sociological issues (Cage 1961, Schaeffer 1966, Shafer 1977, Attali 1985, Truax 2001). The idea of noise and its relationship to music have been brought to the forefront of writing on music (Hegarty 2007). I aim to critique this opposition by exploring how artistic and everyday modes of perception and action rest upon identical processes of sensitivity to information, thus questioning our assumptions about culture and nature as objects of study (Windsor 2004, Windsor and de Bézenac 2012). This ecological approach to music (Clarke 2005, Reybrouck 2005) embeds musicology within a semiotics bounded by the physicality of action and perception, and it provides a neat counterpoint to the relativism that Cook finds troubling (Cook 2000, Dibben and Windsor 2001).