R murray schafer biography of martin luther

AMBIENCE

On December 28, 1967, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation debuted a radio piece by famed pianist Glenn Gould, titled The Idea of North. Opaque yet spacious, this experiment would become the first in a trio of ambient documentaries to be produced over the next decade. Each episode explores the theme of solitude from a different geographical vantage, co-implicating form and content; for, as Gould demonstrates, telegraphy had long since complicated isolation as a lifestyle. But Gould’s obsessive pursuit of this ideal produces a multiperspectival portrait of settler consciousness, at the same time as it thematizes and intervenes in its medium as a technical means of colonial expansion.

With an ear to Europe, these radio pieces were assembled after the fashion of major postwar developments in tape music and collage. Stylistically, The Idea of North seems conspicuously stricken with an anxiety of influence befitting of an incipient nationalism; for it was clearly Gould’s intent to furnish his avant-garde composition a local character. As to whether Gould meant to modernize Canadian content, or to Canadianize modern form, his approach presumes ambiguity, to make strange a standard broadcast format. In Gould’s hourlong intervention, the soothing probity of the professional narrator’s voice is edged out by so much overlapping and uncertain talk. While certain formal precedents for this collaged approach de-emphasize semantics in favour of timbral and or ‘purely musical’ characteristics of source sounds, Gould’s regionalist reply preserves the referentiality of each sound as recorded; if only to sublate them altogether in a narrative tapestry.

Would it have been uncomfortable for general interest listeners—a postulate from which proceeds the mandate of national radio, but who actually identifies with this mean

According to McLuhan, the medium of electricity brought us back to aural world:

Visual man is the most extreme case of abstractionism because he has separated his visual faculty from the other senses, giving him unlimited powers of blue-printing knowledge and experience of political programming. Only Graeco-Roman man has ever had this visual faculty in isolation, and today it is threatened, not by any single factors such as television or radio, but by the electric speed of information movement in general. Electric speed is approximately the speed of light, and this constitutes an information environment that has basically an acoustic structure. At the speed of light, information is simultaneous from all directions and this is the structure of the act of hearing, i.e., the message or effect of electric information is acoustic.

Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987.

The clearly dominant element of seeing and the visual element in academic studies and education was challenged in Vancouver in the late 1960s by Raymond Murray Schafer, Barry Truax and later, Hildegard Westerkamp. They proposed a concept of “soundscape,” which links the external reality with the cognitive processes which enable humans to understand these processes. The Soundscape Project also included the aim to map past and present soundscapes as a way to preserve “soundmarks” and “sound environments” which are in danger of disappearing. Schafer, Truax and Westerkamp proposed combining an increased awareness of our sonic environment with an active agency, or “tuning of the world,” to contribute to a higher quality sonic environment and to transform the “lo-fi” soundscapes caused by industrialization and mechani