Towards a New Equilibrium of Humanity's Relationship to Sound in Contemporary Society: Some Methodological Notes on Acoustic Ecology Applied to Musical Education

Abstract

The idea of a territorial planning in which the sound has a central role was formulated in the Seventies by Murray Schafer, particularly in his work entitled The Tuning of the World. Here, in fact, appeared the hypothesis of a new interdisciplinary field, the ‘acoustic design’. Based on Schafer’s suggestions, I’ll try to focus some of its potential applications in music teaching techniques and ideas: in a preliminary part, from some concrete examples of territorial planning, I will highlight the substantial sound’s marginalization in our culture; in a second section, I will make some remarks on the consequences of this same marginality in the music education’s organization in Portugal. From these premises, I intend to show, at the end of this work,
some possible educational achievements related to acoustic design and sound planning of the territory.