World Listening Day 2024

A celebration of acoustic awareness.

Listen up Earthworms!

Today’s specimen is in honor of World Listening Day, which includes a complimentary playlist for your aural pleasure.

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Exuberantly,

CS Studio

UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS

1. If you missed ‘em the shirts we designed for the Koyoto Cactus Club are still available in our little bazaar in the cloud. Buy your grumpy neighbor a gift!

2. Our next LA Parking Lot Sale is happening next Saturday, July 27! Mark thy calendars, will have some funs surprises at this one…

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Composer Hildegard Westerkamp recording the sounds of a camel in the desert outside Rajasthan, India, in 1992.

Have you “heard”? Today is World Listening Day!

Which also happens to be the 91st birthday of legendary “soundscape ecologist” R. Murray Schaefer.

Members of the World Soundscape Project on the steps of Simon Fraser University in 1973. From left to right: R. Murray Schafer, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax, and Howard Broomfield.

Schaefer was a composer, author, and educator who served as founding director of the World Soundscape Project, also known as the WSP, from the late 1960s into the 1970s.

The aim of the WSP was to help people “better understand the world and its natural environment through the practice of listening and field recording.” The WSP is where we get terms like “soundscape” and “noise pollution” as this niche group of hippy-audiophiles went on to inspire entire genres of music, from the field recordings of Lawrence English to the interspecies musical collaborations of Jim Nollman, all of which led to the development of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

Jim Nollman playing guitar with a pod of orcas in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Canada in 1987.

As we celebrate this most hallowed of holidays, let us also take a moment of silence to acknowledge the contributions of the late great John Cage, sometimes called “the pope of non-musical sound” (whatever the heck that means), as well as other composers who brought to our attention the pre-extant chatter of the living acoustic environment, from which we learn that “moments of silence” have never been silent.

Album cover for “Looking Back,” a compilation of rediscovered archival tapes from a 1999 recording session at the Deep Listening Studios in Kingston, New York, by the Deep Listening Band (Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, David Gamper) with special guests Joe McPhee and Randy Raine-Reusch.

Whether it’s the 60Hz cycle of La Monte Young or Pauline Oliveros’ idea of Deep Listening, whereby one listens not just with their ears but with their entire body, artists like Oliveros, Cage, and Young came up alongside visual artists like Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria—who renounced the domesticated conceit of the gallery for the chaotic splendor of the world outside. A place without doors, walls, or ceilings. One teeming with the diverse sounds, voices, calls, tones, and songs of nonhuman others: birds, clouds, ants, rocks, sunbeams, squirrels, worms, and the rest.

Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels” sculpture in the Great Basin Desert, Utah.

It was only a matter of time before avant-garde musicians renounced the stuffy confines of the concert hall and its cloistered glass ceilings to imbibe the insane symphony of nature itself, reminding us once again how porous the boundary between art and life and between human and non-human really is (if such boundaries ever existed in the first place).

So wherever you are today, take a minute... hell, take four minutes and thirty-three, to turn off your phones, stop, and listen to the chaotic, heart-burstingly beautiful, bonkers song of our strange little world… how songful it is!

POST SCRIPT

For you readers out there, HERE'S a link to one of our fave 20th-century fiction writers' short stories, "The Sound Sweep." It's about a mute boy who works as a janitor, vacuuming residual sounds from objects in a world where audible music has been replaced by ultrasonic sound. When the boy meets a washed-up opera singer living as a squatter in an abandoned recording studio, an unlikely friendship of touching, melancholic beauty ensues.

If you don't already own this collection, for Christ's sake, treat yourself!

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Thanks for listening to The Specimen Monthly!