The Tuning of the World

Abstract

Sound is an important part of the eco-aesthetics and environmental pastoralism of hippiedom. Arising as a temporal and cultural nexus of late-twentieth-century art, writing and activism, music and “sonological competence” (Schafer) as acoustic landscaping, stage broader relations, value systems, class and race boundaries of hippie ethos that are as potent as they are problematic. From the early popular science writing of Rachel Carlson in Silent Spring to the ecomusicological design project of Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project, to works like Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in A Room,” sonic metaphors and practices of this era enclose potentials for integration with, and responsibility for, nonhuman surrounds. Projections of calm quietude, harmonious incorporation, balance and one-ness, charged with difficult cultural, racial and class presumptions, were a poison-cure for the hippie, and may still be prolonging our own ecological ruination today.