Umgebungsaufnahmen (Environmental Recordings)

• 27.01. / 2 – 4 pm / C40.530 / Book Launch
• NOTE: This event takes place in German. Registration is not necessary. It is possible to join online.

Since the late 1960s, art and music theory has seen a conceptualization of the recording and output of sound as environment. The World Soundscape Project (WSP) led by Cana-dian composer R. Murray Schafer coined the term “acoustic ecology” during this period to describe the study of specific relationships between sound and environment. The concept contributes significantly to the consolidation of sound studies and to the con-stitution of sound as an independent epistemic object.

Maren Haffke’s book Umgebungsaufnahmen (Turia+Kant, 2025) explores the epistemol-ogy of acoustic ecologies from a media cultural studies perspective. In the context of the current proliferation of ecological concepts in media cultural studies, the history of a program explicitly understood as ecological in the field of sound studies since the late 1960s is highlighted by shedding light on Schaefer's exchange with Marshall McLuhan.

The book highlights the intersections between acoustic ecologies and ethnography, bio-acoustics, cybernetics, and information theory, as well as the reception of the neo-avant-garde and artistic questions of composition and documentation. With numerous sound samples, the book presentation invites listeners to tune in: Recordings of water noise and whale songs, street noise, and the sound of a political protest reveal episte-mological negotiations whose fault lines can be traced in current discussions (including at the Centre for Digital Cultures) on noise pollution, ‘settler acoustics’ (Gonzalez 2023), and the “entanglements of sound, heat, and colonial power” (Shiga 2024).

The book focuses in particular on the media history of field recordings as ‘environmental recordings’. In Schäfer's cybernetic program of directly linking ecology and design, sound recordings are made intelligible as media of environmental feedback processes, which, by means of technical modifications of perception, also promise changes in the environment: with specific (environmental or urban) political and social concerns. Thus, the WSP's recordings, with their connections to the field recording practice of salvage ethnography, not only serve as an archive of a sonic past whose preservation must be ensured, but also, in their aurality as “Modernity's Ear” (Kheshti 2015), carry the index of the future that is being designed in their preservation of traces.

Maren Haffke is junior professor for Sound Studies at the Institute of Culture and Aes-thetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at Leuphana University since summer term 2023. The book was written following a research stay at the International Research Center for Cul-tural Studies (IFK) in Vienna in early 2023.