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Art of Immersive Soundscapes. 2013. Ed. Pauline Minevich and Ellen Waterman with DVD ed. by James Harley. Regina, SK: University of Regina Press.
In the half-century since R. Murray Schafer coined the phrase, "soundscape" studies have become an essential discourse for music's historians, ethnographers, theorists, and composers. In its amalgam of sound and landscape, the word "soundscape" embraces a fluidity of meaning that has ranged, for different authors, from composed sound art and acoustic ecology (Schafer 1977; Truax 1978; Feld 1982, 2001), to introductory ethnomusicology (Shelemay 2001), to the history of science (Thompson, 2002), and even to popular ornithology (Chu 2008). Broadly speaking, the concept of a soundscape continues to explore "the middle ground between science, society, and the arts" through the contexts, ecologies, memories, and habits that anchor sound in specific places (Schafer 1977; qtd. by Minevich in the introduction of Art of Immersive Soundscapes: 2).
The authors of Art of Immersive Soundscapes situate the book within Schafer's Canadian tradition of socially responsible art, with a turn towards a new variation: the "immersive" soundscape. In a series of 14 essays and an accompanying DVD, the book explores soundscape art as a medium that immerses its listeners into the artist's world through technological and phenomenological mediations of space. Minevich and Waterman bring together an interdisciplinary array of authors who create "imaginative worlds that envelop, engage, and entrance us" by means of octophonic speaker setups, crackling Austrian wood fires, the alarms of a hospital's intensive treatment ward, and other devices (19).
The "immersion" in this book gestures to connections between past and future, and regional and international spaces, in a way that loosely engages a longstanding discourse of Western technological modernity and its seemingly dualistic relationship with nature. "Immersion" in Art of Immersive Soundscapes is obliquely haunted by the implied presence of virtual reality, which is the more mainstream context for notions of technological "immersion." And technological immersion is everpresent in this book's chapters, which feature technologies of audition, such as carefully curated speaker arrays, and technologies of creation, like the computerized data analytics of sonification in Chapters 4 and 5. Although the book examines works from North America, London, Austria, and even Japan, the editors' inclusion of essays by composers such as Barry Truax...