When words sing: collective sounding after R. Murray Schafer

Project leaders: Chiara Aquilani and Francesco Bombarda

R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) was a composer, educator, theorist of soundscape, and a founding figure of acoustic ecology. From the late 1960s onwards, through the World Soundscape Project, which he founded at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Schafer developed an approach to listening as a way of understanding and becoming aware of the relationship between individuals and their acoustic environment. This perspective also informs his compositional work, particularly his writing for choir, in which natural phenomena and sounds are often evoked through mimetic or symbolic means. Among the compositional techniques he employed are vocal onomatopoeia, extended vocal techniques, and the creation of complex, semi-aleatoric timbral formations (choric textures).

Drawing on Schafer’s theoretical and pedagogical legacy, ITER Research Ensemble is carrying on a research and experimental project exploring the collective dimension of sonic experience. Developed through a series of dedicated sessions, the project brings together listening exercises, improvisation, and the collaborative construction of “soundscapes”. (Here, the term is used in a less conventional sense, but one found in Schafer’s pedagogical writings: as “collections of sounds heard in a given place”.) The practices developed within the project revisit and critically expand upon ideas and exercises proposed by Schafer in works such as Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course (1967), …When Words Sing (1970), and A Sound Education (1991).

The activities carried out so far have focused on active listening, soundwalking, and the practice of the soundchronicle — the vocal improvisation of a soundscape that unfolds as a narrative (for example, a thunderstorm). Each exercise is followed by a collective discussion of the participants’ responses and observations, documented through audio recordings or written notes. These practices function as experimental tools for investigating a range of dynamics: how attention is directed and filtered; the active role of silence; auditory memory; the gap between intention and perception; the ways participants influence one another in the process of sonic co-creation; the role of space as an active, living agent; and the ways in which sonic gestures interact to produce forms of coordination, mutual adaptation, and collective intentionality.