Acoustemology

TOM RICE
University of Exeter, United Kingdom

“Acoustemology” is a portmanteau word combining “acoustic” and “epistemology” to

foreground sonic experience as a way of knowing. The term was coined by anthropol-
ogist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld in 1992 through reflections on his research
among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Feld observed that the Kaluli had a sophis-
ticated understanding and appreciation of their sound-rich rainforest environment;
sound was “central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth” (1996, 97). For-
est sounds were closely bound up with Kaluli notions of place and emplacement, but
they were also integrated into local cosmology, poetry, and song. Building upon and
critiquing existing vocabulary for theorizing human engagement with sound (such as
Murray Schafer’s [1977] “soundscape” and “acoustic ecology”), Feld used acoustemol-
ogy to describe an accumulated set of hearing, listening, and sounding practices consol-
idated as culture. Numerous sound researchers from anthropology, ethnomusicology,
and a variety of other backgrounds have found acoustemology to be a relevant and
constructive concept and it is recognized as a key word within the burgeoning inter-
disciplinary field of sound studies. It has been applied to forms of acoustic knowledge
identified in numerous cultural and historical contexts, from Shakespearean England
to contemporary Mombasa. Efforts have also been made both to modify the term and
to diversify the contexts in which it is applicable.

The origins of acoustemology

Thanks to Feld’s own writings, we know a great deal about the origins of the term
“acoustemology.” In 1976, Feld went to live with the Kaluli, a small group living in
the forests of the Great Papuan Plateau in the Southern Highlands province of Papua
New Guinea. He returned to this area, called Bosavi, several times during the 1980s
and 1990s. Like other anthropologists who had studied the peoples of the area, Feld
observed that the Kaluli had an acute acoustic sensitivity to their rainforest environ-
ment (Schieffelin [1976] 2005). Because the density of vegetation in the forest meant
that much of the Kaluli’s surroundings were visually hidden, sounds were relied upon
as primary indicators of presence. At the same time, the rainforest was sonically rich,
the sounds of insects, birds, and other wildlife as well as those of running and falling
water combining to create a particular density of sound. Shifting sonic presences and
dynamics could communicate a great deal to knowledgeable Kaluli listeners. As Feld
writes, in Bosavi, “sounds are heard as time of day, season of year, vegetation cycles,
migratory patterns, forest heights and depths” (1994, 11).
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2000
2 A CO U S T E M O L O G Y

Listening and sonic knowledge were of great value to the Kaluli in practical tasks
such as orientation, navigation, and hunting. However, during his fieldwork, Feld also
learned that the Kaluli had a particular ethno-ornithology in which they regarded birds
as spirits and interpreted their calls as the voices of ancestors. Bird calls were sometimes
echoed in melodic patterns in Kaluli songs and, importantly, the voice of the singer was
heard as that of a bird, which, being in turn the voice of an absent relative, had the power
to produce strong emotions of sorrow and melancholy in the listening audience, often
moving them to tears. Song lyrics frequently charted the imagined paths of birds/spirits
through the forest, passing through places linked to a particular ancestor, triggering
affective memories, and causing relatives to weep. Hearing birds as spirits and singers
as birds meant music became a reflection of the local ecology. This was also true of the
Kaluli practice of singing with and to waterfalls, where songs narrated a “flow” of water
through a landscape, once again passing through emotionally significant places. The
Kaluli perceived a kinaesthetic resonance between the flow of waterways through the
landscape and the flow of the voice through the body. At the same time, Feld detected
a parallel between the materiality of sound in the Kaluli environment and their pre-
ferred style of musical performance. Just as the rainforest sound was dense, with layers
overlapping and interweaving and one sound only standing out momentarily before
receding back into the sonic mix, the Kaluli tended to sing in a way in which single
voices were only heard briefly before falling back into a vocal polyphony. Clearly the
Kaluli related to their sonic surroundings in sophisticated ways, and Feld introduced
the term “acoustemology” to describe the distinctive way of knowing place through
sound that he found in Bosavi.
It is important to bear in mind that the auditory culture of the Kaluli has been affected
by wider changes. Feld himself has observed the influence on local musical practices of
Western instruments and songs, which were brought to Bosavi by missionaries, by men
returning from labor contracts elsewhere in Papua New Guinea or abroad, or heard
over the radio and on cassette. While some songs may now be played with ensembles of
guitars and ukuleles, and sung in both Bosavi and Tok Pisin with gender-specific vocal
harmonies introduced by church singing, Feld maintains that continuity with tradi-
tional Kaluli musical styles is distinctly audible. There is still, for instance, a preference
for creating a particular layered, overlapping density of musical sound accompanying
lyrics in which places and place names are a notable feature. The Kaluli sound world
may be one in which “sensibilities have collided,” but Feld (2003, 237) urges that sound
nonetheless remains integral to Kaluli notions of knowing and being. He suggests
that Kaluli acoustemology should be understood as a layered history in which church
and popular music listening, singing, and playing lie on top of a history of intimate
interactions with and sensitivities to the forest and its multiple sonic presences.

Intellectual underpinnings

Acoustemology can be understood as part of a deliberate effort “to argue the potential
of acoustic knowing, of sounding as a condition of and for knowing, of sonic presence
and awareness as potent shaping forces in how people make sense of experiences”
 A CO U S T E M O L O G Y 3

(Feld 1996, 97). It constitutes a reaction to a perceived sensory bias, a tendency

in Western thought to prioritize a visual epistemology and a related propensity in
anthropological practice to assume vision to be the dominant sensory modality
cross-culturally both in engagement with the environment and in social life as a whole.
Acoustemology points to the existence of alternative ways of encountering the world
and to the possibility of hearing other realities.
The introduction of the term “acoustemology” also represents an effort on Feld’s part
to expand the vocabulary available for the description and study of human engagement
with sound. It constitutes a simultaneous development and critique of Schafer’s (1977)
soundscape concept. Like soundscape, acoustemology emphasizes the importance of
sound in human experience, particularly in relation to place and notions of emplace-
ment. However, through its derivation from and association with the landscape concept,
soundscape arguably conveys a sense of a sound environment that is static and in some
sense arrayed before a detached observer. Feld, like other critics of soundscape, suggests
that the term fails to capture the experience of sound as being produced by move-
ment through, participation in, or interaction with an environment that is dynamic
and continually in flux. At the same time, soundscape substitutes the ocularcentrism
of landscape (through its association with the landscape genre of painting) with an
audiocentric term, whereas Feld suggests that, despite its emphasis on the importance
of sonic knowing, acoustemology allows for recognition of the manner in which sonic
knowledge develops through interplay between hearing and the other senses. This is
illustrated in his work in Papua New Guinea, where he stresses that, for the Kaluli, place
is heard and felt synesthetically, kinaesthetically, and affectively as they move through
the environment, seeing, smelling, and feeling the textures and contours of the ground
underfoot and responding to the forest in song.
The acoustemology concept also both builds upon and critiques the concept of
“acoustic ecology,” also associated with Schafer (1977). Acoustic ecology is concerned
with the relationship, mediated through sound, between living beings (primar-
ily humans) and their sound environments. In this sense, acoustic ecology and
acoustemology have much in common. However, at the level of practice, acoustic
ecology tends to prioritize analytical activities such as mapping the variety of sound
sources in an environment and measuring the frequency, volume, and duration of
detected sounds. Charting a soundscape in this way creates data that in turn support
assessments of the quality of the studied (generally urban) sound environments, and
allow for the identification of ways in which that sonic quality is being eroded by
human-generated noise or might be improved through “soundscape design” (Schafer
1977). Acoustemology encourages an approach that is reflexive, not preoccupied with
an evaluation of sound environments but sensitive to sonic ways of knowing and the
manner in which they are shaped by environmental, cultural, and historical factors. An
acoustemologist might ask, for example, how the processes of mapping and evaluating
sound environments associated with acoustic ecology might be contextualized by
reference to cultural–historical attitudes that give value and salience to those activities.
In outlining these critiques of soundscape and acoustic ecology, Feld also details
how acoustemology is grounded in canonical sociological, anthropological, and
philosophical literature. It is informed, for instance, by Mauss and Bourdieu, Feld
4 A CO U S T E M O L O G Y

describing his interactions with Kaluli adults and children in the rainforest as “a daily
lesson in listening as habitus, a forceful demonstration of routinized, emplaced hearing
as an embodied mastery of locality” (2015, 18). Sonic knowledge is often exercised
unconsciously through historically accumulated and socially acquired interpretive
frames and attitudes. At the same time, in emphasizing that Kaluli acoustemology
is both a form of embodied knowledge and felt experience, Feld acknowledges the
influence of, for instance, Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 1968) work on embodiment and Don
Idhe’s (2007) phenomenological approach to sound and the voice. “Acoustemology” is
also informed by ideas of “relational ontology,” which draw attention to connectedness
as a condition of and for being. Relational ontology allows sonic knowledge to be
understood as emergent and contingent, unfolding through interplay between humans
but also a wider ecology of environments, materialities, technologies, and nonhuman
forms of life.

Multiple acoustemologies

Feld has applied the idea of acoustemology beyond his Kaluli research to more recent
projects. He refers, for example, to European village acoustemologies revealed through
his work on bells in Finland, France, Greece, and Italy. He also points to the urban
acoustemology of Accra, which he encountered through his work on contemporary
jazz in Ghana. The term “acoustemology” has been taken up by scholars from a variety
of disciplinary backgrounds to describe the culturally particular ways of knowing and
experiencing through sound that they have identified in their own research settings.
Musicologist Suzanne Cusick (2013), for instance, refers to an “acoustemology of
detention” in her investigation of uses of sound, music, and silence in the detention
camps of the so-called global war on terror, while cultural geographer Katie Hemsworth
(2015) identifies “carceral acoustemologies” in her work on prison sound. Professor
of English Bruce R. Smith presents “an acoustemology of early modern England” in
his work on Shakespearean soundscapes, seeking “to investigate whether people heard
things—and remembered what they heard—in ways different from today” (1999, 48).
His work constitutes part of a wider field of what historian Mark M. Smith (2015) calls
“historical acoustemology.”
Multiple acoustemologies may coexist within a given social setting. In hospitals, for
instance, patients, nurses, and doctors know through sound in markedly different ways
(Rice 2013). Patients’ auditory perspectives on wards, which they often experience as
noisy and even frightening, differ from those of nurses, who draw on sound cues from
patients and medical technologies as well as shifts in the general ward sound level in
identifying priorities when allocating care and attention. These ways of knowing the
ward differ in turn from more formal applications of acoustic knowledge by doctors in
their diagnostic work, for instance in stethoscopic listening or cardiac ultrasonography.
Here, specialist knowledge is focused on the patient’s body, and doctors arguably
enact an acoustemology of the body, a notion that shifts acoustemology away from
its original grounding in engagements with place, diversifying the spatial reaches and
possibilities of the concept. Anthropologist and sound researcher Andrew Eisenberg
 A CO U S T E M O L O G Y 5

(2013, 187) also identifies acoustemological multiplicity in his work on Mombasa Old
Town but emphasizes contestation, pointing to “acoustemological disjuncture,” or
“competing acoustemological commitments.” Within the Old Town, the Islamic call to
prayer (adhān) and Friday sermon (khutbas) are regularly broadcast over loudspeakers.
Muslim residents and religious leaders consider these broadcasts both sacred and
sacralizing, but the broadcasts’ generalized audibility creates tension with the widely
held, broadly liberal–democratic logic of urban public and private space in Mombasa.

Developing acoustemology

Influenced by work on the social construction of technology and technoculture,

Thomas Porcello (2004) introduced a complementary term to acoustemology,
“techoustemology,” in order to emphasize the increasing importance of technological
mediation in the production of sound and particularly music. Technological mediation,
Porcello argues (2004, 270), almost invariably shapes our expectations of how sounds
should sound, and is rarely absent from what he calls “the sonic signal chain” in all
parts of the modern world. Acoustemologies, then, can seldom be extricated from the
processes of technological mediation that make them possible. Growing recognition
of the importance of technology in sonic and musical practice points to potentially
fruitful avenues for future acoustemological investigation.
By underscoring the importance of technology in the production of acoustic knowl-
edge, Porcello points to the influence of theories of relational ontology on Feld’s for-
mulation of acoustemology. Feld suggests that acoustemology emerges at the interface
of environments, materialities, technologies, and nonhuman forms of life. Technolo-
gies are an important item in this list, and the inclusion of nonhuman forms of life
is also interesting in terms of the possibilities it suggests for future acoustemological
research. Feld draws on human engagement with the sounds of nonhuman animals
(particularly birds) in his work on the Kaluli. In his later work in Ghana, he examined
the importance of toad sounds in the sonic knowledge of Accra. However, Feld has not
explored the acoustemologies of nonhuman animals themselves. The ways in which
animals know through sound and in which nonhuman animal acoustemologies inter-
sect (or not) with human ones represent promising terrain for future inquiry and point
to the possibility of an expansion of acoustemology into new disciplinary fields, most
obviously bioacoustics.
In their discussion of points of productive overlap between sound studies and deaf
studies, Friedner and Helmreich (2012) propose a further simultaneous development
and critique of acoustemology. They consider how, for instance, signing and other non-
spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. They also
point to the way in which the experience of exposure to infrasound or low-frequency
vibration complicates the boundary between hearing and feeling. By describing these
phenomena, Friedner and Helmreich seek to confuse deaf–hearing dichotomies and
to demonstrate the need for an acoustemology that “expands beyond a limited defini-
tion of the auditory” (2012, 75). Purely audiological conceptions of sound and hence
purely auditory acoustemologies might be unhelpfully and unrealistically restrictive.
6 A CO U S T E M O L O G Y

Friedner and Helmreich call for less sonocentric acoustemologies, thereby widening
the scope of the acoustemology concept. In doing so, however, they attack one of the
principles behind the original introduction of the idea of acoustemology, namely that it
was designed to draw attention specifically to sound, hearing, and sonic knowledge in
an intellectual environment where these tended to be overlooked. Acoustemology posi-
tions hearing as a kind of experience that generates distinctive orientations to the world.
Nonetheless, the fact that Feld has emphasized the need to acknowledge the interplay
between sound and the other senses suggests an open-mindedness to the notion that
acoustemology might expand beyond “a limited definition of the auditory.”
There is a sense in which the term “acoustemology” implies an additional “ology,”
because the identification or recognition of an acoustemology requires the study (how-
ever close or cursory, formal or casual) of that sonic way of knowing. A reference to
acoustemology, then, suggests both a sonic way of knowing and the study of a sonic way
of knowing. At the same time, as has been explained in this entry, acoustemology is an
analytical term with a particular intellectual and social history. One of the developments
that has given rise to the formation of the concept is a growing sense within anthropol-
ogy and across the social sciences and humanities more generally that more attention
should to be paid to the role(s) of sound in social and cultural life. This broadening
academic consciousness of the significance of the study of sound has led to a corre-
sponding increase in writing about sound and creating recordings of sound, and, slowly
but surely, an increasing use of sound in the presentation of data and ideas through
audio illustration, composition, and documentary. Importantly, then, Feld’s formula-
tion of acoustemology has contributed to the emergence in anthropology and sound
studies of multiple but complementary “academic acoustemologies”: ways of knowing,
thinking, and sharing ideas about studied worlds through sound.

SEE ALSO: Bells; Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002); Ecological Anthropology; Ethnogra-

phy; Ethnomusicology; Fieldwork; Missionaries and Anthropology; Music and Lan-
guage; Sound, Anthropology of; Sound Recordings; Visual Anthropology

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Cusick, Suzanne G. 2013. “Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the ‘Global War on Ter-
ror.’” In Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, edited by
Georgina Born, 275–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eisenberg, Andrew J. 2013. “Islam, Sound and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship
on the Kenyan Coast.” In Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Expe-
rience, edited by Georgina Born, 186–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Feld, Steven. 1994. “From Ethnomusicology to Echo-Muse-Ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer
in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest.” Soundscape Newsletter 8: 9–13.
Feld, Steven. 1996. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua
New Guinea.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 91–135. Santa Fe,
NM: School of American Research Press.
Feld, Steven. 2003. “A Rainforest Acoustemology.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by
Michael Bull and Les Back, 223–39. Oxford: Berg.
 A CO U S T E M O L O G Y 7

Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt
Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Friedner, Michele, and Stefan Helmreich. 2012. “Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies.” Senses &
Society 7 (1): 72–86. doi:10.2752/174589312X13173255802120.
Hemsworth, Katie. 2015. “Carceral Acoustemologies: Historical Geographies of Sound in a
Canadian Prison.” In Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past,
edited by Karen M. Morin and Dominique Moran, 17–33. Oxford: Routledge.
Idhe, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.
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Porcello, Thomas. 2004. “Afterword.” In Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic
Cultures, edited by Thomas Porcello and Paul D. Greene, 269–81. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
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Rice, Tom. 2013. Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience. Canon
Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston Press.
Schafer, Murray R. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf.
Schieffelin, Edward. [1976] 2005. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New
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Smith, Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor.
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Smith, Mark M. 2015. “Echo.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny,
55–64. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.