This bold concept, intended as an alternative not to music but to the problems of noise, led to the formation of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) at Simon Fraser University in the early 1970s. Although in common usage, the WSP often got abbreviated to ‘the soundscape project’, Schafer clung to the idea of its global basis, and in 1975 conducted a tour through Europe to make recordings and study five villages in each of five different countries.

The main purpose of the WSP’s work was to document acoustic environments, both functional and dysfunctional, and to increase public awareness of the importance of the soundscape, particularly through individual listening sensitivity. In current terminology, the goal is to put ‘acoustic ecology’ on the environmental agenda. However, given the importance of local action, one of the WSP’s first major publications was The Vancouver Soundscape, a booklet plus two records which appeared in 1973. Twenty years later, we have re-issued most of the recordings on a double CD, where the second CD consists of documentary recordings and soundscape compositions derived from digital recordings made in Vancouver in the 1990s. Not only was the Vancouver project probably the first systematic study of the soundscape of a city, but the 20-year span with the follow-up project gave a unique aural portrait of the rapid evolution of the city and its soundscape. Such longitudinal work is rare in acoustics and noise studies, and should be encouraged in soundscape documentation, since both personal and cultural memory lacks the ability to track such aural changes in the environment.

The Vancouver study also set the frame of the city for other work to follow. In the last decade, city ‘portraits’ on CD, varying in the degree to which they mingle documentation and composition, have appeared for Madrid, Amsterdam, Brasilia, and others. Many other unpublished compilations and individual research results have also been carried out. In other words, it can be argued that the WSP’s influence has spread worldwide as a concept practiced by locals, rather than outside ‘experts’. In fact, following the 1993 Tuning of the World conference in Banff, Alberta, an international organization known as the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) was formed, which maintains an extensive website and soundscape newsletter, as well as an on-line discussion group. In 1998, a Swedish group organized an international conference in Stockholm on the theme of acoustic ecology, and an administrative structure was set up during the conference for the WFAE consisting of both national or regional groups and individual members. In other words, the type of system that has emerged from this evolution can be described as an international network with local nodes.

So does this mean that the soundscape is a shared global experience? Although it is clearly the concern of a dedicated group of individuals who are networked worldwide, soundscapes are inherently local and particularized. To be sure, there is a disturbing analogy to economic and cultural globalization which is a force for homogenization, and that is the pervasive and invasive influence of technological sounds and noise. Almost everything about technology promotes standardization and uniformity, right from the micro level of hums and broad-band noise, through to the influences that produce ‘lo-fi’ soundscapes in every urban centre, as well as their surroundings (Schafer, 1977, 1993).

It is a simplification, but one which is suggestive: hi-fi soundscapes are varied