the.com/soundscape
The background noise you only notice once someone turns it off.
means The particular mix of sounds — natural, mechanical, or human — that characterizes a place or environment.
from A 20th-century coinage, built from 'sound' plus '-scape' (as in 'landscape'), borrowing that suffix's sense of a whole scene taking in at once. It's generally credited to acoustic ecologists and composers in the 1960s-70s who studied environments as sonic terrain — treating what you hear the way a landscape painter treats what you see.
- coined by
- R. Murray Schafer, acoustic ecologist, 1960s
- not just music
- traffic and birdsong both qualify
- key idea
- environments have sonic fingerprints worth protecting
- film trick
- designers build entire worlds from room tone alone