What is acoustemology? Definition and examples
‘Acoustemology’ combines the words ‘acoustic’ and ‘epistemology’, with acoustic referring to sound and hearing and epistemology to the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. This field, then, can be understood as relating to “a sonic way of knowing and being in the world” or a “knowing-with and knowing-through the audible”.
The term was coined in 1992 by Steven Feld – an anthropologist, filmmaker, musician, and sound artist – as a result of fieldwork he conducted over 25 years with the Indigenous Kaluli (or Bosavi) people in Papua New Guinea. Feld “sought to describe” the sophistication of the Kaluli’s “practices of listening, hearing, and sounding” within their rainforest territory, and “their intricate knowledge” of its sounds – which, in the forest context, “reveal […] what vision conceals”.
In this way, Feld came to understand “acoustic knowing as a centrepiece of Kaluli experience” and fundamental “to experiential truth” for their forest lives. More broadly, acoustemology can be said to refer to “a methodology of and for listening to histories of listening”, and the idea that ‘place’ and ‘voice’ derive from “an audible archive of long-lived relational attunements and antagonisms”. Other work by Feld within acoustemology has ranged from “European towns and city bells to diasporic jazz in West Africa”.
Sound engineer Andrea Arenas describes acoustemology as an effort to theorize “how sound and sound experiences shape the different ways of being and knowing the world, and of our cultural realities” – including the way in which perception (as conditioned by the surrounding culture) affects these outcomes.
The term has subsequently been adopted in a range of disciplines which are part of sound studies, meaning that it has become a key piece of terminology regarding human interaction with sound, reflecting Feld’s belief that the concept is “open-ended” and “generative rather than prescriptive and which invites ongoing empirical research and interdisciplinary discussion”.
Featured photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash
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