Aesthetic/Artistic
A contrasting approach involves appreciating sounds for their unique textures and qualities. This is an aesthetic matter and the focus is very much on emotional impact, on the subjective human experience of hearing particular sounds or entire soundscapes. In this realm, poetic interpretations are valid and encouraged, and may be the best and most effective way to convey one’s deepest feelings and sentiments. Sounds can be likened to foods of different colors, providing a large palette of delicious possibilities, each having a different flavor when tasted by the listener.
Appreciation is generally rooted in variability, in the fact that everything is continuously changing, that each moment is absolutely unique. The song of a bird heard one morning will be different from the song of the same bird heard that evening or the following morning, even if a scientific analysis reveals that they are all identical. In this domain, sounds are appreciated purely for their own sake, as powerful sensory or tactile experiences always occurring in a larger context. Furthermore, one need not identify the sources of sounds to experience and embrace them with all of one’s being.
In the realm of professional art, the aesthetic appreciation of sounds is in its infancy, even though groundwork has been laid by innovative thinkers such as Murray Schafer, who used the term “soundscape” to refer to all sounds heard at a particular place and time. The emerging field of “soundscape art” has a number of followers, especially in Europe, while the related fields of “acoustic ecology” and “soundscape ecology” provide connections between the arts and the sciences.