Introduction: Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950

Sound is at the centre of multiple ongoing debates in the ecological and geophysical sciences, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies.Particularly in the historically-minded humanities, sound has been repeatedly hailed as an emerging object of study without ever attaining the quantity or status of research in visual and pictorial fields (Morat).Scholars working in the history of science and technology have, over the last two decades, developed research on different aspects of sound history that reach beyond the history of acoustics as a science.There has been important work focused on listening practices, for instance, on hearing, and on the mechanization of sound (Thompson; Mody; Bijsterveld; Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field; Tkaczyk).Nevertheless, the role of sound in environmental history has been comparatively underexamined.This special issue emerges from an international, interdisciplinary project which aimed to overcome this gap by placing the relationship between nascent environmental thinking and sound in its social, cultural, ideological, and emotional contexts, while exploring its long-term role in shaping the perception of the world around us.Although "sounds are a perpetual and dynamic property of all landscapes," it is also clear that they "vary spatially and temporally" (Pijanowski, Villanueva-Rivera et al. 203).There has, however, been less work focusing specifically on the historical, literary and geographical role of sound in shaping the landscapes of environmental history.While Peter Coates' seminal paper delineating the potential of an environmental history of sound helps us to unravel some of the early literature, few works with a similar focus have emerged in the years since it was published (Hehl and Hardenberg 79).Instead, historical descriptions of sound in nature tend to be included as mere additions to accounts of the visual perception of landscapes.Where historical scholarship does focus on sound, it does so mainly by describing disturbances and noise as pollution, rather than reflecting on how "natural soundscapes" are the product of multiple overlapping layers of sound (Schafer).Noise is frequently opposed to nature and/or silence -and, thus, silence is also frequently linked to nature.Consequently, natural quiet is perceived as something that needs to be protected and the affective and emotional power of natural sound is side-lined or effaced completely.By contrast, there has been a greater recognition of sound in literary studies, perhaps because language has its own sonic dimension and environmental approaches to literature have been looking to oppose the tyranny of the eye and of landscape painting for many decades.Nevertheless, the focus has tended to be more on sound in general and often with questions of form at the heart (Leighton; Attridge) or highly focussed on certain literary genres, especially lyric (Culler).More general approaches have often been limited to relatively specific historical moments in the canonical periodisation of the discipline.Relevant examples of the latter are the two magnificent volumes of online essays in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, edited by Susan