The Symbolic Soundscape: Reversing the Roots

Abstract Soundscape composition has been rooted in the tradition of musique concrète, whose basic principle was to break free from notating musical ideas with symbols and instead to use recorded real-world sounds in a musical way. The author’s live-coding piece titled Latitude aims to reverse this principle and to propose a new form of soundscape composition in which place-based data, such as geolocation information, are used as symbols to create musical patterns. In addition to this, a conceptual framework contextualizes the piece, providing the extramusical element that is omnipresent in soundscape composition, but from a different angle. The musical and the extramusical exchange roles between input and output, as explained in the article, providing an additional dimension to the reversing of the roots. Along with Latitude, the existence of some pieces by other composers suggests a possible new subgenre of soundscape composition that is referred to here as “symbolic soundscape” music.