Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays, Paperback

How does sound ecology--an acoustic connective tissue among communities--also become a basis for a healthy economy and a just community?

Jeff Todd Titon's lived experiences shed light on the power of song, the ecology of musical cultures, and even cultural sustainability and resilience. In Toward a Sound Ecology, Titon's collected essays address his growing concerns with people making music, holistic ecological approaches to music, and sacred transformations of sound. Titon also demonstrates how to conduct socially responsible fieldwork and compose engaging and accessible ethnography that speaks to a diverse readership. Toward a Sound Ecology is an anthology of Titon's key writings, which are situated chronologically within three particular areas of interest: fieldwork, cultural and musical sustainability, and sound ecology. According to Titon--a foundational figure in folklore and ethnomusicology--a re-orientation away from a world of texts and objects and toward a world of sound connections will reveal the basis of a universal kinship.

About author(s):

Jeff Todd Titon is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Brown University. He has been active professionally both in folklore and ethnomusicology for more than 45 years. He is known for developing and practicing collaborative ethnographic field research based in reciprocity and friendship, for pioneering an applied ethnomusicology based in social responsibility, for his 1984 proposal that musical cultures could be understood as ecosystems, and for developing an ecological approach to cultural and musical sustainability.