Soundscapes as Cultural Heritage: Lesson Ideas for the Classroom

Abstract

Soundscapes engender historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic meanings through acoustical qualities that reflect a community’s lived experiences. In this article, we propose music lesson ideas that help students appreciate and embrace their sociocultural heritage—by creating, performing, and listening to soundscapes that are representative of their locality. These lesson ideas are guided by pedagogical imperatives drawn from key soundscape literature, which reveals sounds as being powerful in sculpting culture and identity as well as impacting ways of knowing. Activities in the lessons serve to develop students’ aurality and their understanding of the sociocultural connotations of sound. The learnings gained may supplement more traditional musical skills and knowledge acquisition in the music classroom.