Acoustic Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature of Music in Ecomusicology

This essay is a critique of the notions of nature and culture, as operationalized by the recently named field ecomusicology. While fields such as anthropology and history have questioned the idea of nature, ecomusicology, on the contrary, has explored its significance, producing an ecology of music and sound that reaffirms the term and, along with it, a multicultural account of diversity that takes the Western notion of culture as a viable concept for all peoples. This essay, rather, seeks to acknowledge a historical lineage of ethnomusicology and its relation to structuralism as fundamental for rethinking the ontologies of sound/music. This lineage is also fundamental for creating links with recent anthropological work on multinaturalism. Based on this work, the essay tentatively proposes the move toward acoustic multinaturalism as an alternative concept that is not bound to the creation of a new field but rather to rethinking the ontologies of the acoustic.