Soundscapes and the acoustic past: a sonic ecology of memories

In the last decades music sociology has become a growing, interesting, and vibrant field of research for many scholars. In this chapter I will consider how “the musical” gets into “the social”, with a special focus on space and time as fundamental cognitive dimensions for the organization of social life. This approach is built on the works by De Nora (2000a; 2000b; 2003), Shepherd and Devine (2015), Bennett (2015), Born (2015) and many other scholars in the field (Sterne 2012; Horsfall, Meij, and Probstfield 2013; Roy and Dowd 2013). It has been especially inspired by De Nora’s idea of “musical affordance” (2016), which underlines how and to what extent the characteristics and the properties of the musical languages can contribute to shape and construct the social meanings of identities, spaces, and times (Tota and Hagen 2016). Starting from the recognition of this transformative capacity of music that allows to reconfigure and mediate social formations, the main aim is to highlight the variety and the extent of the musical impacts on the social definition of space and time. The concept of “soundscape” is considered as a fundamental context that makes possible a better understanding of the symbolic order of social life. It is argued that the idea of “acoustic past” allows a deeper analysis of the relation between music, collective identities, and collective memories, especially in relation to traumatic events.