The concept of soundscape and the writings of R.  Murray Schafer has come to occupy a prominent position in sound studies. Schafer importantly and efficiently outlined the auditory as a field of study, and demonstrated how attention to sound is also attention to social, environmental and anthropological concerns. Yet Schafer is also often criticised for thinking in dichotomies such as silence vs. noise, nature vs. city, sound vs. sight. The sound of natural silence has an exalted and almost religious position in Schafer's thinking, while the opposites: the city, noise and sight are approached form an outside view, giving us a weirdly backlit account of phenomena such as urban sound or even rock music.

The term soundscape, a neologism containing ‘sound’ and ‘landscape’, was taken up by Schafer, theorized and developed to become analytically useful. Yet the different meanings connected to the word today surpass Schafer's account. Usage includes the name of computer software, a genre of musical composition and more generally for all kinds of sound design. Recently the ISO, The International Organization of Standardization, has published this definition of the concept: “acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context” (see here). Clearly the concept and the idea of approaching intersections between space and sound from an experiential perspective has gained widespread attention.

One aspect that has been increasingly discussed is how this interplay of sound and place affects the question of identity. We are used to thinking of places in terms of stable identities. It is the character of a place that makes it recognizable when we return for instance to an old house or to the particular square in this and this city, where memorable events took place. Yet places also change and live. Places may have even less stable identities than we have. And maybe a part of our fascination with places is that they are the same yet somehow changed, since we last were there.

When approaching places from a sonic perspective, we are instantly faced with the dynamic rather than the stable aspects. Even keynote sounds like wind whistling in leaves or traffic moving are subject to change in a whole different way than the shape and color of buildings and landscape. Sound changes minute-by-minute, year-by-year. But more importantly: sounds evaporate and disappear the moment they become audible. Focusing on sound makes us aware of the fleeting and dynamic character of places, maybe even before we notice the more stable character. Noticing this, it is paradoxical, that Schafer in his work on soundscape takes such a huge interest in defining and preserving sonic identities. Sonic environments might just as well be thought in terms of process, action, dialogue and conflict as in terms of stable identities. Perhaps it is precisely the interplay between dynamic and stable aspects of sonic environments that makes them such an interesting, yet challenging field of study.

A few researchers have pointed to the term territory and territorialization as useful in approaching sonic environments. Alain Corbin has studied how church bells in 19-century France (Corbin 1998) functioned to mark the limits of a territory, and Brandon Labelle has investigated some acoustic territories of the modern city like the underground, the sidewalk the shopping mall etc. (Labelle 2010). I have myself suggested acoustic territoriality as a framework for exploring the ways environments are appropriated and inhabited through sound (Kreutzfeldt 2009). Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue have presented an elaborate vocabulary of 82 sonic effects, that allow analyses of particular effects connected with sound (Augoyard & Torgue 2005). These are just some useful sources for approaching the dynamics of placemaking through sound.