The neologism soundscape refers to the acoustic envelope that surrounds the listener. Since the late 1970s it has become continuously popular. In recent years, there has been increasing criticism that the term soundscape is used blurrily and arbitrarily, and thus risks to lose its explanatory power in artistic and scientific discourse. Yet soundscape is more than just a term: it stands for a paradigm. In the following, the origins, prerequisites, implications, consequences, and perspectives of the term soundscape will be explained in order to make its core accessible and its original intensions clear: The soundscape concept leads to an aesthetic perspective that consistently approaches the world and its auditory phenomena from the perspective of hearing, encouraging people to change focus and thereby enabling an alternative world “picture.” At the same time, the holistic acoustic environmental experience that the term implies, in the context of R. Murray Schafer’s theory of Acoustic Ecology, becomes tangible as an expression of the society from which it emerges: a soundscape is a reflection of a specific society’s conditions, tensions, and namely its ecological conflicts. Finally, since the 1970s, the Soundscape Studies have been establishing a vocabulary for the description of the auditory world and its phenomena that makes the important elements of acoustic environmental experience conceptually comprehensible and thus sustainably accessible to scientific as well as aesthetic reflection. By demonstrating why the world sounds the way it does, the soundscape paradigm also opens up starting points for its applied design and the artistic forms that emerge from it. This is especially important with regard to the upcoming immersive technologies and the audiomedial forms of experience that derive from them.

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