Ecological music: A listener-centred approach to composition

This article proposes ecological music as a listener-centred approach to composition based on the design of listening affordances. Rather than defining ecological music by environmental sound sources, natural references or technological media, the article defines it as a compositional orientation in which sound materials are organised according to the perceptual actions they make possible. Drawing on ecological psychology, embodied cognition and enactive theories of perception, the article conceptualises listening as an active, situated and exploratory process. Through practice-based reflection on selected compositional works, it examines how repetition, ambiguity, threshold perception, recognition, abstraction and embodied temporality may function as compositional affordances. It is argued that ecological composition shifts the composer’s role from controlling meaning to designing perceptual conditions through which musical meaning emerges and it advances an open framework for instrumental, electroacoustic, soundscape-based, improvisational and hybrid practices.