As sound artists we have inevitably an object of interest which is being extracted and/or executed in a way which expresses an artistic idea. The sound is that object. Lopez’s article discusses two schools and negotiates two different points of view at the same phenomena of real sound environments – soundscape. 

On one hand there is a school of “Schaferians” named after Canadian composer Murray Schafer. He starts with a critique of “tuning” which he considers “silencing” and “noisy” which is a diversion of post-industrial human from the natural sounds of the environment surrounding us. Therefore he considers any kind of systematic attempt to isolate the sound from its natural environment as a form of divergence which he calls Schizophonia. 

Pierre Schaeffer talks about sound object (object sonore) which is exactly the opposite of what Schaferians wish to achieve. Sound object is a sound isolated from its environment in order to create artistic expression. Schafer says that keeping sounds within its natural environments is artistic expression itself. Schaeffer criticises him for restricting the creative freedom in favour of acoustic ecology.

I can agree with both points of view but only in their specific parts. Schafer is seeing an art in something naturally occurring and trying to raise a critique of common sonic art expression which we call music (in order to create an art piece music isolates tones, then further music concrete isolates sounds etc.). This may bring a lot of new inspiration but in the same time it stops here. That is where I agree with Pierre Schaeffer claiming that Schaferians are reducing opportunities for artistic freedom and expression.