Acosutemology is a term coined in 1980 by Steven Feld, an American anthropologist born in 1949 that aims to understand how the production and listening of som (including music) can be an instrument for knowledge, with relations between humans and non-humans, and those to the environment. The term is a word composed of acoustic and epistemology. It tries to understand the space of sound interaction between animals and humans, which doesn’t limit itself to its physical condition but extends to non-material worlds. It doesn’t restrict itself to understanding the world passively but with the help of those who listen and reproduce sound, exchange experiences, and reflect on their practices and sound perceptions.
Acoustemology is, thus, a tool for comprehending how different beings that cohabit in the same social or geographic space and build their relations, having sound as a form o connection.
It was with the Kaluli, who belong to the Bosavi people tribe in Papua New Guinea, where Feld entered anthropology with his musical knowledge in 1976, and the result came out in 1982 in the form of a book called Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982). By that time, he considered himself an ethnomusicologist. Still, he later realised the term wasn’t adequate to refer to all societies’ sound and music productions because the ethnic creates a space between western people and the non-western. Feld argues that the study of the sound output should embrace musical manifestations and other expressions in a soundscape. So, acoustemology also attenuates the tensions between anthropology and musicology: the first centred on humans, and the second, on the European concept of music.
Feld projects acoustemology as a mode of understanding sound as part of a process way broader than the relation between beings capable of producing knowledge regarding interactions and trades. Sound comprehension involves material and physical experience because the sound would be any vibration in the air captured by the cells of our ears and transformed into electric impulses sent to the brain. Apart from that, it carries a social dimension, since what we hear and how we do it brings traces of our experiences and society.