The Trauma of Separation: Understanding How Music Education Interrupted My Relationship with the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

I grew up immersed in the sounds of nature. However, throughout childhood, the ambient soundscape that once thrilled me was usurped by human-made sounds. I conducted an autoethnographic inquiry to seek the ways that my early and middle childhood music education diverted my attention from local soundscapes to a near-exclusive focus on anthropocentric sound. During early childhood, I shed my nature-centric musical identity to conform to a musical community that prioritized human-made sounds over the natural soundscape. In middle childhood, listening became an anxiety-ridden activity as hyper attention to human-made sounds became necessary to navigate childhood complexities and to function in my musical environments. Isolation and dissociation from the natural sounds that I valued as a young child resulted in my trauma of separation from the earth. Conclusions are contextualized so that music educators might draw connections between music and nature to avoid practices that perpetuate the trauma of separation with their students.