The original WSP team included Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, Bruce Davies and Peter Huse, among others.
This innovative study raised the interest of researchers and artists worldwide, creating enormous growth in the field of acoustic ecology.
The expanded expressions of acoustic ecology are increasing due to the sonic impacts of road and airport construction that affect the soundscapes in and around cities where the human population is more dense.
Members of the WFAE, many of whom are recording artists and composers, are focused on improving the quality of public soundscapes through the design and planning of community spaces that preserve desirable sound while reducing noise pollution.
[10] Manmade noise such as jets flying over a habitat can disrupt the natural order of these sounds, even putting certain species in danger of predators.
[10] On land, animal communication is shaped by physical characteristics of an environment such as distance, range of vision, weather, and surrounding noise.
However, all those ecological research goals have a precondition that those bioacoustic recordings are well investigated so that the animal species can be accurately recognized.
[9] In his book The Tuning of the World, Schafer used new terms like 'soundmarks' -- a specific community's distinctive sounds—and 'keynotes' -- prevalent but overlooked background sounds such as traffic—to help categorize the different elements of a soundscape.
[19] People's preferences for noise control have been shown to differ based on the culture and technology of the time period as well as the familiarity or practicality of certain sounds.
[20] Studying the soundscapes and traumatic impact of war has shown the effectiveness of noise as a psychological weapon to produce fear.
Therefore, those planes startle caribou prefer to avoid aircraft themselves, which has a result that they will need to go farther to do a better harvest, but this will occur in adding some costs for fuel, equipment, and the effort for sure.
[citation needed] The ambient noise present within the world's oceans; geophonic, anthrophonic, and biophonic, has been identified as a critical indicator to the well-being of the regional biosphere.
[24] In mature ecosystems, species will sing at unique bandwidths and specific times, displaying a lack of interspecies competition in the acoustic environment.
"Dominion" uses Canadian soundmarks that were made in different province by the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University for an event of cross-country tour that happened in 1973.
[27] Marc E. Moglen (2007) recreated pre-historical Soundscapes (Acoustic Ecology) at University of California, Berkeley's Department of Anthropology, combining compositional techniques with site recordings for a non-diegetic piece in the virtual world of Second Life, on "Okapi Island" [citation needed].