Pre-modern design of post-natural soundscapes

Descartes maxim, ego cogito, summarises the project of the Western rational mind, which Shephard describes as 'the conquest of the outside [of the self]... (where)... nature is subjugated by science'. This is a division made possible by the apotheosis of mind, positioned above the perceived contaminations of the sensual world. As the natural world became objectified, the concept of nature emerged; a construction which creates distance between the self and the natural world, which humanity had inhabited for a million years. This apparent conquest of nature witnessed the rapid rise of urban environments, with the previous three generations being the first to have little to no contact with the natural world. The emancipated modern mind has witnessed the rapid destruction of ecological networks, its resources ciphered into the constructions of humanity's modernist dreams made most prodigious in our contemporary towering cities. And from the soundscape of the natural world, a composition within which humanity was a part, the soundscape of modernity has emerged; a decomposed soundscape that is the residue of our topographical shapings - the drones, buzzes and whirrs of the modern soundscape.