Sound as a Metaphor for Being-In-Nature

I still need to get my hands back on R. Murray Schaffer's The Tuning of the World, which I had to return to the library before getting to read, but I feel like the connection between Merleau-Ponty's being-in-the-world and the pursuit of sound ecology are linked.  

I just finished Virginia Madsen's little article entitled "Notes Toward Sound Ecology in the Garden of Listening," and was struck, as I usually am in writings on soundscapes, by the sense that the city is "a homogenising, polluted, and 'disturbed' environment where noise (equated with poorly designed acoustic technology)  is the parasite that consumes its host."  This consuming power of sound though, suggests to me that listening is a powerful agent of our being-in-the-world. 

I'd like to suggest that museums think more carefully about the use of sound and silence in order to soothe the effects of the city.  I'll mention Hildegaard Westerkamp's critique of the Museum of Anthropology's soundscape as an example of the wrong that large institutions are doing us with the use of "silence."