Anthropophony


The term, anthropophony, consisting of the Greek prefix, anthropo, meaning human, and the suffix, phon, meaning sound is a neologism used to describe all sound produced by humans, whether coherent, such as music, theatre, and language, or incoherent and chaotic such as random signals generated primarily by electromechanical means.
The term was first used to describe certain soundscape phenomena recorded as part of a bioacoustic study in 2001–2002 commissioned by the National Park Service, and done in Sequoia/King's Canyon National Park. Anthropophony is one of three terms used by Drs. Stuart Gage and Bernie Krause to define the general sources of human sounds/noise that occur within a soundscape. The other two non-human, but natural sound sources include biophony and geophony.