Soundscape Composition as Environmental Activism and Awareness: An Ecomusicological Approach

Soundscape composition is a musical field that has converged from a diverse array of philosophies and methods of listening. Informed by the common mission of raising awareness towards the current environmental crisis, soundscape composers aim to re-connect audiences to the natural soundscapes of their everyday lives. To achieve this mission, soundscape composers interact with soundscape ecology, a scientific field that also addresses environmental issues like global warming and declining biodiversity through the study of sound. In so doing, soundscape composers repurpose scientific technology, transforming it into a tool that challenges the traditional nature/culture dichotomy and integrates listeners with their environments through spiritual, emotional, and sense-based ways of knowing

Soundscape Composition: Music as Environmental Activism

Soundscape composition is an emerging genre of experimental music that incorporates sounds from natural environments. While soundscape composers utilize a wide variety of mediums, techniques, and performance contexts, they share a common purpose of encouraging audiences to question and reflect on their relationship to the environment in the age of the “Anthropocene,” enabling listeners to re-connect to the places in which they live through sound. This study asks how soundscape composers use their music as a rhetoric that communicates environmental issues in ways that depart from typical portrayals in mainstream media. Drawing from the works, interviews, and writings of a selected group of soundscape composers, I argue that soundscape composers act as cultural interlocutors, transferring personal and scientific knowledge to a medium that engages alternative ways of environmental knowing. By repurposing scientific technology to serve artistic ends and interrogating conventional Western notions of what counts as “music,” soundscape composers both broaden what counts as environmental knowledge and question conceptual divisions between humans, nature, and technology. By acting upon the potential of soundscape composition to promote social, political, and cultural change, the artists profiled in this study contribute to an understanding of the environmental crisis not only as a physical reality, but as a crisis of character and culture that forces individuals and societies to reconsider how people relate to nature and to each other

Communicating Air: Alternative Pathways to Environmental Knowing through Computational Ecomedia

This dissertation, Communicating Air: Alternative Pathways to Environmental Knowing through Computational Ecomedia, is the culmination of an art practice-led investigation into ways in which the production of ecomedia may open alternative pathways to environmental knowing in a time of urgent climate crisis. This thesis traces the author’s artistic, personal and political development across the period of study and presents an extended argument for greater public engagement with weather and climate science, greater public and private support for long-term collaborations between media art and climate science, and increased public open access to global weather and climate monitoring and computationally modelled data

The soundscape of Anthropocene

Recently, much attention has been paid to the many different forms of collaborative or participatory practice both within, and out with the academy; from practice-based research to theoretical contributions and artistic experimentations. In terms of acoustemology as described by Steven Feld, the creative processes of collaborative soundscaping practices, developed as dialogic editing, produce theories of sound as knowledge production. Within this trend of doing anthropology in sound, sound art works aim to reconnect communities to the environment and indicate the emergence and presence of an ecological and aesthetic co-evolution. Such projects, in fostering interdisciplinary approaches, allow the development of hybrid types of knowledge through dialogic exchanges, and engage multiple agents by developing audile techniques. They also raise interesting questions within collaborative and interdisciplinary creative practice, in relation to the critical examination of the instrumentality of collaboration. By focusing on field recordings and soundscape compositions this paper discusses ecological sound art works that use collaborative creativity, new technologies, and phenomenological listening, to produce dialogic and collaborative forms of epistemic and material equity. These sound art works are the result of complex expressions of creative processes that involve multiple agents, while successfully voice their authorial presence. The interdisciplinary, collaborative and open-ended nature of these projects brings forward the social and political dimension of sound and listening, which could figure in more collaborative forms of knowledge production and inspire climate action

Alchemical Sensing: Creating an Embodied Experience of the Unseen Organism

This paper presents the research surrounding the audiovisual installation, Stars Beneath our Feet (2015) by Louise Mackenzie. It introduces the concept of alchemical sensing to describe the layered use of scientific technology in the context of an audio-visual art installation as an alternative frame of reference that attempts an embodied understanding of the unseen organism. The process of translation through layers of technology is considered as alchemical in reference to the ancient Greek and Egyptian origins of the tradition. Not alchemical in the sense of seeking immortality or turning metal into gold, but alchemical in the anima mundi sense of seeking out the ‘essence’ of matter. Referencing the development of the field of sonification, the acoustic artwork of Joe Davis and Katie Egan and of Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling, the use of Atomic Force Microscopy, Python, Photosounder and MAX MSP were employed to construct an embodied audio sense of the micro-organism, Dunaliella salina. Movements detected were translated using both sonification and audification techniques into sound files that were used to form the audio component of Stars Beneath Our Feet: an installation as part of Lumiere Durham 2015, a four- day international light festival produced in the UK by Artichoke. The video component of the installation was made using a combination of dark field microscopy and DSLR camera to produce moving images that focus on a perspective of micro-organisms that is other to that commonly used within scientific research. The objective of ‘looking at’ the organisms in this expanded manner and ‘listening to’ the sounds of data obtained via technological interpretation of the movement of micro- organisms in the context of an art installation adds a broader sensory dimension to our understanding of the unseen organism, one which encompasses their being in the world without consideration of their use as resources. https://vimeo.com/14712064

Using Real-Time Data Flux In Art – The Mediation Of A Situation As It Unfolds: RoadMusic – An Experimental Case Study.

The practice driving this research is called RoadMusic. The project uses a small computer based system installed in a car that composes music from the flux of information it captures about the journey as it unfolds. It uses a technique known as sonification that consists of mapping data to sound. In the case of RoadMusic, this data capture is realtime, external to the computer and mobilised with the user. This dissertation investigates ways in which such a sonification can become an artistic form. To interrogate the specificity of an art of real-time it considers philosophical theories of the fundamental nature of time and immediacy and the ways in which the human mind ‘makes sense’ of this flux. After extending this scrutiny via theories of system and environment, it proceeds to extract concepts and principles leading to a possible art of real-time flux. Time, immediacy and the everyday are recurring questions in art and music, this study reviews practices that address these questions, essentially through three landmark composers of the twentieth century: Iannis Xenakis, John Cage and Murray Schafer. To gain precision in regards to the nature of musical listening it then probes theories of audio cognition and reflects on ways in which these can apply to real-time composing. The art of sonifying data extracted from the environment is arguably only as recent as the computer programs it depends on. This study reviews different practices that contribute towards a corpus of sonification-art, paying special attention to those practices where this process takes place in real-time. This is extended by an interrogation of the effect that mobility has on our listening experience. RoadMusic is now a fully functional device generating multi-timbral music from immediate data about its surroundings. This dissertation argues that this process can be an alternative to mainstream media systems; it describes how RoadMusic’s programs function and the ways in which they have evolved to incorporate the ideas developed in this thesis. It shows how RoadMusic is now developing beyond my own personal practice and how it intends to reach a wider audience

Data Sonification in Creative Practice

Sonification is the process of data transmission with non-speech audio. While finding increasing acceptance as a scientific method, particularly where a visual representation of data is inadequate, it is still often derided as a ‘gimmick’. Composers have also shown growing interest in sonification as a compositional method. Both in science and in music, the criticism towards this method relates to poor aesthetics and gratuitous applications. This thesis aims to address these issues through an accompanying portfolio of pieces which use sonification as a compositional tool. It establishes the principles of ‘musification’, which can be defined as a sonification which uses musical structures; a sonification organised by musical principles. The practice-as-research portfolio explores a number of data sources, musical genres and science-music collaborations. The main contributions to knowledge derived from the project are a portfolio of compositions, a compositional framework for sonification and an evaluation framework for musification. This thesis demonstrates the validity of practice-as-research as a methodology in sonification research

Sound based social networks

The sound environment is an eco of the activity and character of each place, often carrying additional information to that made available to the eyes (both new and redundant). It is, therefore, an intangible and volatile acoustic fingerprint of the place, or simply an acoustic snapshot of a single event. Such rich resource, full of meaning and subtleness, Schaeffer called Soundscape. The exploratory research project presented here addresses the Soundscape in the context of Mobile Online Social Networking, aiming at determining the extent of its applicability regarding the establishment and/or strengthening of new and existing social links. Such research goal demanded an interdisciplinary approach, which we have anchored in three main stems: Soundscapes, Mobile Sound and Social Networking. These three areas pave the scientific ground for this study and are introduced during the first part of the thesis. An extensive survey of the state-of-the-arte projects related with this research is also presented, gathering examples from different but adjacent areas such as mobile sensing, wearable computing, sonification, social media and contextaware computing. This survey validates that our approach is scientifically opportune and unique, at the same time. Furthermore, in order to assess the role of Soundscapes in the context of Social Networking, an experimental procedure has been implemented based on an Online Social Networking mobile application, enriched with environmental sensing mechanisms, able to capture and analyze the surrounding Soundscape and users' movements. Two main goals guided this prototypal research tool: collecting data regarding users' activity (both sonic and kinetic) and providing users with a real experience using a Sound-Based Social Network, in order to collect informed opinions about this unique type of Social Networking. The application – Hurly-Burly – senses the surrounding Soundscape and analyzes it using machine audition techniques, classifying it according to four categories: speech, music, environmental sounds and silence. Additionally, it determines the sound pressure level of the sensed Soundscape in dB(A)eq. This information is then broadcasted to the entire online social network of the user, allowing each element to visualize and audition a representation of the collected data. An individual record for each user is kept available in a webserver and can be accessed through an online application, displaying the continuous acoustic profile of each user along a timeline graph. The experimental procedure included three different test groups, forming each one a social network with a cluster coefficient equal to one. After the implementation and result analysis stages we concluded that Soundscapes can have a role in the Online Social Networking paradigm, specially when concerning mobile applications. Has been proven that current offthe- shelf mobile technology is a promising opportunity for accomplishing this kind of tasks (such as continuous monitoring, life logging and environment sensing) but battery limitations and multitasking's constraints are still the bottleneck, hindering the massification of successful applications. Additionally, online privacy is something that users are not enthusiastic in letting go: using captured sound instead of representations of the sound would abstain users from utilizing such applications. We also demonstrated that users who are more aware of the Soundscape concept are also more inclined to assume it as playing an important role in OSN. This means that more pedagogy towards the acoustic phenomenon is needed and this type of research gives a step further in that direction.O ambiente sonoro de um lugar é um eco da sua atividade e carácter, transportando, na maior parte da vezes, informação adicional àquela que é proporcionada à visão (quer seja redundante ou complementar). É, portanto, uma impressão digital acústica - tangível e volátil - do lugar a que pertence, ou simplesmente uma fotografia acústica de um evento pontual. A este opulento recurso, carregado de significados e subtilezas, Schafer chamou de Paisagem-Sonora. O projeto de investigação de carácter exploratório que aqui apresentamos visa o estudo da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto das Redes Sociais Móveis Em-Linha, procurando entender os moldes e limites da sua aplicação, tendo em vista o estabelecimento e/ou reforço de novos ou existente laços sociais, respectivamente. Para satisfazer este objectivo foi necessária uma abordagem multidisciplinar, ancorada em três pilares principais: a Paisagem-Sonora, o Som Móvel e as Redes Sociais. Estas três áreas determinaram a moldura científica de referência em que se enquadrou esta investigação, sendo explanadas na primeira parte da tese. Um extenso levantamento do estado-da-arte referente a projetos relacionados com este estudo é também apresentado, compilando exemplos de áreas distintas mas adjacentes, tais como: Computação Sensorial Móvel, Computação Vestível, Sonificação, Média Social e Computação Contexto-Dependente. Este levantamento veio confirmar quer a originalidade quer a pertinência científica do projeto apresentado. Posteriormente, a fim de avaliar o papel da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto das Redes Sociais, foi posto em prática um procedimento experimental baseado numa Rede Social Sonora Em-Linha, desenvolvida de raiz para dispositivos móveis e acrescida de mecanismos sensoriais para estímulos ambientais, capazes de analisar a Paisagem-Sonora envolvente e os movimentos do utilizador. Dois objectivos principais guiaram a produção desta ferramenta de investigação: recolher dados relativos à atividade cinética e sonora dos utilizadores e proporcionar a estes uma experiência real de utilização uma Rede Social Sonora, de modo a recolher opiniões fundamentadas sobre esta tipologia específica de socialização. A aplicação – Hurly-Burly – analisa a Paisagem-Sonora através de algoritmos de Audição Computacional, classificando- a de acordo com quatro categorias: diálogo (voz), música, sons ambientais (“ruídos”) e silêncio. Adicionalmente, determina o seu nível de pressão sonora em dB(A)eq. Esta informação é então distribuída pela rede social dos utilizadores, permitindo a cada elemento visualizar e ouvir uma representação do som analisado. É mantido num servidor Web um registo individual da informação sonora e cinética captada, o qual pode ser acedido através de uma aplicação Web que mostra o perfil sonoro de cada utilizador ao longo do tempo, numa visualização ao estilo linha-temporal. O procedimento experimental incluiu três grupos de teste distintos, formando cada um a sua própria rede social com coeficiente de aglomeração igual a um. Após a implementação da experiência e análise de resultados, concluímos que a Paisagem- Sonora pode desempenhar um papel no paradigma das Redes Sociais Em- Linha, em particular no que diz respeito à sua presença nos dispositivos móveis. Ficou provado que os dispositivos móveis comerciais da atualidade apresentam-se com uma oportunidade promissora para desempenhar este tipo de tarefas (tais como: monitorização contínua, registo quotidiano e análise sensorial ambiental), mas as limitações relacionadas com a autonomia energética e funcionamento em multitarefa representam ainda um constrangimento que impede a sua massificação. Além disso, a privacidade no mundo virtual é algo que os utilizadores atuais não estão dispostos a abdicar: partilhar continuamente a Paisagem-Sonora real em detrimento de uma representação de alto nível é algo que refrearia os utilizadores de usar a aplicação. Também demonstrámos que os utilizadores que mais conhecedores do fenómeno da Paisagem-Sonora são também os que consideram esta como importante no contexto das Redes Sociais Em-Linha. Isso significa que uma atitude pedagógica em relação ao fenómeno sonoro é essencial para obter dele o maior ganho possível. Esta investigação propõe-se a dar um passo em frente nessa direção

Expanded approaches to ecological sound practice : beyond the schaferean impasse

Expanded Approaches to Ecological Sound Practice: Beyond The Schaferean Impasse is a critical intervention into the domain of ecological sound practice that seeks to create pathways forward for the field beyond the romanticism and essentialism that it inherited from its founder R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues at the World Soundscape Project. This intervention is enacted through a critical relistening and rereading of the canonical works of the field, which are recontextualised through a number of nested frameworks drawn from the environmental humanities, media theory, and geography. These discussions are situated alongside case studies of contemporary sound works that are seen to be demonstrative of potential pathways forward for the field. The project poses a rethinking of ecological sound practice as an ethico-aesthetic practice that sees the artist/audience as playing a co-poietic role in the construction of the soundscape through ongoing processes of mediation. Within the context of this revised model for ecological sound practice, emphasis is given to understanding the ecological crisis, and the acts of listening and recording, in socially differentiated and situated terms, rather than in the anti-modernist and romantic terms of Schafer and company