Environmental StorytellingEnvironmental Storytelling

Listening to Earth is a research project and sound installation (Chester & Ricketson 2024) focused on listening, connecting, and understanding our environment through the medium of sound. We have conducted research over a two-year period to understand what insights can be gleaned about our environment if we consider sound as both a medium for the transmission of story, and a vessel of knowledge for the storage of more-than-human memories. We asked the questions, what is the capacity of sound to reveal more than we had previously considered possible about our changing environment? Does Earth have stored vibrational memory? Are vibrations, stories, and sonic narratives held within Earth? And can a practice of deep, focussed, and mediated listening to Earth help us gain access to these stories?

We hypothesize that sound has the capacity to tell us more than we previously considered possible, that Earth has stored vibrational memory, and that by paying attention and listening deeply to this vibration we can begin to understand what it has to say. In the sensory sound installation titled Listening to Earth, we worked to create a space where people can deeply listen to the recorded stories and memories held within intertidal areas of the coast of New South Wales, Australia. The resulting spatial soundscape is 40 minutes in length, designed for eight speakers, a subwoofer, six bass shakers installed in benches, and two air cannons. The soundscape is accompanied by a responsive visualization and custom-built benches that vibrate lower end frequencies.

As a speculative creative and research process, we position our work as an act of collaborative environmental storytelling. Different from the human centric approach to storytelling and composing that we are familiar with, this project tries to blur the boundaries of what is human and more-than-human in seeking new knowledge. Listening to Earth treats the environment itself as a knowledge holder, and the methods and processes used for listening are underpinned by dialogic exchange with the environment, where conversation and shared dialogue are used to explore meaning making. To be in dialogue with Earth we must first learn to listen in ways that connect us into a resonant vibrational space with Earth. Listening can be done through our bodies, as well as external listening devices including microphones and resonant instruments. We integrated listening and recording methodologies that aided in the dialogic exchange with Earth.

Our recording practice was deeply engaged rather than done in short fits and bursts. It entailed sitting for long periods of time on Earth listening to the world beneath the sand, or below the water’s surface through hydrophones and geophones. Initially this method may seem similar to listening to a podcast or a music playlist, but after five minutes, ten, twenty, and so on, the listening practice becomes a situational practice. This is when the lines blur between actively listening to Earth, and becoming a part of the soundscape of Earth, through a temporal synthesis of self with sounds of sand, water, and wind. This is the beginning of the dialogic exchange, where we move from observation of Earth to an engaged relationship with it.

The project is framed from the perspective of posthumanism, which no longer assumes an anthropocentric orientation to truth; draws on the practice of ‘Deep Listening’, embracing “radical attentiveness” and “listening as activism” (Oliveros 1989; 2022); and positions the process as a dialogic language (Aktas & Mäkelä 2022), in which Earth is recognised as a collaborator. In affording the sounds of Earth a form of sentience, Listening to Earth draws upon North American First Nations writer Dylan Robinson’s decolonial argument for a relationship in which the sounding object as well as its listener are both considered living subjects, as laid out in his book Hungry Listening (Robinson 2020). 

Conceptualising listening as a space of sonic encounter between subjects, Robinson appeals for greater ethical accountability. That is, he argues the Western perceptual paradigm centres the listener as the sole subject that results in an “orientation in which we do not feel the need to be responsible to sound as we would another life” (Robinson 2020, 15). Robinson draws on Indigenous song that has life (that is considered living) to emphasize the relationship between sound and listener as contact between equal subjects. He suggests resurgent listening practices based in forms of Indigenous sensory engagement can provide pathways for decolonising dominant listener regimes. As Robinson points out, there is a settler colonial relationship to the idea of listening where “Listening itself may become an act of confirming ownership” (Robinson 2020:13). Our research is rooted in approaches we hope disrupt extractivist relationships with Earth and foster approaches to listening, recording, and composition that are rooted in empathy and exchange where Earth is seen not as an anthropomorphised agent but as the living, breathing, holder of knowledge and information that Earth is. This belief is so deeply rooted in our approach that this article acknowledges Earth as co-author. By Earth here we mean the sea, the dunes, the wind, and the environments in the intertidal areas where we worked. We also acknowledge the traditional countries where our listening has been focussed, which include Bidjigal and Gadigal lands near Maroubra in Sydney; Yuin lands at Cudmirrah and Berrara on the NSW South Coast; and Awabakal lands around Whibayganba, Nobbys Head Land in Newcastle, NSW.

Through the creation of unique listening experiences and associated discourse, we hope to create new knowledge about sound and the capacity of vibration to communicate Earth’s memories and stories, and contribute new techniques, approaches, methods, and knowledge for sound-based research that decenters storytelling as an exclusively human experience. 

The experimental process involves the design of instruments that listen via the media of air, water and earth and enter into dialogue with the same media. For example, an aeolian harp that communes with the wind, hydrophones that communicate in liquid ripples, and seismographic vibration technologies that catch shivers from the skin of the earth. These sonically rich entry points for listening challenge the way we attend to sonic stories we do not typically hear. Drawing upon David Abram’s ‘more-than-human’ lens to try to dissolve culture-nature dualisms and acknowledge our embedded place within the natural world (Abram 1996), we hope to open our perspectives to learn from the more-than-human through sound. 

This project has been undertaken by two creative researchers bringing the respective perspectives of a sound artist engaged in media and critical sound studies and a composer engaged in exploratory music practices. Our different backgrounds, disciplines and ways of working are united in our mutual interests in the aesthetics of listening and ecologically informed creative practice. Listening to Earth has been supported by a collaborative research grant from the Sydney Environment Institute, which enabled the researchers to embark on these areas of inquiry, instrument making, and deeper explorations into environmental listening. This fellowship has provided the most sought after commodity in academia, time, to be in conversation, experiment, and truly collaborate. The development of Listening to Earth became a process of experimenting with listening and composing for listening. This led us to think more about listening practices through time, the way listening evolves us and our sense of what is possible, real, and comprehensible, and how our approach to listening grows and changes.

Methodology and ProcessMethodology and Process

The methodology employed in Listening to Earth takes its cue from the field of soundscape ecology, an interdisciplinary field that investigates ecological relationships through the analysis of sound in natural environments. R. Murray Schafer coined the concept of the soundscape in Tuning of the World (1977) where he has explored how the acoustic characteristics of an environment reflect ecological patterns and processes. Researchers in this field study the makeup, structure, and dynamics of soundscapes to understand a variety of issues relating to biodiversity, habitat quality, species interactions, and ecosystem health. 

This research assumes sound as our methodological tool employed in recording, experimental instrument design, and composition. Jonathon Gilmurray argues for the expanded benefits of sonic methodological tools for their affordance of knowledge creation (Bull and Cobussen 2022). Marcel Cobussen reflects on Gilmurray’s essay in the Bloomsbury Handbook for Sonic Methodologies and says:

Applying the sonic as a methodological tool can give us an ‘enhanced understanding’ of certain topics or events, as sound appeals not only to the cognitive and the rational but also gives space for associations, imaginations, and speculation as alternative forms of knowing. (Bull and Cobussen 2022:5)

Experimentation and imagination are core elements to this acoustic ecological investigation, and according to Gilmurray are also responsible for an exponential increase in the number of composers and sound artists directly responding to global environmental issues.

By drawing on soundscape ecology methods, we hope to glean insights into the relationship between our chosen sites of listening and their corresponding soundscapes through the recording and analysis of sounds, and their potential impact on listener perception when reassembled in a creative context. To be in dialogue with Earth we must first acknowledge and understand a few central concepts. First that listening is essential to learning. Next that embedded in traditional sonic methods are historically extractivist approaches and language that treat Earth stories as acoustic data to be mined rather than as a form interconnection and exchange through ecologies of meaning making and knowledge building. And finally, that many sonic methods have their origins in settler colonial practices.

Geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser explores the settler colonial history of sonic methods highlighting that one way this manifests is through the equating of lack-of-bias in field recording with the white ear.

An enduring sonic inheritance is the assumption consolidated over centuries that the white ear that listens is benign and objective – a dangerous and under-acknowledged construct that defines sonic colonialities, in which structural whiteness masquerades as ‘lack of bias’. (Kannigieser 2023:693)

This lack of bias is often accompanied by a myth of transparency, part of the European and settler-colonial practices of documenting and representing the world through field recording, which involves the removal of the recordist and their device from the recording, further separating the human from the more-than-human. (Kannigieser 2023:692). The longstanding methodological impetus to erase human intervention from field recordings implies the necessity of human involvement to tell Earth’s stories while negating Earth’s ability to tell its own story. Our methodological approach to this project borrows from traditional sonic methods while moving beyond these historical practices to explore three-way listening, and in so doing inviting Earth to be a collaborator in this paper and this project. Our approach both acknowledges the historical structural problems embedded in many sonic methods and explores a different methodological approach. In so doing Listening to Earth, exists in the complex methodological arena articulated by Katie Hemsworth et al in their work on earwitnessing, where they argue that:

part of a reflexive approach to sonic methods… must involve critical recognition that sonic environments tell their own stories of the effects of settler colonialism (Hemsworth 2017:149).

The discipline of listeningThe discipline of listening

Critical engagement with listening as a way of knowing means recognizing the cultural histories of making and listening to sound, but also, importantly, forming deeper knowledges of acoustics, vibrations, and materialities that shape sonic experience. (Hemsworth 2017:150)

Defining a listening practice remains an ongoing pursuit. For this project we developed a shared sense of collaborative listening, focussed on how we wanted to approach listening with Earth, in essence developing a three-way listening practice through much experimentation. This three-way practice is informed by Steph Ceraso’s definition of multimodal listening which “amplifies the ecological relationship between sound, bodies, and environments” (Ceraso 2014:105). That our ears and eyes can perceive only a small fraction of an infinite spectrum of vibrational energy raises the prospect that our bodies are soaked in a constant din of invisible and inaudible vibrations that bypass our brains to act directly on our skin and organs. Do our bodies receive vibrational information from Earth? We do receive vibrational information just as the animals and plants around us, but perhaps we are like an antenna without a tuner and our nervous systems have lost the ability to process vibration as meaning. How can we relearn to receive vibrational information from Earth, and would such endeavours be considered an act of listening?

The work of Pauline Oliveros and her lifelong commitment to the practice of listening provided many pointers for engaging with our environment through sound. She is noted for her practice of ‘Deep Listening’, a disciplined embodied pursuit of attentive listening to sound in every moment and every environment. Drawing upon, or finding resonances with, aspects of mindfulness, meditation and embodied movement, Oliveros’s practice encourages participants to explore the connections between sound, space, and consciousness, fostering a deeper understanding of environments and interpersonal communication through sound. Recognising that hearing is physiological and listening is psychological, Oliveros’s practice carries both undertones of restorative healing – a tuning of mind and body – as well as political overtones in which her radical attentiveness has been considered a form of activism. In her collection Sonic Meditations (Oliveros 1971:5), a series of text-based musical scores, “Native” (No. V) contains the following: “[…] walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” 

This curious instruction repositions the organ of hearing to the part of our body that most frequently makes contact with the earth. It calls on us not only to listen with our full bodies, but to listen ecologically. To walk silently carries with it the charge of treading lightly. Only when the point of contact between person and earth is silent may we connect with our ear-feet. Oliveros’s evocation of feet in this context asks us to consider listening beyond what is heard by the ear. 

The sound walking practices of Hildegard Westerkamp enrich deep listening practices by bringing together a focused awareness of sound while moving through an environment to enhance sensory connection to the surroundings (Westerkamp 2012). Her work encourages listeners toward deeper engagement with nature through a consistent awareness of their human presence. There are many approaches to sound walking, including guided sound walks, where a leader directs participants' attention to specific sounds; meditative sound walks, focusing on mindfulness and the sensory experience of listening; thematic sound walks, which concentrate on aspects of the soundscape like wildlife or urban noise; and participatory sound walks, where participants actively engage by recording or discussing the sounds they encounter. Westerkamp’s methods for studying acoustic environments helped inform our positioning of recording equipment and decisions to attend to specific sounds or subsets of sounds within these environments out in the field. 

While not prescriptive of clear-cut methods or processes, practices such as deep listening and sound walking are recognised as developed skills requiring discipline and practice. The ethos of Oliveros, Ceraso, Westerkamp and others underpins much of the methodology of this project from its very premise, to informing strategies for undertaking field recording, to the analysis of audio and the eventual design of the sensory sound installation.

Sites of listeningSites of listening

Listening to Earth was born on multiple foreshore areas on the southeast coast of Australia. The sites of this research were chosen in part because they are dynamic zones where vibrational energy transfers between sea, land and air; because coastal zones are significant centrelands and borderlands of human habitation rich in cultural and environmental heritage; and because they are sites that are in a state of continuous erosion and vulnerable to our changing climate. As such, the vibrations of intertidal zones are inscribed with ecological undertones concerning the changing climate. Instruments for listening were deployed in three coastal areas in New South Wales: on Bidjigal and Gadigal lands near Maroubra in Sydney; on Yuin lands at Cudmirrah and Berrara on the NSW South Coast; and Awabakal lands around Nobbys Beach in Newcastle (see fig. 1).

As previously mentioned, this research was conducted with Earth in order to develop meaning and understanding of the vibrational environment through dialogue using sound. Much of this practice is built on research from Mäkelä and Aktaş (2022) who explore learning through human and non-human interactions with an emphasis on promoting emotional and dialogical relationships with nature. Our research explores a listening learning space where deep engagement, repetitive listening, and experimentation are used to explore relationships to Earth. This approach borrows something from the idea of “forest pedagogy,” a practice-led platform to examine human and more-than-human relationships through the natural environment as a performative learning space (Mäkelä & Aktaş 2022). Focussed on developing new listening methodologies in collaboration with the more-than-human, our research carefully considers sites of listening as critical for creative exploration and ongoing relationship building.

Listening instrumentsListening instruments

Further to honing our discipline of listening with our bodies as listening instruments, we sought to extend our vibratory perception through the deployment of listening instruments: devices that could potentially unmask or provide new insights on Earth’s sonic stories. Listening instruments comprised commercially available recording technologies, and custom-built aeolian instruments that sing to the caress of the wind. While the listening instruments performed the obvious technical function of recording audio, the conceptualisation of the instruments as a prosthetic extension of our organs of hearing also provided a metaphorical framework for how such instruments might frame our listening. For instance, the aeolian harps were imagined as devices - ears - that catch filaments of stories carried by the wind, or as a monument and archive of distant sounds imprinted in the atmosphere for a future post-Anthropocene era.

The coastal foreshore areas were listened to via the use of microphones (Uši Pro from LOM Audio) that capture sound as it is usually heard by the ear via pressure variations in the surrounding air (See Figure 2). Vibrations were also captured via the use of piezo-based hydrophones (Aquarian, H2D) and geophones (Geofón, LOM Audio). The use of such technologies enabled listening outside of what is usually heard by the naked ear mainly by virtue of the media through which vibration is recorded: that is, hearing through the mediums of water and sand.

Hydrophones were submerged in the shallow waters of the ocean, in rockpools, and in the wet sand of Cudmirrah beach. Geophones were buried deeper in the beach and under the extensive sand dune system and within a sandbar of an intermittent closed and open lagoon where fresh water from Swan Lake meets the salt water of the Pacific Ocean.

The premise of a listening instrument was extended beyond available recording technologies to include the development, prototyping, fabrication and deployment of self-built instruments sounded via natural vibrations. These custom objects were conceptualised as instruments, in both the measurement and musical sense, that sound with Earth’s vibration to assist in understanding the voice of Earth. Unlike the recording of sound with microphones, hydrophones and geophones, whose raw recordings are characterised by a complex and noisy spectra of vibrations that require filtering in post-production to attend to specific sounds, the physical design of the listening instruments mechanically filter the energetic noise from the outset to foreground specific frequencies, or perhaps specific stories, reverberating within the white noise of earth’s geophony. This is the beginning of the emergence of more-than-human story as we have come to understand it.

The listening instruments created as part of Listening to Earth are aeoliphones in the tradition of aeolian harps: musical instruments that are not performed but sounded by the wind alone.

Instruments activated by the wind have been found throughout the world in many cultures and periods. A notable example being the khlaeng ek or singing kites of Cambodia (Howe 2019). The body of the kite includes a reed like bamboo mechanism that vibrates and can hum different tones as the wind passes through, allowing the distinctive buzzing songs to be heard over rice fields at night following harvest (Socheat 2005). The most referenced form of aeolian harp – named after the ancient Greek god of the wind Aeolus – has its roots in a 15^th century description by Athanasius Kircher and features a set of strings stretched across a sound board that, via the energy of the wind, produces sustaining harmonic tones (Kircher 1966; 1970). Often characterised as eerie or ethereal, the instruments were common in Europe during the late 18^th and 19^th century as small household instruments. In more recent times, aeolian harps are more likely to be found as large outdoor sound sculptures in wind-exposed locations.

While encountering the sounding instrument today remains uncommon, the poetic metaphor of the aeolian harp has a strong literary presence. The image of the instrument as a medium through which ‘Nature speaks to Man’ was a common trope in English Romanticism and the sound produced by the instrument came to be seen as an analogue to the state of the human mind (see Coleridge 2015; Shelley 2012; Thomson 1751).

SonovaneSonovane

The first attempt to build an aeolian instrument was the sonovane: an auditory weathervane that sings to the prevailing winds. The pipe-based instrument was designed with a rotating cowl that swivels like a weathervane to draw the wind through combinations of tubes of varying length (figure. 3). Created using a 3D printer, the corrugated pipes are sounded in the same way as a ‘whirly tube’ (usually found as a children’s toy-instrument) with a fundamental tone defined primarily by the length of the tube and different harmonics activated by the velocity of airflow. In this design, the instrument was not only imagined to capture, filter and amplify specific energies of the wind, but create musical intervals that sing in different relationships to sonify wind direction and intensity: a nor-Easter could perhaps reveal a warm harmony, while a Southerly conjures an angular chord; a gentle eddy a low chortling, a blustery wind a melody, while a gale a moaning wail.

The experimental design, however, was not particularly effective in sounding the wind as imagined and only a few recordings of the instrument situated on exposed headlands on Gadigal Country in Maroubra and Yuin Country in Berrara in South-Coast NSW found use in the final sound installation. While the sonovane will likely be further developed, with regards to this project, a more satisfactory aeolian harp was created using a more established string-based design.

Golden HarpGolden Harp

The second listening instrument built was a 19-string aeolian harp born out of a week-long residency at Lighthouse Arts at Nobbys headland. The harp was built with repurposed wooden bed slats and off cuts, and designed to capture the intense daily afternoon winds that blow across the Lighthouse headland. The string-based instrument relies on wind to vibrate the strings, which sound at relatively high-pitched frequencies depending on their tuning. Strings on the harp are clustered in three different groupings that are laid on three axes, with varied spacing between them to capture wind gusts from different directions. The harp was painted gold, built with zither pins to allow it to be tuned, and strung with monofilament nylon fishing line. Installed next to the lighthouse over two days, the sounds of the wind resonating the harp were recorded through ambient microphones and a geophone that was magnetically attached to the instrument at screw points. The resulting sounds are pitched sympathetic drones from the strings that undulate with the wind forming both low pitched high amplitude and high-pitched low amplitude resonances. The recordings from the golden harp were heavily used throughout the spatial sonification for Listening to Earth. Click on video link below to listen and see the golden harp at the headland.

Together, the two aeolian devices were conceptualised as listening instruments speculatively making audible distant atmospheric ripples that have slipped beyond regular thresholds of perception. The ambiguity of the instruments' sound, both the result of human design and performance at the whim of nature, was intended to signal a playful dialogue with Earth rather than a clinical extractive form of engagement. The experimentation process in the build and deployment of these listening instruments was designed to capture winds present at headlands in intertidal areas, tuning these instruments to the specific places where they were meant to sound, and translate atmospheric vibration into audible story.

Analysis and assemblyAnalysis and assembly

Following the fieldwork periods, the recordings of the foreshore areas with microphones, hydrophones, geophones and aeolian harps were imported into digital audio workstations and analysed over a series of listening sessions under controlled studio conditions without the complex sensory input of the recording location. Recordings were grouped and categorised with reference to the sound source, the media through which it was heard and its spectral sound characteristics (high, low, complex, short, continuous). Most of the raw recordings were filtered to unveil unique sounds from within the complex and noisy sound spectra and bring them to the foreground.

While acknowledging the conscious subjective nature of such filtering, we consider this software intervention an extension of Deep Listening practices in which the mind can be trained to filter out a complex sonic environment to enable specific sounds to be unveiled and be allowed the space to be heard. This filtering and the techniques used in the editing process are all part of a subjective aesthetic practice that foregrounds creative decision making based on intuition. This has been done very much in the spirit of Tony Bastick’s research on the necessary relationship between creativity and intuition, where he argues that all creative people make value judgments based on the knowledge of their practice and experience, whether conscious or not. (Bastick 2003)

Following the cataloguing of a diverse bank of recordings, the intertidal sounds were reconfigured from their original recorded state through splicing, moving, editing, and occasionally augmenting recordings into compositions. Using the same software tools, sounds were assembled, layered, mixed, morphed and juxtaposed in processes that borrow heavily from the practice of musique concrète composition. Pierre Schaeffer describes ‘concrète’ creative practice as being “made up of pre-existing elements, taken from any sound material, noise, or musical sound, then composed experimentally by direct montage, the result of a series of approximations, which finally gives form to the will to compose contained in rough drafts, without the help of an ordinary musical notation." (Schaeffer 2012:25). Our compositions rely exclusively on field recordings, and like Schaeffer we use experimental compositional approaches to create a series of approximations. Our compositional approximations rely heavily on Bastick’s understanding of the relationship between creativity and intuition, focussed on ways of reconstructing Earth’s stories while relying on a perceptual imagining of those stories in relation to the vibration, wind, water, and sand on the country where they were recorded.

While composed sound in contemporary society is consumed primarily via headphones and speakers, conventional speaker arrangements seldom come close to utilising the complex spatial decoding possible in the act of listening. To immerse and envelop audiences perceptually within the sound work, spatialisation techniques using Flux’s SPAT Revolution software were used to position and move sound sources in a three-dimensional space to create a sense of location, depth, and movement within a cube of eight speakers. This was first configured in a small studio context, then in custom configurations for public exhibition. The spatial composition requires a specially configured sound cube of speakers installed in a space so as to be heard in the way it was composed. This is both a limitation and an element that makes the installation itself a unique experience for the listener.

Engagement with visual elements of expression beyond the sound cube was a core element of the compositional process. These included the sound cannons, that vibrated grains of sand placed on floor tom drums, the construction of vibrating benches placed throughout the room, and a 40-minute visualisation work created by artist Fausto Brusamolino, who we commissioned to develop visuals that responded directly to the soundscape of Earth stories. The collaboration with Brusamolino came about when we realized we were trying to engage listening audiences for significant periods of time, ten, twenty, thirty minutes of sitting and listening. Our prior experiences with sound installation work made clear that engaging an audience to listen is difficult. Engaging an audience to listen to subtle, low frequency, non-semantic sounds for large periods can be near impossible.

The introduction of a visualisation that used the soundscape as its starting point to generate visual information that flowed with the soundscape was appealing on several levels. Brusamolino’s work is dynamic, and we were excited to be able to procure funding to bring him on as a collaborating visual designer. The dynamic visualisations brought bright colours, mesmerising textural displays and complex evolving patterns into the installation, allowing audiences to sit and visually engage with the work. This visual centrepiece helped audiences understand what to do, how to sit, and where to look. While the soundscape did not require audiences to look one way or another, the focus on the visuals created a space for audience members to sit in and with the soundscape.

This is also true of the sound canons, which created a visual focal point, illuminated drums covered in sand, that engaged audience members around why the sand was moving, and how sound is vibration, and vibration creates movement. This element of vibration is core to the installation, the underlying elements of Earth stories we wanted to communicate, and it brought audience’s attention inward toward listening. Finally, there were the vibrating benches which were illuminated with LED lights, giving audience members a way to be situated in the space, feet on the floor, and settled. The vibrational aspect of the benches is not visually evident, making them a place to sit and rest. But from an installation design standpoint the benches prepare audiences to be open to the installation that is before them. The under-bench bass shakers vibrate based on the low-end frequency compositional elements of the soundscape, meaning they are at times imperceptible, sometimes subtle, and occasionally unmistakable. Serving as a perfect blend of visual and sonic compositional elements, the benches, like the sound cannon drums with sand on their skin, help to engage the audience's visual and tactile sense while drawing them in to listen.

Engaging Audience ListenersEngaging Audience Listeners

Creative outcomesCreative outcomes

Having listened deeply to Earth at coastal foreshore areas and documented an abundant wealth of vibrational information, the question arose as to what, if anything, should be done with the recordings. Following the practices of Oliveros, Westerkamp and others, the simple self-betterment of heightened attentiveness and empathic connection to the environment through the medium of sound is a valuable goal unto itself. Both researchers report ongoing personal impacts with regards to the depth and breadth of their awareness of environmental sound at the fringes of perception as an everyday byproduct of engaging in this project. Perhaps coming from backgrounds as practising artists with the compulsion to make, or perhaps with the expectation of tangible outcomes embedded within the production-oriented model of research funding, the instinct to disseminate via a sound-based artistic work emerged as both an extension of the dialogic exchange with Earth as well as a means of inviting other listeners into the conversation.

While the creative sharing of the documented sound materials may have taken (and still may take) a variety of forms – guided public participatory soundwalks, the release of an album, composition of a musical work integrating Earth stories with instrumental performance – we gravitated towards the presentation of what we’ve termed a sensory sound installation. The intentional dislocation of sound from its natural environment and its re-sounding within an exhibition context is envisioned to provide a space to allow the sounds of the intertidal environment to speak to audiences directly and promote active listening decoupled from the distractions often inherent in the real-world experience. By repositioning what we expect to feel and hear in physically open spaces in a controlled closed space, we aim to provide a new way of understanding and thinking about the natural environment while enabling access to sound that is difficult, if not impossible, to engage with otherwise.

The creation of the installation falls into two key areas: the gathering, organising, composition and spatial production of the sound works; and the design of a listening space to facilitate concentrated multimodal listening. The sound installation is a 40-minute multi-channel audio-visual file that plays on loop. As with our perception of the natural world, from an audience perspective, there is no obvious beginning or end, just the sense of joining and exiting an experience that extends beyond the boundaries of our frame of attention.

The music concrète approach to the soundscape design, builds on Pierre Schaeffer’s practice of listening to an environment repeatedly and recording the sounds, then using only those recordings to compose a soundscape that recreates that space or ideas within it. To compose this work, the recorded sounds were listened to closely over and over again. Much like the practice of sitting and listening to the ocean, the wind, and the rock pools through headphones, the experience of composing involved elements of deep focus, relaxation, and sitting.

From a compositional perspective, the loop is made up of two 20-minute soundscapes, each developed by one researcher. The two works engage with the same sets of recordings and structurally sit both before and after one another as though cycling perpetually between two hearings or listenings of related materials. Our compositional approaches are uniquely rooted in our own practices and years of experience. Using the recordings made at the three research sites, audio editing software was used to develop and command editorial decision making for the re-layering of sound worlds we had captured. Hundreds of recordings went into each composition, and at times subtle and discreet sound elements were isolated from longer recordings, like that of grains of sand blowing across a microphone in the wind, and tides rushing up on the shore, to be placed back into the overall sonic mix of the environment.

The process of spatialisation was bound by the obstacle of technology. After individually editing recordings into two 20-minute sound works, we came together in a sound cube spatialisation studio that has the same configuration as the installation, on a smaller scale. Driven by a computer running SPAT Revolution, the room became the site for development of our spatial composition. Here we sat and negotiated the placement of each sound, controlling its elevation and placement in a 360-degree sphere, and how near or far that sound was audible within a given mix. This process allowed for the delicate creation of a sound world that came as close to our imaginings of the intertidal worlds we recorded.

Consider the researchers themselves as another type of listening instrument where each subjective artistic decision impacts an aspect of the recording, differentiating it from another. When making subjective creative decisions very much in the spirit of Tony Bastick’s understanding of intuition, our presence in each environment and the feelings we have there directly influence how and what is recorded. This is another entry point for consideration into the proposed dialogic exchange with Earth represented through this work. Artists work in the subjective, leaning into the way something sounds or feels, the vibe or energy that a particular sound or combination of sounds emits. Often touted as intangible or ephemeral, this ability to focus on and exist within the subjective of a practice of listening, recording, and composing, is to allow the environment to contribute to our practice. The connection we have through this subjective exchange opens a portal to co-creation. Click on the video link below to listen to an excerpt from ‘Listening to Earth’.

Part 1Part 1

In one of the 20-minute soundscapes, there is a narrative quality of leading the listener through distinct areas of the intertidal zone. The segment opens on the expansive Cudmirrah beach in the sound-space of ocean waves. The largely unmediated sound is complex, occupying the full frequency spectrum, however, the natural white noise is familiar for those who have paused to listen while standing on a beach. Over a slow and barely perceptible transition, the broad spectrum of frequencies and spatial design narrows and a slow crossfade occurs to the sounds of hydrophones placed in the wet sand where the ocean meets the land.

The listener has sunk slowly into the beach and into an unfamiliar sonic vantage point. The movement of miniscule particles of sand, surprisingly active, evokes the sound of wind, a curious sonic ambience that carries depth and fluidity far removed from the more or less stable and solid medium of the beach underfoot. Waves approach, recede and eventually pass over the hydrophones with a seismic wash, moving over the listeners’ heads using the overhead installation speakers. From this perspective, the ebb and flow of relatively small waves becomes an alarming deep whoosh of energy. The sense of movement from the ocean and an associated sense of encroaching submersion perhaps ominously forewarns of rising sea levels.

From the shoreline to deep under the sand dunes, geophones provide the listener with a window into a highly active subterranean sound world. As though listening to the crashing waves while buried deep within the sand, the listening experience in the installation all but bypasses the ears to act directly on the body via subsonic pressure waves from the subwoofers and the tremoring of vibrating benches.

The ears of the listeners’ are pulled from the sand and into a nearby rockpool on Cudmirrah Reef revealing a busy microcosm of sonic activity. The sounds of waves and water motion at the surface are mixed above the listeners’ heads enhancing the perception of being submerged in the rockpool which is otherwise characterised by cracks and pops from all directions thought to be the cavitation of microscopic bubbles of oxygen produced by algae and the movement of small sea snails and echinoderms.

Over the course of 20 minutes, the listener has traversed strata of air, sand and water and experienced sounds of nature from the perspectives of both vast and microscopic perspectives. The trajectory from familiar to unfamiliar sound worlds and back again could perhaps reflect the subtle projection of a musical dramaturgical arc of calm–tense–calm over the total experience.

Part 2Part 2

The second 20-minute soundscape layers the natural world for the listener. Layer by layer the listener is exposed to a greater fidelity of the story of the environment, to scaffold a robust dynamic and immersive sound world for the listener. Initially the listener is brought into an under-dune world, with very low frequency geophone recordings under the sand, slowly that sound is layered with another sound of the sand dune, and then one from the sand on the shoreline. Each newly introduced sound aims to bring the listener from under the earth to its surface and then into the atmosphere, all through the addition of one new sound layer at a time. This helps facilitate the listener’s gradual travel into the complex listening environment.

In addition to recordings made in dunes, rock pools, and in and around the ocean, the composition relies heavily on recordings made with the golden harp. These aeolian recordings were made simultaneously with a geophone to capture the lower end frequency response of the instrument, and a condenser microphone to capture a more comprehensive range of response. There were several hours of recordings of the harp in total, made over two different days at Whibayganba, Nobbys headland. These recordings capture the sonorous, haunting, and beautiful gusts, translated through nineteen nylon strings on three different axes. The instrument was designed to capture wind vibrations on different axes simultaneously to sound multiple aspects of the wind at once.

The selection of recorded sounds was made after an exhaustive process of listening back to every recording made. This led to a process of categorising each recording into a bucket of like recordings. While the buckets change for every project, they are a key element of the process of defining the shape the composition begins to take. The buckets in this case were sand, low-end sounds, wind, water, delicate water, and where water meets sea. While listening back to sounds there is another editing process that happens, cutting out parts of the track that are not good quality, have too much distortion, background noise, or have been recorded at too low a level. The next layer of edit is based on the content of the sounds recorded; this entails splicing up a recorded track into smaller length recordings that are more highly curated. These are then saved and labelled into the appropriate bucket. Once this process has been completed, a new project is opened in the digital audio workstation and recorded sound clips are imported. This is when the art of layering the composition happens. The process involves using one sound at a time, placed on a timeline to develop a particular feeling of place. To accomplish this, sounds are added and subtracted, moved around the timeline, faded in and out, made louder or quieter, cut down into even smaller parts, and in some instances stretched longer. This process is completed for each bucket of recordings. Once completed these segments by bucket then get layered in with one another to accomplish the composer's design for the piece. Often different sections of the composition are developed in isolation and then woven together with other sonic ideas and expressions from the recordings. The result is a composition that expresses the experience of being enveloped in the intertidal areas. This composed piece is then taken into the spatial studio to build up the spatial parameters of the work. These determine where each sound is heard in a 360° sphere, how near or far they are from the listener, how high or low they are in our listening sphere, and whether or not the sounds remain stationary or move within the composition over time.

Sensory Installation Sensory Installation

As important as the creation of the multichannel audio, is the creation of a controlled listening space through which audiences hopefully intuit a deep engagement with the sound work. Through immersive spatial audio design and the application of multimodal listening frameworks, we employed vibration technologies and subtle visual information in the form of incandescent, pulsating sand on drums, glowing vibrating benches, and reactive video projections to fully engage the listening body in this ultra-definition representation of the natural sound world (Figure 6). Following an informal showing of the audio-only component as part of the ‘Performers(’) Present International Artistic Research Symposium’ at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, National University of Singapore (2023), the work received its more developed multisensory public exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney (2024) where it was experienced by more than 3000 visitors.

At the museum, audiences entered a darkened space to be enveloped by the sounds of intertidal environments. Sound was diffused via eight speakers arranged in a cube-style array conveying the surround experience in multiple 360° planes to immersively move the audience through layers of air, water and land. The presence of low frequency seismic vibrations unheard by the ear but prominently captured with geophones and hydrophones buried in the beach or under coastal sand dunes were foregrounded via subwoofer speakers as well as custom use of tactile transducer technologies that gently pummelled listening bodies to augment the experience and the ‘feeling’ of sound. As part of the installation, three benches were fabricated fitted with bass shakers. The benches were inspired by Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation to listen with the bottom of your feet. The tactile listening experiment began as a low-lying plank, a bridge of sorts, over which audiences could walk barefoot, feeling seismic low-frequency recordings of the Earth returned through their feet (Figure 7). With the amplified vibrations felt but not heard, the bottoms of the audience’s feet quite viscerally become ears that listen to the deep sounds contained within the earth.

The creation of the installation centres sound as the primary point of sensory engagement by the removal from its associative visual sensory context. While new visual information is reintroduced in the form of reactive projections and vibrating patterns of sand, these visual sensory inputs together with the tactile sensory inputs of the benches are cumulatively imagined as an augmentation of the sense of sound and not separate to it.

A tactile sense of sound is evoked visually through the sonic manipulation of sand on two glowing translucent drums. Bass frequencies were used to drive two custom-built sound cannons – woofers with vortex-inducing appendages that focus sound waves into tactile movement of air – installed beneath the transparent drums. The low-frequency energy is directed into the skin of the drumhead covered in sand from the same coastal site as the recording. The seismic rumble captured from within the beach is returned to the same sand which bounces on the drumhead, introducing a subtle acoustic sizzle to the sound world, and visually rearranging itself into patterns echoing the formation of ripples and dunes in the natural foreshore area (Figure 8).

Further visualisation of the otherwise sound-centred experience is provided in the form of projections by lighting and video artist Fausto Brusamolino. Though abstract in nature, the visual language subtly references the sonic environment with the suggestion of moving water and complex granular systems in constant flux. Brusamolino comments: “The visual aesthetic for this work was fine-tuned and manipulated to provide an organic, constantly changing, transformative feel. Each shape, color, texture, movement, transform into the next one. To my eyes this is how nature, and water in particular, behaves.” (Email correspondence July 11 2024; see figures 9-10).

Developed using custom software designed by Brusamolino, the video projections are generated in response to the audio. That is, the imagery is manipulated by, and reacts to, the audio signal in real time: “The visuals generated for this work are a live take, a screen recording of the video software interpretation of the sounds in that moment in time. A different take, done a different day, would look slightly (or very) different as many parameters organically interact and cascade into each other.” (Email correspondence July 11 2024) Although a real time visualisation in a state of perpetual change, like the intertidal environment on which it is based, is possible and conceptually desirable, a fixed rendering of the video was synced to the audio for reliability during public exhibition.

While there is an obvious paradox inherent in representing the natural environment within the contrived artificiality of a human-built environment, it is hoped the installation space can be imagined as a listening instrument: a device that makes noticed what was previously unheard, shifts habitual ways of hearing and provides an access point to commune with Earth.

Reflections for ConsiderationReflections for Consideration

On ListeningOn Listening

With a shared language of sound, we, as composer and sound artist, found common ground through listening. Our fieldwork to record sounds of and with Earth, were in fact adventures guided by our curiosity to listen beyond the typical habits and perceptual thresholds of listening. We spent hours digging holes in the sand and burying microphones into them, cultivating lassoing techniques for hydrophones to enter the ocean, and carefully negotiating the proximity of microphones and recording equipment to sea water, so as not to lose our tools. Crouching down beside a rockpool where a hydrophone had been placed, we could spend thirty minutes listening, watching, and contemplating the sources of the sounds and the changes in their sonic qualities as the tide rushed over the pool.

Our investigations into listening with Earth, considering what Earth might be saying and how we might capture and understand that information, led us away from earlier misguided notions of information-mining through sound, and toward an acknowledgement that our experience recording the sounds of the ocean, the intertidal areas, and the wind, left us with a feeling of connection, intrigue, and understanding that was itself the story. The attention and focus to vibration, water, wind, and animals is the story, even if the information within that story may not be something we can fully access.

Conceptualising listening as a space of sonic encounter between subjects, Dylan Robinson appeals for greater ethical accountability. If we extend Robinson’s consideration of music and listener as equal subjects to include an awareness of our anthropocentric frame of listening and likewise consider environmental sound – in this instance, the geophony of earth – as a living subject, perhaps we are more ethically positioned to listen to Earth from the perspective of a collaborative dialogue than an extractive form of engagement. We worked with the parts we could access and understand, through our shared language of sound, and created composed listening experiences for others so they too could feel a sense of connection and intrigue that might form an empathetic connection between listener and Earth.

Our research and experimentation with aeolian instrument building, which was both process and practice led, focussed on a relationship between the wind, and the pipes and the strings we were assembling. After designing the prototype for each instrument, we spent hours calibrating the pipes and strings to be in conversation with the wind. From an instrument making perspective, the technicality of the process was concerned with making changes to the instrument, including the materials, directionality, angle, tension, and so on. From an ethnographic perspective, the calibration of these instruments required a deeper knowledge of the wind. This deeper knowledge relies on a situated understanding of our role and position as researchers, embodied listeners, and participants in a dialogic exchange where the knowledge we bring to the conversation supports our ability to listen, experience, and feel the vibrations and sensorium of Earth, which is the beginning of the story.

Our instruments only worked if we understood how they could be in conversation with the wind, as the tubes and strings would only vibrate and sound if they were in true relation to the wind. Building instruments that could be in conversation with the wind required us, as the instrument makers, to revisit one location over and over again, learning about the changes in wind off the ocean at different times of the day, and developing an instrument to respond to the extent of the wind, large gusts, headland level winds, and calmer breezes found down at the beach. We had to bring the instruments with us on these excursions so that they could exist in the presence of the wind. We would try one installation orientation and then another and then another, until we found the ways the instrument liked to sound the wind.

Placing the sonovane atop a tall stand we waited for the wind gusts to rotate the cowl and sound. When that did not sound correctly; did not rotate the cowl the way it was designed, the wind did not vibrate the pipes, and the subjective aesthetic we imagined did not happen, we unmounted the instrument and placed it on its side so that wind could rush past and through the pipes. The golden harp was initially installed on the ground at the lighthouse, but due to the layout of concrete buildings, and the placement of a brick wall, it became clear that the instrument could not be in conversation with the wind on the ground, so we lifted it up onto a stand. When the instrument still did not resonate the wind, we took it off the stand and held it above our heads and moved with the wind, until we heard the wind and the instrument sound. This was the place where they could be in conversation. However a moment later the wind changed, and the golden harp’s strings no longer vibrated from the wind's gusts. So we moved with the instrument in the wind, learning how the wind moved at the lighthouse, and how the instrument was angled when it sounded in vibration with the wind. Recording the sounds of these instruments vibrating, required dynamic movement, ongoing change, and trial and error. Listening itself is a dynamic process, and listening to Earth’s stories is not a passive practice but rather an active one that requires movement, calling and responding, swinging and swaying, engagement, and subjective connection.

We chose to build aeoliphones, in part, because of the inherent agency this gives the wind, and our pre-existing embodied listening practices connected to vibration. Installation of the instruments involved placement in site-specific and high wind ecological sites including headlands, and at lighthouses. There was a level of human engagement with the instruments through placement and movement in relation to wind, as well as through the unique selection, configuration, and placement of audio technologies embedded in the instruments to facilitate the listening of micro-sonic sounds, and subtle vibrations. In their explorations of listening and mediation with an aeolian guitar, Stefánsdóttir and Östersjö, offer that “the radical conditions offered by the relational approach to the site-specific, through ecological sound art, can be seen in the practice of aeolian guitar performance and specifically in how the non-human agency of the wind is enhanced through the intentionality of the audio technology.” (Stefánsdóttir and Östersjö 2022:132) Inherent to their argument is the depth of an artist’s relationship to their practice built in the tactile, sensorium, and intuitive, and how these elements of one’s practice, in their case embodied listening, are necessarily transferred or carried into their use of technology, and further how the technological decisions they make become embodied with these deep sensory knowledges. Our own embodied listening experiences focussed on vibration, as musician, composer, and sound artist, allowed us to bring embodied knowledge and sensory memory of how vibration feels and acts upon different materials, surfaces, and conditions, directly impacting our engagement and choices with sound technologies. Further, our aesthetic approach to vibrational listening, situated in sound and touch directly informed the building of the listening instruments and technology choices and placements.

On ComposingOn Composing

There is a direct relationship between placing the aeolian instruments in conversation with the wind, the way they vibrate and absorb the environment around them, and our approach to composing a soundscape of Earth for audiences, intended to be listened to, engaged with and absorbed. In the gaps and connections between the process of recording and our approach to composing exists an understanding of listening. This is to say that the compositional practice sits atop a listening practice, and that both the recording and composition of sounds happens in, by, and through a listening practice. Without negating the artistry and experience brought to bear on the compositional practice by our combined years of focus and interest in composition, our approach to composition of these Earth sounds could in some ways more accurately be called Listening. These compositions attempt to re-presence a three-dimensional environment where heard sounds are stories, and listening is absorbing.

We know that humans project themselves into sounds they listen to. In Listening to Nature, Noise and Music, Max Peter Baumann asserts that we listen in a ‘corrective’ way: “It is not the world that makes our auditory contents but rather our experiential knowledge that creates the world and how we hear” (Baumann 1999:97). That is, we listen in an “ethnocentric” way that quickly compares unaccustomed information with accustomed patterns (Baumann 1999:102). Is this to say that people largely move sounds they hear to the centre, in essence using listening to homogenise different sounds toward the familiar, rather than to differentiate the subtleties? This question gave us pause as our compositional approach aimed to reveal subtlety, to expose worlds under sand, inside rock pools, stories in wind, and sounds on the ocean floor. We were constantly differentiating subtle sounds of water, sand, and wind to create a soundscape that was dynamic and immersive by piecing together many subtle sounds to recreate a whole. Would a listening audience be open to hearing this subtlety, to engage with it, or might they try to homogenise these sounds toward the familiar?

We established strategies for composing, founded in disciplined deep listening practices that engage the whole body in the sensorium of listening. We knew we wanted to include touch-based vibration as an experience of embodied listening, and that we wanted to develop a spatial listening environment that enveloped the listener. The aim of these compositional strategies was to create a space for the listener to connect with Earth, in a deeply focussed state of listening. Driven by an assumption that the average person does not focus deeply on environmental sounds of the wind, water, and sand, the spatial composition created dynamic layers in a 360°-degree auditory environment that placed the listener at the centre of a high fidelity re-presencing of the intertidal environments where we recorded. This approach raises questions around the subjective nature of what we choose to attend to and why, but also what listeners in fact hear in the installation. We found ourselves again asking questions about how we and others listen.

In a piece of 19th century ‘sensation fiction’, Florence McLandburgh’s, The Automaton Ear is narrated from the perspective of a professor who creates a peculiar listening instrument to tune into the vibrations of the past (McLandburgh 1878). Over the course of the story, the professor begins to question whether his curious ear trumpet does indeed amplify the sounds of the external world or his own interior: a projected hallucination of his own fantasies. If through the installation listeners are socialising sounds of Earth as part of their interior world, as McLandburgh and Baumann hypothesised, could this become an act of inner dialogue? Through meticulous editing and composition, the soundscape is designed to connect listeners to the environment, knowing that each person will take something different away. This raised questions about when listening to the environment is an act of reception and when it is an act of projection. Perhaps in an act of reception, the experience of listening places one in conversation with self about the practice of listening and in this way in conversation with the environment. And in our long list of questions that still do not have answers, what comes from being in dialogue with the environment? Might the act of engaged listening, whether through perception or reception, create a focussed attention on the dynamic nature of Earth, one that necessitates ongoing conversation?

ConclusionConclusion

We consider Earth as a co-author on this paper, because we listen in relation to the places where we are. Echoing the sentiment found in Dylan Robinson’s work, we have tried to move away from extractivist thinking about the resource of nature while moving toward interdependent exchange in which Earth is reframed as a collaborator. Mäkelä and Aktaş “propose that if one builds a relationship with the natural environment that acknowledges interdependencies and encourages respectful and caring acts, one's approach to creative practices as well as everyday behaviours can transition into more sustainable and responsible ones.” (Mäkelä & Aktaş 2023:140) In essence, intention and care are required to live and create in a way that is sustainable toward the environment, and by extension these behaviours form the stepping stones to be in conversation with Earth.

Our next steps in this research are to continue asking questions of ourselves and others about using methodological approaches that centre more-than-human collaboration. The conversation about environmental co-creation and sustainable, non-extractivist approaches to research has only just begun. Leading scholars in this area are undertaking research projects, as we have, to further explore possibilities that necessitate a reframing of traditional academic gazes and pursuits. Focussing in on this issue from an eco-acoustic compositional practice perspective leaves us with many unanswered questions, and an understanding that being in collaboration with Earth requires deep attentive engagement with the environment, in a way that continues to grow and evolve our listening practice.

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