How can soundscaping prompt reconsideration of the lives, cultures and futures of forests?
To explore this we’re organising a forestscapes listening lab at Science Gallery London, as part of Pulse of the Planet on 21st March 2025 from 6.30pm. You can find out more and register here.
The listening lab is part of the forestscapes project, which examines how soundscaping can surface different ways of knowing, imagining and experiencing forests.
As part of this project we are developing generative arts-based methods for recomposing collections of sound materials to support “collective inquiry” into forests as living cultural landscapes.
At the listening lab we will be using supercollider for live algorithmic recomposition of collections of forest related sounds – including field recordings from forest research and restoration projects, as well as sounds associated with forest sites and forest issues on online platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
In contrast to listening as individual immersion in curated recreations of nature – the lab will explore listening as a collective practice of unsettling and reconsidering nature-culture relations and how ecologies are mediatised, commodified, laundered and contested.
If you’d like to get updates on the forestscapes project you can sign up here. If you’re interested in collaborating or hosting a forestscapes workshop you can find contact details here.
How are digital objects such as hashtags, links, likes and images involved in the production of forest politics? This chapter explores this through collaborative research on the dynamics of online engagement with the 2019 Amazon forest fires. Through a series of empirical vignettes with visual materials and data from social media, we examine how digital platforms, objects and devices perform and organise relations between forests and a wide variety of societal actors, issues, cultures – from bots to boycotts, agriculture to eco-activism, scientists to pop stars, indigenous communities to geopolitical interventions. Looking beyond concerns with the representational (in-)fidelities of forest media, we consider the role of collaborative methodological experiments with co-hashtag networks, cross-platform analysis, composite images and image-text variations in tracing, eliciting and unfolding the digital mediation of ecological politics. Thinking along with research on the social lives of methods, we consider the role of digital data, methods and infrastructures in the composition and recomposition of problems, relations and ontologies of forests in society.
Here’s the book blurb:
Digital ecologies draws together leading social science and humanities scholars to examine how digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics. The book offers an overview of the emerging field of interdisciplinary digital ecologies research by mapping key debates and issues in the field, with original empirical chapters exploring how livestreams, sensors, mobile technologies, social media platforms, and software are reconfiguring life in profound ways. The collection traverses contexts ranging from animal exercise apps, to surveillance systems on the high seas, and is organised around the themes of encounters, governance, and assemblages. Digital ecologies also includes an agenda-setting intervention by the book’s editors, and three closing chapter-length provocations by leading scholars in digital geographies, the environmental humanities, and media theory that set out trajectories for future research.
How can generative soundscape composition enable different perspectives on forests in an era of planetary crisis? The forestscapes listening lab explores how sound can serve as a medium for collective inquiry into forests as living cultural landscapes.
The soundscapes are composed with folders of sound from different sources, including field recordings from researchers, sound artists and forest practitioners, as well as online sounds from the web, social media and sound archives. They are composed using custom scripts with the open source supercollider software as well as open source norns device, a “sound machine for the exploration of time and space”.
The re:publica installation will include soundscapes from workshops in London and Berlin – including some new pieces from the Environmental Data, Media, and the Humanities hackathon last week.
How can soundscapes be used as a way to attend to forest life and the many different ways that we narrate and relate to forests, forest issues and forest protection and restoration efforts?
Forests and their wider ecologies are presented not only as sites of conservation and relaxation, but also as crucial infrastructures in addressing and building resilience against the effects of climate change; habitats for endangered species; hotspots of biodiversity; part of poverty alleviation programmes; sites for ecotourism, health and wellbeing; scenes of neocolonial afforestation; backdrops for corporate greenwashing; landscapes of danger, violence, destruction and resource conflicts; and places where different kinds of planetary futures may emerge. Forests are involved in collective life in many ways.
In this context, the forestscapes project will explore, document and demonstrate generative arts-based methods for recomposing collections of sound materials to support “collective inquiry” into forests as living cultural landscapes. It aims to facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges between natural scientists, social scientists, arts and humanities researchers, artists and public-spirited organisations and institutions working on forest issues.
While many previous works have explored sound as a medium for sensory immersion, (e.g. field recordings), forestscapes explores how recomposing sound material may explore forests as mediatised and contested cultural landscapes: diverse sites of many different (and marginalised) kinds of beings, relations, histories and representations. As part of the project we will co-create new sound works, as well as generative composition techniques using open source software and hardware.
Research on visual methods has explored how to work with “folders of images”, including formats for the re-arrangement of images for collective interpretation. Forestscapes will explore generative methods and techniques for working with “folders of sound” – whether folders of site-based recordings or collections of sounds associated with a particular place gathered from the web and social media.
Further details and materials from the project will be added here.
Call for folders of forest sounds
As part of the project we have an open call for folders of forest sounds. If you have a collection of forest sounds related to a particular site and you’d be interested in exploring soundscaping techniques, we’d love to hear from you.
What? We welcome sounds collected in different contexts, i.e. research projects involving forests in some ways (e.g. ecological restoration, study of climate change impacts, fieldwork, etc); sounds recorded during walks and trips; as well as material collected online.
How? You can tell us about your folders of forest sounds here.
Who? We’re keen to hear from everyone with collections of forest sounds – whether you’re a forest scientist with bioacoustic recordings; an environmental organisation exploring sound as a medium of community engagement; a new media researcher gathering online materials; an ethnographer working with sound materials; a musician working with field recordings from a particular forest site; an artist interested in generative compositional techniques with ecological sounds; or a walker who has gathered a collection of sounds from a forest you often go to.
When? Please submit your files by 17th March 2023.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has prompted confusion among its users and concerns about the platform’s future. Musk’s tweets are gathering daily attention due to large-scale layoffs and safety concerns around the new paid blue verification mark. To make things worse, as its engineers are on their way out of the door, users are also experiencing various technical glitches on the platform. Millions of users – including journalists, researchers and organisations – are already signing up on alternative platforms to be prepared for the platform’s deterioration and demise.
While no one can predict Twitter’s future, it remains widely used by politicians, scientists, companies, NGOs and influencers who are still busy posting on the platform. This includes COP27 in Egypt, where Twitter was one of the main platforms to report on the event. #cop27 has been tweeted over 2.85 million times since 5 November 2022.
Social media platforms can give us additional insights into how broader publics make connections between forest restoration and other social, economic and environmental issues. To see which issues and narratives around forest restoration have been brought up on Twitter in the lead-up to the event, we’ve carried out a series of small explorations based on the digital methods recipes developed by our colleagues at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London and the Public Data Lab who are part of the SUPERB consortium led by EFI. This has been a good way to see if EFI could use these methods independently to understand international events as they unfold.
We usually see a spike in hashtag usage a few days before global events like the COPs. Using#cop27, we collected 217,189 tweets between 5 and 7 November 2022. We then examined the top 1000 hashtags to see which kinds of forest-related issues are present.
