Current environmentally concerned sound art and science is in a similar situation that was resolved within the field of visual arts in the beginning of the 1990s. Since then the work of environmentally oriented artists was more or less recognised as a distinct movement in its own right. This open list is an attempt to bring together some names of people, initiatives and institutions approaching and thinking about sound in such a way that it resonates within the general critical environmental agenda of today. Not necessary it collides with musicians using field recordings as a material for their music composition, sound work, sound installations, radiophony etc. As well, the profession of artist or scientist is necessarily not conditional.
Leo Leroy Beranek (born 1914 in Solon, Iowa, died 2016, in Westwood, Massachusetts) was an acoustics expert and a founder of the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman. His ancestors came from West Bohemia. Edward's Baranek (Leo's father paternal grandparents) Josef Beránek and Anna Šimandlová were from Nynice and Jarov respectively. Beranek attended Cornell College in Iowa, where he graduated in 1936 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics.
Karin Bijsterveld's current research focuses on topics at the crossroads of Science and Technology Studies and Sound Studies. She has published on the history of public problems of noise, on the sounds of the past, and on the relationship between music and technology in Social Studies of Science, Osiris, Technology and Culture, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and The Senses & Society. Her 2007 inaugural lecture focused on the history of car radio and interior car sound.
Elena Biserna is an independent scholar and occasional curator based in Marseille, France. Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, time-based art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several international publications (Les Presses du Réel, Mimesis, Le Mot et le Reste, Errant Bodies, Amsterdam University Press, Cambridge Scholar, Castelvecchi, Bloomsbury, etc.) and journals.
Andres Bosshard (born in Zurich in 1955) is an internationally recognised expert in his field. He playfully designs towers, islands, gardens and skies of sound in the public space; Bosshard was in 1993 one of the co-founders of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. He studied music and art history and since 1976 performs as a musician and sound artist and plays at festivals in Europe, America, Japan and India. He works with sound architecture, sound installations and sound gardens and interacts with landscape planners and architects.
Alex Braidwood is a sound artist, media designer, and educator who maintains a practice exploring issues of sustainability at the intersection of art and science. He has exhibited art, led workshops, lectured on his work, and performed live at a variety of events and venues throughout the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He has been an artist in residence in an Australian mountain village, on an Iowa farm, at a mid-western biological field research station, and on Isle Royale National Park.
Sabine Breitsameter is a professor of media culture at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. Her focus is on electro-acoustic art, media history and the culture of listening. From 2004–08 she was visiting professor of experimental sound design at the Berlin University of the Arts where she co-founded the Sound Studies master degree course.
Matthew Burtner is an Alaskan-born composer and sound artist specializing in concert music, environmental sound art and interactive media. His work explores ecology, embodiment, and extended polymetric and noise-based systems. He composes systems of human-computer-environment interaction, finding an aesthetic between human expression and environmental system. Burtner studied composition, computer music and philosophy at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Iannis Xenakis’ UPIC Center in Paris, Tulane University in New Orleans and St. Johns College in Santa Fe.
Roberta Busechian (1990) is a sound artist, curator, researcher, lecturer of sound art theory, practice and sonic activism. She is a guest lecturer at IUAV University of Venice, was a lecturer at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Master Sound Art for creative industries) at electronic music academy recreative12.
Angus Carlyle is a British researcher and teacher, working with other sound artists in the CRiSAP Research Centre. He teaches at the University of the Arts London where he was the Co-Director of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) from 2005 - 2017. He is interested in landscape and in other things besides and curious about how we make sense of the environments we inhabit. Sound is an important part of that curiosity but Angus also works through text and image.
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring (1962) and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer and financial security.