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.
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought.
Lynn Margulis was an eminent American evolutionary biologist. Her serial endosymbiotic theory (SET) of eukaryotic cell development overturned the modern concept of how life originated on earth. She argued that different types of bacteria, through “symbiogenesis”, formed more complicated single organisms. Born in Chicago, Illinois on 5 March in 1938, Lynn Margulis earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1957. After a few months, she married the famous astronomer Carl Sagan. They divorced in 1964.
Danny McCarthy (b. 1950) has pioneered both sound art and performance art in Ireland and he continues to be a leading exponent exhibiting and performing both in Ireland and abroad regularly. In 2006 he founded The Quiet Club (with Mick O Shea) a floating membership sound (art and electronics) performance group and have presented works all over Ireland and internationally. They have a CD out on Farpoint Recordings entitled “No Meat No Bone” recorded at the Rauschenberg Foundation Capiva, Florida. He has a solo CD “The Rauschenberg Scores” also on Farpoint.
Andra McCartney (1955-2019) was an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, where gave courses on sound production, research creation, and sound theory. She was a soundwalk artist, leading public walks and creating gallery installations, recordings, performances and radio works. Her works can be heard on the internet, on CBC radio, and on CDs produced by Deep Wireless, Terra Nova, and the Canadian Electroacoustic Community.
Ann McMillan (born 1923, New York City, died 1994) was an American composer and musician, famous to be working with environmental sounds. McMillan was part of the burgeoning musique concrète and electronic music movement, forming sparse, eclectic sounds through tape manipulation.
Matilde Meireles is a sound artist and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects. Her work has a multi-sensorial and multi-perspective critical approach to site, where Matilde investigates the potential of listening across spectrums as ways to encounter and articulate a plural experience of the world — human and otherwise. These range from the inner architectures of reeds and complex water ecologies, to the local neighbourhood, resonances in everyday objects, and the architecture of radio signals.
David Monacchi (1970) is an eco-acoustics researcher, composer and interdisciplinary artist. He has been developing the project “Fragments of Extinction” for more than 20 years, conducting field research in the world’s remaining areas of undisturbed primary equatorial forest in Amazon, Africa and Borneo.
Timothy Morton (born 1968) is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe.
Alyssa Moxley is an artist that works with sound, listening, memory, and environment. Her works include field recording, musical composition and performance, film sound design, choreography, interactive sculpture and sonic interventions. She accesses narratives of identity, place, space, and embodied experience through sound.
Rachel Mundy is an Associate Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture, & Media program at Rutgers University in Newark. She specializes in twentieth-century sonic culture with interests at the juncture of music, the history of science, and animal studies. Her work shows how music has been used to navigate changing boundaries between race, species, and culture during a century of social and ecological crisis. Rachel’s work has been cited as initiating an “animal turn” in music studies.