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.
Max Neuhaus (1939 – 2009) was an American musician, composer and sound artist. Neuhaus produced the project Listen - a listener’s manifesto, organized from 1966 on in different formats: lecture, newspaper article, post card, self-adhesive sticker, poster, as well as sound walks in New York neighbourhoods.
Curator, artist and researcher Mikel R. Nieto studied art in San Sebastian, Madrid and Barcelona. For years he has been deeply involved in phonographic practice and the resulting theory. He has given workshops in a number of cultural centres and universities. He forms part of the team behind the sound map of the Basque Country soinumapa.net, and Hots! Radio, as well as the Mediateletipos.net dissemination portal.
Jim Nollman (born 1947) is an American composer, conceptual artist, author of five books, and an environmental activist. He graduated from Tufts University in 1969. In 1973, he composed a Thanksgiving Day radio piece “Turkey Song”, that featured him singing and playing flutes with 300 tom turkeys. From that point forward, he began his lifelong pursuit of composing and recording "interspecies music" with other animals.
Martha Craven Nussbaum (born 1947) is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department. She received her BA from NYU and her MA and PhD from Harvard. She has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities and is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Department of Philosophy and the Law School.
Emeka Ogboh (born 1977) is a Nigerian sound and installation artist. He became interested in sound art during a media class at the 2008 Fayoum Winter Academy with Austrian multimedia artist Harald Scherz. Following this experience, Ogboh paid attention to the interaction of sounds in Lagos as compositions rather than individual voices. Ogboh compared the soundscapes to orchestra symphonies, with layered voices rather than strictly chaotic noise. He also appreciated the soundscape's ability to "transport the listener" and found the sound medium most engaging.
Maria Papadomanolaki is a transmission artist and composer based in Greece. Papadomanolaki has studied linguistics and literature at the Aristoteleion University of Thessaloniki before moving on to sound art and sound studies, having completed a PhD on the topic ‘Sonic Perceptual Ecologies’ at CRISAP, LCC, UAL. Her work and research focus on the role of sound in the way we engage with our environments, with memory, placemaking and perception.
Aki Pasoulas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts London, and at Middlesex University. His teaching includes courses on acoustics, psychoacoustics, electroacoustic composition, digital audio, and multi-channel sound. His doctoral research, supervised by Denis Smalley at City University London and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), investigated the listener’s experience and interpretation of time passing and the interrelationships among timescales in electroacoustic music.
Roger Searle Payne (1935) is an American biologist and environmentalist famous for the 1967 discovery (with Scott McVay) of whale song among humpback whales. Payne later became an important figure in the worldwide campaign to end commercial whaling. He spent the early years of his career studying echolocation in bats (and how their food, moths, avoid them) and auditory localization in owls.
Alejandra Perez Nuñez (Punta Arenas, 1972) is an independent artist and a member of a diverse group of practitioners and writers examining the electromagnetic environment in relation to post industrial economies. As a noise performer working with open source tools she participates in projects dealing with radio, connected performance and social science fiction. Her work is based on a decolonial methodological perspective: she uses sound as a device to critically investigate that which is imperceptible to the eye and hidden in contemporary capitalist narratives.
Cédric Peyronnet is a French sound artist. He is working since the ’90 around phonography (Field recordings, “sound hunting”…), soundscapes, using the principles of concrete, acousmatic, electroacoustic music. His work, whose main theme is the exploration of places by sound recording, listening and sound sculpting, takes form of compositions and sound pieces (CD, Vinyl … more than sixty references published since the ‘90), concerts, sound screenings and sound installations.