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.
Marc & Olivier Namblard, audio-naturalists and listening wanderers, examining from childhood this contrasted and elusive landscape, situated in the southeast of the Massif Central, called “Cévennes”. Patience, exploration and familiarity with the natural environment have enabled them to create a body of work of field recordings that are of the highest depth and quality.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940 - 2021). Shortly after he obtained his graduate in philosophy in 1962 in Paris, Nancy began to write explicitly philosophical texts. He published on authors like Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and André Breton. This engagement with various different types of thinkers also came to be characteristic of his later work, which is renowned for its versatility. Has written more than twenty books and hundreds of texts or contributions to volumes, catalogues and journals.
Jay Needham is an artist, radio producer and composer. His sound and visual works address the politics of borders and the aesthetics of acoustic reception. His compositions activate listening as an irreplaceable component of an artistic cognitive process. Needham’s current work advances the critical placement of radio and the transmission arts as one of the most persuasive contemporary forms of cultural communication.
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.
Linda O Keeffe is a sound artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her current body of practice is focused on the intersection of science & technology, ethics and communication, where she has produced a number of art works, published research papers and keynote presentations. In 2017 she was commissioned to develop a body of work for the touring exhibition Sounds Like Her, the work, Hybrid Soundscapes I-IV has been shown in major UK art galleries from 2017 to 2020, and has been featured in publications exploring the role of women in sound.
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.
Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing initiative in the humanities, specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP's editorial board includes scholars like Alain Badiou, Jonathan Culler, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean-Claude Guédon, Graham Harman, J. Hillis Miller, Antonio Negri, Peter Suber and Gayatri Spivak, among others.