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.
Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. Her research interests include experimental practices in music and sound art; urban sound; sound and space; and new technologies in music.
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.
Ingrid M. Parker is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ingrid’s research interests embrace both basic and applied problems and bridge the fields of ecology and evolution. Much of her research is focused on understanding the causes, consequences, and dynamics of biological invasions, especially the effects of species interactions (such as herbivory, disease, and pollination) on plant invaders. She has also worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use science to help save endangered plant species.
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.
"Sound works, recordings, scored compositions, improvisation, ongoing collaborations, installations: my work can take a variety of forms. At the most basic level, this work invokes a change, usually subtle, in the situation. It attempts to engage with “the process that is the world” (to quote Joseph Panzner quoting John Cage), to hear that world evolving behind the surface, to hear a world that is constantly undergoing transformation. But the work is also an attempt to pause, to hold that space open as a place to imagine a better world."
Michael Pisaro-Liu
Daniela Medina Poch (she/her, Bogotá~Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Medina Poch investigates how unofficial histories and interspecies entanglements contribute to the conception of ecocentric narratives, epistemic bridges that amplify non-hegemonic knowledge systems. She works with the political potential of language and language subversion, and sensitive ponderings that are woven into ecoliteracies, lecture-performances, installation-performances symbiotic listening spaces and collective platforms.
Andrea Polli is an environmental artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology. Her interdisciplinary research has been presented as public artworks, media installations, community projects, performances, broadcasts, mobile and geolocative media, publications, and through the curation and organization of public exhibitions and events. She creates artworks designed to raise awareness of environmental issues.