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.
Akio Suzuki (born 1941 in Pyongyang, North Korea) is musician and soundartist. Since his infamous “Throwing Objects Down a Staircase” event at Nagoya Station in 1963 and the self-study events which followed, where he explored the processes of “projection” and “following” in the natural world, Suzuki has pursued listening as a practice. In the 1970s he created and began performing on a number of original instruments, including the echo instrument Analapos.
Hollis Taylor is a composer and bioacoustic researcher who blurs the lines between human music as classical, jazz, and folk and bioacoustics. Taylor was born in the USA and has been a Sydney resident since 2002. Her PhD from the University of Western Sydney is on the song of the Australian pied butcherbird. Her portfolio of compositions based on birdsong won the 2008 UWS APRA award and was featured on ABC Classic FM's New Music Up Late and at Violinale 2009 in Berlin.
Emily Thompson is a historian of technology who studies early twentieth-century America. Her research explores the cultural history of sound, music, noise, and listening, and she focuses on how these phenomena and activities intersect with technologies like the phonograph, motion pictures, and architecture. She studied electrical engineering and physics as an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Davide Tidoni is an Italian artist and researcher working from the boundaries of physical, perceptual, and affective dimensions of sound. His work addresses questions regarding interactions with acoustic space, intersubjectivity, and impermanence. His practice also includes interests in the use of sound in counter-cultures and social contexts of struggle. In 2018 he published The Sound of Normalisation, a field research on the ultras group Brescia 1911.
Walter Tilgner is a biologist and bioacoustician, born 1934 in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia. In 1945, after the banishment from there the son of a master carpenter was raised on a farm near Hünfeld Germany. In the fifties studied zoology and botany in Frankfurt on the Main and until his retirement worked at the Natural History Museum at Lake Constance. The environmentalist and well-known nature photographer, since 1999 the honorary member of the Soundscape Forum Basel and WFAE. He is recording “nature sound images” for more than 40 years.
Cheryl Tipp is the British Library’s Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds. With a background in zoology and library services, Cheryl has spent many years looking after the Library’s world - renowned collection of over 250,000 species and habitat recordings. She has worked extensively on projects that encourage the creative reuse of archival content, from student videogames to short films from emerging filmmakers.
Zoe Todd (she/they) (Red River Métis) is a practice-led artist-researcher who studies the relationships between Indigenous sovereignty and freshwater fish futures in Canada. As a Métis anthropologist and researcher-artist, Dr.
Cobi van Tonder is an interdisciplinary artist who has presented over 40 works worldwide, including concerts and exhibitions in Japan, Korea, USA, Ireland, UK, Germany, South Africa and Greece. Her innovative art/science hybrid projects involve the creation of new technological interfaces or software to enable artistic ideas. She explores diverse avenues of listening as art-making space that she describes as ‘expanded listening’.
David Toop (born 1949) is a composer/musician, author and curator based in London. Since 1970 he has worked in many fields of sound art, listening practice and music, including improvisation, sound installations and video works, field recordings, pop music production, music for television, theatre and dance.
Barry Truax is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication (and formerly the School for the Contemporary Arts) at Simon Fraser University where he taught courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic music. He worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with sound and technology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works, music theatre pieces and those with live performers or computer graphics.