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.
One of Dunn / Crutchfield’s collaborations most famous works is The Sound of Light in Trees (2006) which is an electroacoustic piece using only the sounds recorded in pine trees made by the Pinyon Engraver Beetle, which came from a research project.
Frances Dyson is a writer, media artist and associate professor in Techno-Cultural Studies at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology (MIT Press, 2014). In this wide-ranging book, Dyson examines here the role of sound in the development of economic and ecological systems that are today in crisis.
Max Eastley (born 1944) is a British kinetic sculptor, musician and composer. Has worked across a variety of genres including: improvised and experimental music; folk music; popular song; jazz; compositions using environmental recordings as well as musical resources. He has also composed music for film and dance. His primary instrument is a unique electro-acoustic monochord, developed from an aeolian sculpture.
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts. She is a founding member and artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Éliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings.
Alice Eldridge’s background in music, psychology, evolutionary and adaptive systems and informatics underpins creative and empirical interdisciplinary research in sonic (complex) systems at the interstices of music, technology and ecology. This includes improvisation, composition, field recording, instrument building and computational analysis of natural acoustic environments within the emerging field of ecoacoustics, braided with ideas and methods from adaptive and complex systems.
Steven Feld (born 1949) is an American anthropologist, filmmaker, musician, and sound artist, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico and Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Feld's academic research principally concerns the anthropology of sound, a term he coined in 1972 to extend the anthropology of music and language into a more critical sensory and aesthetic focus on voice and poetics, all-species sound relations, media and technologies, and environmental and ecological acoustics.
"Following the total disappearance of abstract sounds, this piece could be considered a sonic photographic slide, the outcome of a whole evolutionary process. The most faithful and realistic reminiscence possible of a fishing village at dawn. First conceptions about minimalism." Luc Ferrari
Harvey Fletcher (1884 — 1981) was U.S. physicist, a leading authority in the fields of psychoacoustics and acoustical engineering. Fletcher graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in 1907 and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1911. In 1916 he joined the staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked for 33 years, primarily in the fields of speech, music, and hearing. Much of his work on the fundamentals of psychoacoustics is described in his book Speech and Hearing (1922).
Bill Fontana (Born in Cleveland in 1947, based in San Francisco), began his career as a composer and, over more than forty years, his oeuvre has unearthed the delicacies of the hidden music surrounding us in our daily lives, drawing our attention to it in striking ways. Fontana’s installations, which highlight the idea that the act of listening is a way of making music, use sound as a “sculptural” medium. Since the early 70’s Fontana has used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces.
Jez riley French (was born 1965). Using intuitive composition, field recording, improvisation and photography, I have been exploring my enjoyment of and interest in detail, simplicity and an emotive response to places and situations since my early teens and as a full time artist for over 20 years. Alongside performances, exhibitions, installations I also lecture and run workshops around the world on various aspects of sound culture including located sound / field recording, the act and art of listening and their roles in contemporary explorative sound arts.