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.
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.
Raviv Ganchrow (born 1972) completed his architectural studies at The Cooper Union, New York and sonic studies at the Institute of Sonology, University of the Arts, The Hague. He researches interdependencies of sound, locale and hearing through installations, writing, and the development of transduction technologies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with a long-standing interest in game cultures. She has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments. Milena is a sound studies scholar, a multimodal ethnographer, and a soundwalking enthusiast, published widely in the areas of acoustic ecology, media and game studies, design and technology.
Sabine Breitsameter is a professor of media culture at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. Her focus is on electro-acoustic art, media history and the culture of listening. From 2004–08 she was visiting professor of experimental sound design at the Berlin University of the Arts where she co-founded the Sound Studies master degree course.
Michael Pisaro (Buffalo, 1961) is an American composer and guitarist, and a member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble. He has composed over 80 works for a great variety of instrumental combinations, including several pieces for variable instrumentation. A particularly large category of his works is solo works, notably a series of 36 pieces (grouped into 6 longer works) for the three-year, 156-concert series organized by Carlo Inderhees at the Zionskirche in Berlin-Mitte from 1997-1999.