This exercise is for the SLU Senses of Place/Place Sensing Course I designed for Summer 2021. The attached soundwalk method specifically allows for embodied activity/group listening in the context of Zoom based teaching.

(n.b. I am not exactly a supporter of free labor for Big Tech, but in devising soundwalk exercises for online classes, platforms are to a certain extent inevitable.)

I am part of an interesting collection of arty/anthropology-y takes on sound, politics, and the Anthropocene (in its various incarnations and challenges-to). My contribution listens to ice, bowhead cetology and the impassioned words of Chris Clark, who has spent over 40 years studying bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea region (Alaska) and written extensively about various challenges these animals now face. Check it out below:

And the special issue:

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to review Dylan Robertson’s important intervention into sound studies last fall, in the journal Antipode. Click the link here for the piece.

I love the AudioMoth technology, and I love the AudioMoth idea. It is promoted as an affordable, DIY inspired piece of audio recording equipment – and it actually is those things! Thus, I find it a bit of a bummer that the folks making the tool have a different approach for AudioMoth casings, which are necessary in recording situations where the plastic bag approach is insufficient. Here’s a very cheap workaround, which you can build from IKEA and hardware store materials (twist-ties, newspaper, a drill). I am sure the official option on offer is wonderful and functional, but if you don’t have the university budget for it, try this instead.

At this point, many more chapters could be added to Jennifer Gabrys’ prescient 2010 book Digital Rubbish. One set of pages might be devoted to the 5.6 Billion $ (USD) “bioacoustics sensing market”, about which I am working on a piece with Karen Bakker. Thousands of new sensing tools – portable recorders, digital hydrophones, automated sensors – are now on the market, and with them, batteries, casings, plastic sheets, and all sorts of of electronic gear. These tools are regularly put out for months in difficult environmental conditions, where they suffer damage, shed parts, or are completely obliterated (as happened to me with a few tools on the Pacific West Coast). The upshot: tiny bits of sound recording rubbish are being added to the welter of electronic stuff that occupies a not-so-small section of our Capitalocene payload…

The ecological residue of contemporary media rarely gets a sonic treatment, which is something I was fortunate to consider when Gunnar Cerwen shared some WAVs from one of the damaged AudioMoths we found at Spillpengen in March 2021. The ripped plastic bag – probably pecked away at by a seagull or an eagle – still held the unit intact (although other units did not do so well). But there was a new audible aspect to what Gay Hawkin’s once called the plastic bags’ “stubborn materiality” and probably a few more stories to tell from the rest of the inventory too…

Gunnar Cerwen (SLU Alnarp) is one of the most talented field recording practitioners I’ve come across in Sweden, and I feel fortunate to be collaborating with him on the Spillpeng project. In 2012, he was asked to develop an audio catalogue of the SLU-Alnarp, a beautiful bucolic agricultural school in Skane that boasts a number of gorgeous listening spots (during off-highway hours). Below is a sample of his “Japandammen” (Japanese Garden) recording, which captures dawn chorus in this unique site in Southern Sweden (aka the province of Skane).

Check out Gunnar’s recording:

In past projects working with social planners and youth, I have been repeatedly asked about group collaborations and contemporary music-making. They want to explore social values through sound making, but the idea of a convening live band, School of Rock-style, doesn’t always appeal, because kids don’t always want to learn ACDC covers and play drum-kit as much. But much of the music they do want to develop — hip hop, beats, dub techno — gets made via computer systems that hardly promote group activity. Here’s an idea I am dying to try with some people: a bunch of Korg Volca Drums, a mixer, and a speaker plus wires (You could use other drum machines too). The system could support much of the contemporary stuff,  while experimentally promoting multiple inputs and skill levels (inc. room for microphone and guitars in the mix too) and a more collaborative ethos.

An industrial city on the outskirts of Stockholm, Sodertalje is a global capital of the Syriac Orthodox Christian diaspora, an ethnic and religious minority group. The Ronna Forest is a broad swathe of densely wooded area surrounding the Ronna housing projects to the north and northwest of the city. For many local youngsters, the local forest is a “green avoidance space” – an unfamiliar zone where wild boars and other disagreeable elements threaten safe passage.  

The aim of this VIVA PLAN collaboration with Sodertalje Kommun (2019- _) is to engage a sonically-mediated co-learning experiment with interested Ronna youth, specifically around the nearby Ronna Forest. Our gambit is to engage Ronna Forest as a musical resource and means of asking broader questions about youth identity, community belonging, and nature. Working with producer Nicos Merchatskis (https://soundcloud.com/spiritualimprima) the rotating crew of interested Ronna youth aims to harness field recordings of forest sounds and the community-constitutive powers of music (and specifically: techno) to cultivate ideas about nature. Might attitudes about the local environment change as its constitutive sounds become materials for new forms of collective, creative expression? 

We call ourselves “Ung Tra” or “Young tree” (Swedish). All the sounds (minus the techno/house) will be sourced from the forest and its myriad contents. Check out a track!

** Editors Note – Sadly, this project was ruined by coronavirus, which made the subsequent collaboration meetings impossible.

Part of Mississippi: An Anthropocene River