The Listen(n) Project, initiated and directed by Dr. Garth Paine (Associate Professor, School of Arts Media + Engineering and Senior Sustainability Scientist, Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University), is an interdisciplinary collaborative endeavor with Dr. Sabine Feisst and Dr. Daniel Gilfillan from Arizona State University.  Post-Doc scholars on the project have included Dr. Leah Barclay (2014-15) and Dr. Abby Aresty (2016).

Garth Paine on Listening from ASU Now on Vimeo.

The Listen(n) Project has expanding international partnerships including with Professor Cornelius Poepel at the Kompetenzzentrum Sound und Interaktion (KoSI) at the Hochschule Ansbach.

The project capitalizes on the power and beauty of environmental sound and explores new ways of listening to the land and experiencing, documenting and understanding the rich sonic signatures of nature preserves in the American Southwest, Europe and South America.

The Listen(n) Project is grounded in the field of Acoustic Ecology which studies and documents the sounds of the environment. The Listen(n) team pursues questions about the role and function of sound and the perception of sound for a deeper understanding of place, presence, belonging and sustainability issues. The team has already established one of the largest online databases of surround sound field recordings in the world and plans to grow it further over the next decades through including field recordings made by park communities and visitors. Over time the sound recordings will critically indicate changes in land use and species adaptation and point to the importance of the sonic environment for wildlife and our communal, social and global health.

The Listen(n) team offers on-site activities including listening and field recording workshops and soundwalks. It has developed online tools, including novel internet streaming technologies, and geo-located walking apps for mobile devices for virtual soundwalks through remote wilderness environments. It has also created fully immersive audio-visual virtual reality experiences of National Park environments through multimodal sensing and data fusion. The latter technology allows communities to be present in remote environments. The Listen(n) team believes that through the power of sound – experienced on site and/or through innovative technologies – local and global communities can actively engage in a variety of creative placemaking projects and become environmental stewards.

---

Experience

The Listen(n) Project team has developed a virtual reality nature experience that provides distributable and sharable audio-visual environmental experiences. Full 360 spherical images and ambisonic sounds are combined so the user can look around the environment as if truly present in a landscape (i.e.virtual sonic soundscape of a remote desert in Arizona, Germany or Mexico)

The headset can be used in exhibitions in a park’s partner communities and in festivals and galleries internationally. Extensions to this system will allow individuals to capture their own environmental experience and upload it easily into the system.

These outcomes are designed to showcase the acoustic ecology of pristine nature preserves across the globe on a local, national and global scale and to bring attention to the their delicate sonic ecosystems, with the goal of fostering environmental stewardship. The Listen(n) Project also highlights the future possibilities of digital technology and rich media environments in creating immersive experiences that can generate a deep ecological awareness and engagement globally.

Dr. Poepel and the Listen(n) Project team is also developing 3D immersive environment rooms for aged care homes and hospitals where patients can experience being in nature at any time of the day, by simply wheeling their chair into the space.

 

The Immersive Listening Experience Room (ILERo) will be used to offer a virtual reality experience without wearing VR glasses. In case of the Listen(n) Project recordings it is possible to immerse into the richness of the acoustic scene of the land both individually and communally. It is expected that the immersive experience in this room differs in various aspects in comparison to the experiences using VR glasses. One of the objectives in using this room is it to explore those differences and to design use cases where the advantages of such a room come into account.

---

Explore

Listen(n) offers exploratory workshops for all ages and specifically for school children (4th grade and up), providing

• training in listening skills; directed, active and whole body listening
• sound recording skills – using innovative ambisonics field recorders to capture full 360 degree sound fields
• documentation and archiving platforms to build a crowd-made longitudinal record of the acoustic ecology of pristine National Parks

 

Listen(n) invites artists, musicians and writers to explore the National Parks’ sonic environments through art works, compositions, place stories and poetry, presented in exhibits, concerts, installations and readings in physical and virtual venues.

 

Listen to Dr. Garth Paine talk about Listen(n) during a dawn recording session in Mojave National Preserve

---

Engage

• Listen(n) uses the media arts to inspire the National Park’s visitors and local communities to help draw attention to the value of National Park reserves. Listen(n) offers them tools for sharing and promoting their park experiences. Visitors and community members are invited to make ambisonic (surround) sound recordings and contribute social and historical background information about the National Park. Thus Listen(n) stimulates community engagement through manifold place and meaning-making opportunities.
• The community is invited to help grow a database of environmental sound recordings that are streamable over the internet and accessible to a global audience as remote embodied sonic experiences.
• Through an online discussion platform park visitors and communities can critically engage with the park’s sonic ecology and become stewards of ecosystems Southwest Desert, engaging the interwoven notions of resilience and precariousness.
• Listen(n) is currently developing further community engagement and capacity building tools to enable communities at each park location to remain actively involved in park stewardship inspired by the power of environmental sound.

---

Listen(n) Partner National Parks and Reserves in the USA include

• Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona
• Joshua Tree National Park, California
• Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, California
• Death Valley National Park, California
• Jornada Biosphere Reserve, New Mexico
• Beaver Creek Biosphere Reserve, Arizona
• Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve, California