This little guys came into the tree I left my recorder under for a command performance
Author: garth
yellow-legged frog in Sequoia
I am not sure these are yellow-legged frogs, but there were thousands of them at singing at Halstead Meadow. In the recording I have it is amazing how they all start, sing for a period of time and then stop synchronously! they do this several times over the course of 2+ hours.
Media Release – Listen(n) Project in National Park Week
Media Release: April 14, 2015
Open your ears to the sonic environment during National Park Week
America’s largest celebration of national environmental heritage begins on April 18 with events and activities happening across 400 national parks.
Hosted by the National Park Foundation and National Parks Services, National Park Week celebrates the vibrant culture, rich history and iconic landscapes of National Parks across the country.
The National Park Week program features Arizona State University’s Listen(n) Project, which explores technologically innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to acoustic ecology in National Parks across America. During National Park Week, the Listen(n) Project team is hosting presentations and workshops that foster community-centered listening experiences in Joshua Tree National Park and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park in California. Conceived in 2013 by Arizona State University professor Garth Paine, the Listen(n) project examines how new approaches to listening increased awareness of the acoustic ecology can inspire environmental stewardship among local and global communities. The project has already gained significant international attention and has been featured at some of the world’s leading acoustic ecology and conservation events, including the 2014 IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia and SxSW Eco in Austin, Texas.
Listen(n) engages local placemaking through deep listening and sound recording community workshops, providing local communities with the tools and skills to document the acoustic ecology of their local park. The Listen(n) created a user-friendly online database and portal for community members, researchers and artists to share their sonic experience of park environments globally. The project has formed diverse partnerships and promotes creative projects to be shared with larger communities.
Dr. Paine and visiting researcher Dr. Leah Barclay will lead field recording workshops and demonstrate the value of listening to the park environment through a series of public presentations during National Park Week. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to contribute to the Listen(n) online database and online community portal, which is a dynamic and inspiring model for soundscape presentation and digital archiving of sound, media art works and community storytelling.
Listening to Joshua Tree
The Listen(n) team will also contribute to the ‘Find Your Park’ campaign on FindYourPark.com. Launched April 1 by the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, Find Your Park is a public awareness and education campaign celebrating the milestone centennial anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016 and setting the stage for its second century of service. ‘Find Your Park’ is also the theme for this year’s National Park Week. It is an exciting opportunity for the Listen(n) Project to engage in a national conversation about the value and future of America’s National Parks.
One of the crucial components of the Listen(n) Project has been the development of rich digital media environments that can be used to engage local and global communities including the elderly and disabled without access to these precious places. Given the current challenges of environmental degradation, the Listen(n) team has created novel virtual reality experiences (EcoRift) which facilitate remote embodied experiences of natural environments through sound to broaden discussion about the value of pristine, yet fragile ecosystems.
As the National Park Service turns 100 on August 25, 2016, it continues to foster new ideas to engage communities through recreation, conservation, and historic preservation programs. National Park Week offers programs that enable communities to protect, preserve and experience nature. The Listen(n) Project underscores the NPS vision by creatively exploring the rich sonic environments of parks. Assisted by Dr. Sabine Feisst and Dr. Daniel Gilfillan from the Humanities and Sciences, the Listen(n) team documents the parks’ acoustics and offers path-breaking virtual reality experiences of parks, responsive community listening workshops in parks and realizes music and art projects inspired by the sounds of parks with the goal of studying, protecting and preserving the parks’ acoustic ecology and building community capacity and environmental stewardship for the future.Follow the Listen(n) Project during National Park Week using the hashtag #ListenProject and #FindYourPark on social media platforms and on www.ecolisten.org
Listen(n) Symposium promotes sustainability through sound
The sound of a bird calling in the distance or the breeze blowing through the brush might seem inconsequential; for many, these auditory cues can go completely unnoticed.
Arizona State University’s Listen(n) Symposium – a series of panel discussions, musical performances and art installations – aims to open our eyes to the issues of sustainability by opening our ears to the sonic environment.
The symposium, which takes place Oct. 16-17, hopes to forge cross-disciplinary approaches to address environmental issues in new and innovative ways. It is an extension of a project by the same name, originated by Garth Paine, associate professor of digital sound and media in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and of composition in the School of Music.
“With the Listen(n) project, we set out to document the Southwestern deserts of the United States with the idea that listening to the environment gives us information about its health and the changes taking place,” Paine explained.
Paine is joined by Daniel Gilfillan, an associate professor of German studies and information literacy in the School of International Letters and Cultures; Sabine Feisst, a professor of musicology in the School of Music; and Leah Barclay, a visiting professor of music composition from Griffith University in Australia.
Paine and his associates started out by making a series of ambisonic recordings, which use a full-sphere microphone to capture complete surround sound, in six UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (many of which are also National Parks). Because community engagement is a key element of Listen(n), the audio is already available online
“We’re able to offer people the embodied experience of being present in the land,” Paine said
He said they hope to take this idea even further, encouraging community members to make recordings of their own over time and contribute to the sonic definition of their own space.
The Listen(n) Symposium will offer that opportunity at its inaugural event, “49 Waltzes,” being held at 3 p.m., Oct. 16, at the ASU Art Museum on the Tempe campus. The event is modeled after John Cage’s “49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs of New York.” Students from Feisst’s class will assist attendees in creating recordings at various points around campus. These recordings will form the building blocks of an audio-visual installation at the ASU Art Museum that will be on view for the duration of the symposium.
“Students in the School of Music and Arts, Media + Engineering have worked very hard on a captivating collaborative audio-visual installation featuring the acoustic ecology of the ASU Tempe campus in a realization of American experimental composer John Cage’s ‘49 Waltzes,’” said Feisst.
The second day of the symposium will also feature a vocal performance and blessing by Kieg Mek Ne’edham kc Kehindam, a group from the Gu Achi District, Tohono O’odham Nation, led by traditional singer, curer and cowboy Simon Lopez, and a panel discussing the sound ecologies in Tohono O’odham cosmology.
“The Listen(n) Symposium brings indigenous, international and ASU-based artists, literary, media and music scholars, and scientists together to artistically explore and critically assess the acoustic ecologies of American Southwest deserts,” said Feisst.
The symposium will also feature speeches from esteemed figures in the world of acoustics. Sabine Breitsameter, a professor of sound and media culture at the Hesseische Film-Und-Medienakademie in Dramstadt, Germany, is giving the keynote speech at 6 p.m., Oct. 16, and Eric Leonardson, the chair of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, is speaking the following afternoon at 2:30 p.m.
The two-day event closes with a concert of musical pieces derived from the field recordings Paine created for Listen(n).
“At its base, the symposium is about the ways we engage the environment through the mode of listening, and whether we can attune our listening practices to a degree that allows us to think about these environmental issues in a way that moves beyond, say, studying statistical analyses,” said Gilfillan. “(This approach) brings the individual into the realm of the environmental space. It encourages students to think about how composition, how sound, how art as a medium, allows us to engage with these more critical issues in a way that is both creative and forward thinking.”
Listen(n) events are hosted by the ASU Art Museum and the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute for Sustainability. Learn more at ecolisten.org. To view the full list of events and to RSVP, visit listennsymposium2014.sched.org.
The symposium has been made possible by seed funding from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the Institute for Humanities Research, a research unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences