Abstract (long paper)

Keywords: acoustic ecology, field recording, ambisonics, immersion, virtual reality, modes of listening.

The Listenn project1 is an interdisciplinary media arts project, investigating the pristine acoustic ecologies of Southwest deserts of America. Establishing the largest database of ambisonic and stereo field recordings of the Southwestern landscapes of the United States, the Listenn project is designed to not only archive sound, but to explore how virtual environmental engagement through media arts and sound can cultivate environmental awareness and community agency. It delivers community partnerships and capacity building with enthusiastic communities in four American Southwest desert communities: Joshua Tree, Sequoia & Kings Canyon and Organ Pipe Cactus National Parks and the Mojave Desert Trust. Aiming to empower and encourage communities to make creative contributions to and have agency in the development of the Listenn project, this paper outlines the fieldwork undertaken in 2014 and 2015 and discusses the substantial online listening database, virtual reality and web based tools deployed and currently in development. It will also provide information on the project’s innovative application of ambisonic audio recording and playback to create 360-degree immersive experiences online and through the Oculus Rift VR headset (EcoRift). ecolisten.org

• Garth Paine, Associate Professor in Digital Sound and Interactive Media. Garth is particularly fascinated with sound as an experiential medium, both in musical performance and as an exhibitable object. This passion has led to several interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the sonic landscape through their presence and behaviour. Garth has composed several music scores for dance generated through video tracking of the choreography, and more recently using Bio-Sensing on the dancers body. His immersive interactive environments have been exhibited in Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, Canada, UK, Hong Kong and New Zealand. Garth Paine is internationally regarded as an innovator in the field of interactivity in electronic music and media arts (some papers here). He gained his PhD in interactive immersive environments from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia in 2003, and completed a Graduate Diploma in software engineering in the following year at Swinburne University. All a long way from his Bachelor of classical Flute performance from the conservatorium of Tasmania. Garth is Associate Professor in Digital Sound and Interactive Media at the School of Arts Media + Engineering at Arizona State University in the USA. His previous post was as Associate Professor of Sound Technologies at the University of Western Sydney, where he established the Virtual, Interactive, Performance Research environment (VIPRe) . He is often invited to run workshops on interactivity for musical performance and commissioned to develop interactive system for realtime musical composition for dance and theatre performances.   activatedspace.com
• Leah Barclay,  is an Australian composer, sound artist and creative producer working at the intersection of art, science and technology. Her work has been commissioned, performed and exhibited to wide acclaim internationally and she has directed and curated interdisciplinary projects across the Asia-Pacific. Barclay’s PhD involved site-specific projects across the globe and a feature length documentary exploring the value of creativity in environmental crisis. Her research has been published internationally and her creative work has been selected for major international festivals and conferences. She is currently an artist in residence at the Australian Rivers Institute investigating the creative possibilities
  of aquatic bioacoustics, the president of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the founder and artistic director of Biosphere Soundscapes, a large-scale interdisciplinary art project connecting the soundscapes of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves across the world. Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Griffith University, Australia  leahbarclay.com
• Sabine Feisst, Professor of Music, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA. Dr Feisst is Professor of Musicology and Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University’s School of Music and Global Institute of Sustainability. Focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century music studies, she published the monographs Der Begriff ‘Improvisation’ in der neuen Musik (Studio Verlag, 1997) and Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (Oxford University Press, 2011) which won the Society for American Music’s prestigious Lowens Award for the most outstanding book on American music in 2011 and was called “a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship.” In 2014 she was chosen as one of five ASU professors to receive the Defining Edge Research Award in the Humanities and Literature. Her research has been supported by German and American government grants and she has served on the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship board. Author of over 80 articles in anthologies, journals and reference works and US editor of Contemporary Music Review, she is currently writing a monograph on music inspired by the American Southwest, deserts, editing the Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology, and is general editor with Denise Von Glahn for the Music, Nature, Place book series from Indiana University Press. With Garth Paine, she co-directs ASU’s Acoustic Ecology Lab which includes such research streams as the Listen(n) Project and EcoRift.  sustainability.asu.edu/person/sabine-feisst
• Daniel Gilfillan, Associate Professor, German Studies, Film and Media Studies, Arizona State University, USA. Gilfillan’s research engages the relationships between sound, media, and the perception of experience. He has published widely on German and Austrian radio and sound art, and on the history of the radio in Germany as an experimental art medium (Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio, Minnesota, 2009). He is currently working on a volume Sounding Out the World: Sustainability and the Art of Sound. This new book explores interconnections between approaches to sustainability practice as grounded in a sustained theoretical pairing of resilience/precariousness and the importance of sound as an element of voice, and as an element of interaction with other ecosystem populations (animals, landscapes, and atmospheres).  isearch.asu.edu/profile/520523