Find links to articles, reports, and relevant webinars here. Technical reports will also be available on InformalScience.org
PRACTICAL RESOURCES
Get ready for World Listening Day–Select resources and ready to roll activities. This image is from a pair listening activity, Sound2Sight
Or check out the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology’s of a 2022 workshop on listening across boundaries for World Listening Day
A tribute to Schafer’s music and importance in acoustic ecology tribute on (hosted by Ed Herrmann on KOPN Columbia, MO, July 17, 2022), includes interviews with acoustic ecologists, Hildegard Westerkamp and Eric Leonardson. Also archived on , on Berkeley community radio KALW-FM.
We have two soundpacks! With this resource you can enjoy the soundscape of a favorite place after you visit or become familiar with its sounds before you go. Parents, caregivers, and educators can prepare youth for a multisensory exploration. We invite creatives to use clips to compose or as additions to other projects.
in Chicago is a unique spot. Find the sound clips, images, and recommendations for educators .
welcomes more than 2 million visitors a year. The sound pack includes sound recordings, images, and recommendations for educators. Squawks and talk and more.
Compiled by Eric Leonardson, Associate Professor, Adj. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
, activities to increase awareness of sound among youth interested in outdoor spaces. Purchase multiple copies .
RESEARCH
Identifying, Perceiving, and Understanding Sound This report summarizes the ways informal educators on the project described sounds.
Learning from Site Visits This report summarizes observtions and descriptions informal educators and researchers documented during visits to a botanic garden, science center, zoo, and park.
Data Maps Partners identified relationships of interest among categories and constructs in the data set In Columbus researchers collected an estimated 500 hours of audio recordings, 140 sound searches (visitor-driven recordings and interviews), and nearly 1000 questionnaires measuring close to 100 variables.
Presentations describe the research and its premise as it relates to culture. This is a way to learn about the project through an online visual, spatial map.
Sound Travels: visitor research update. This brief summarizes key ideas from visitor-focused data collection in project Year 2.
MORE RECOMMENDATIONS
Sound Travels leaders have published articles on topics such as ecology and acoustics, music and its impact, which may interest Sound Travels followers. Below we also list some of our favorite resources. Enjoy!
, a study led by Drs. Louise Allen and Nickolay Hristov, Epub 2021 Feb 10
Noise is becoming a more prominent feature of many landscapes. Noise can primarily function to mask-meaning that it obscures a cue by overlapping with it, or distract-meaning that it occupies an animal’s attention. The study indicates that the pallid bat does not seem capable of compensating for environmental noise. Proc Biol Sci 288(1944):20202689, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2689.
explains Carl Strang’s research on cicadas, crickets, and katydids in the Chicago area.
–Short articles to celebrate the year of sound (2022). Experts from the UK Acoustics Network and the International Year of Sound team published articles exploring the world of sound and how it benefits and causes problems to people, other animals, and our environment. Everything vibrates and makes sound, from the smallest living cells in the human body to the biggest skyscrapers.
World Listening Day (#WLD, #Worldlisteningday) The annual is a global participatory event on composer R. Murray Schafer’s birthday, July 18. He wrote The Tuning of the World. Each year the World Listening Project selects a theme for World Listening Day. The 2022 theme of “” was created and described by a musician and marine biologist based in Mexico.
held its 2023 conference in partnership with Atlantic Center for the Arts, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. For more details: .
Is an open-source acoustic monitoring device used for monitoring wildlife. See also, Tips from the Saturday, July 14, 2022 the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology , &Բ;
Specific to Parks and Natural Soundscapes
Check out
- NPS Natural Sounds & Night Skies Division
- The National Park Service offers a sound gallery with entries like this one of coyotes howling,
- A Study of Signs, Whispers, and the Experience of Muir Woods, by Levenhagen et al. First published: 21 October 2020
- , a public radio-style audio series helps transmit some of Yellowstone’s scientific investigations to listeners, wherever they are.
- Young Sound Seekers program,
- Audio postcard by Jack Hines, 2019 artist-in-residence at the ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore
- The Nature Fix by Florence Williams
- The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause
- Digital High Fives:
For explanations of noise pollution, some research, and engaging graphics, check this World Atlas article:
Advisor Eric Leonardson from the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology also recommends these sites for resources on sound, ecology, and society:
Advice for exhibit designers is available. In “Sound Advice: Acoustic Considerations for Museum Design” (2007), Weatherhead gives readers a place to start (making a sonic map), and sets expectations for a team. She suggests a minimum of four players: the exhibit designer/developer, the acoustics engineer, the A/V or multimedia designer/producer, and the museum leader.
Pros and Cons to Sound as an Immersive Experience. Immersive exhibits are by definition complex and multisensory, often incorporating virtual and physical spaces as well as strategies to transport visitors to a distant realistic or imagined space.
The temptation to focus on and elevate natural soundscapes is strong, but also can be a trap. Visitors to “Sugar from the Sun” heard recorded insect, bird, and amphibian sounds. Evaluators found some respondents went looking for the origins of the sounds, wound up disappointed and began questioning if the experience was real or fake (Gyllenhaall, 2008). “Coast to Cactus in Southern California” incorporated Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Including a first language may have evoked nostalgia, and this is significant as waves of emotion may distract from STEM concepts but solidify intent to return and open new topics for discussion among visiting group members.
Some authors critique crowd-sourced collections of sounds. The British Library/National Trust project “Sounds of Our Shores”, directed its users to collect “favorite sounds,” which resulted in a rich collection of natural sounds, but diverted attention away from soundscapes of protest and working class struggle. Tourle (2017) argued that despite the appearance of an open exercise in crowd-sourcing sonic heritage, the project in fact erased the complexity of shoreline sounds.
Unusual approaches
Musical interpretations of data sets (e.g., “Earth System Music” by Lee de Mora),
Accessible Oceans, led by Amy Bower, Woods Hole. Bower and an interdisciplinary team of scientists and sound experts are working to design auditory displays of ocean data about phenomena such ocean-atmosphere exchange and underwater volcanic eruptions. For some background on Bower’s research,
For explanations of noise pollution, some research, and engaging graphics, check this World Atlas article:
“Virtual Museum: Reconnecting to the Natural Heritage” in Boulder, Colorado AND “The Affective Geography of Silence: Towards a Museum of Natural Quiet” are helpful models for engagement in description and data interpretation (e.g., using an exercise like creating a shared ideal landscape).