Hearing Now: Raising environmental awareness through ecological sound art in Australia

Sound is widely regarded as an effective medium through which to cultivate meaningful connections to place due to its ability to immerse listeners and cultivate tacit knowledge in audiences. In the fields of ecological sound art and acoustic ecology, a long tradition of working creatively with the natural environment to produce impactful sound art has yielded a wide array of interdisciplinary projects that promote listening as a pathway towards greater ecological understanding. Hearing Now participated in this tradition through two project streams. First, a series of durational site-responsive music performances was produced within Noosa’s Floating Land festival; and second a program of environmental field recording and music-making workshops for kids was delivered with the Surfrider Foundation: Sunshine Coast Branch and within Sunshine Coast Council’s ‘Kids in Action’ initiative. Each stream was intended to cultivate empathetic connections to the environment in audiences by revealing, amplifying, and decorating characteristics of natural sites, such as ecological processes and soundscapes, through exploration and performance. Hearing Now embraced a practice-led research methodology founded on Leah Barclay’s Sonic Ecologies Framework, which positions cultural immersion, interdisciplinary collaboration, and multi-platform dissemination among key elements to inspire environmental awareness in communities through sound. Building on my experience as an artist and creative producer, my integration of Sonic Ecologies constituted a novel adaptation of Barclay’s framework that highlights the benefits of an ecological perspective in contemporary music practice. I propose that this perspective and the approach described in this thesis may offer musicians a response to the shifting landscape of the live music industry in Australia today. Qualitative inquiry in this project addressed a gap in ecological sound art discourse by exploring the impact and reception of creative work. Methods of surveying audiences with voicemail messages, field recording with children, interviewing parents of children participating in workshops, and observing audiences or participants on-site revealed how participants and audience members tended to experience ecological sound artworks as ‘sites’ that support autonomous observation. The study found that the creative works empowered audiences to observe and learn from the environment itself rather than from the artwork explicitly, which suggests a more nuanced degree of autonomy on the part of the individual audience member than is generally afforded in place-based sonic arts literature. In its totality, Hearing Now embarked on a community-sensitive mission to explore how I, an experimental sound art practitioner, might support efforts to expand ecological responsibility in my home region of the Noosa Shire. The project forefronted listening as a way to relate to people and ecology, and through this arrived at a wide range of beneficial interactions between artist, community, and place. From these experiences, I advocate for a mode of creative practice that shifts self-expression from being a primary driver of creative action, to a more site- and community-responsive mode of operating that is guided by environmental and social context.