Working on Young Sound Seekers has made me an advocate for accessibility and universal design. My advice to anyone who teaches: It’s really important to think about barriers that may exist while preparing your lessons, and think about ways you can eliminate them at the design stage. That is the philosophy that led me to the “Listen Pair Share” activity. I was so happy that I had the opportunity to share this at the WFAE Listening Pasts – Listening Futures conference. I talked about the need to rethink some of our cherished teaching activities (like soundwalking and silent journaling) through an accessibility lens and led a mini-demonstration with some volunteers.
The paper on “Listen Pair Share” for WFAE is current in press. I will update this post with the link when it becomes available. For now, you can listen to my March presentation and watch my slides in the following 20-minute video:
Each Spring semester, I give my students in DIGA 366 time at the end of the term to develop advanced creative projects. Because of our work together on the WFAE conference, they only had four weeks to pull these off. The results are still impressive!
There were some live performance for Ableton Push, original sound designs for video, music and sound design for video games, sonification of threatened species data, and a podcast episode on video game nostalgia.
For over a year leading up to actual event in March 2023, I was part of a team planning and producing an international conference right here in Volusia County. The Listening Pasts – Listening Futures conference marked the 30th anniversary of the founding of World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and was the first international conference on environmental sound studies in the United States. It was made possible through Stetson’s continuing partnership with Atlantic Center for the Arts, and literally brought together people representing every continent.
My involvement in the conference took on many forms. Before the conference, my advanced students in Digital Arts helped produce 13 sound installations as part of the artistic program on the ACA campus. The conference began with a panel discussion on our DeLand campus that brought together four leading voices on sound and the environment with me acting as moderator. On the second day, I presented about Listen Pair Share, a group listening activity that was designed to be more inclusive. On the third day, we invited conference attendees to join us on a Young Sound Seekers excursion, which gave our kids a chance to make connections with like minded people from around the world. It was months of planning that culminated in a jam-packed week of presenting, installing, moderating, conversing, and (most importantly) connecting.
This was likely a once-in-a-career opportunity for me to host artists and scholars with similar interests here in my backyard and share with them what makes Stetson and this area of Florida so special. In some ways, I am still trying to mentally process the event. I continue to converse with people I met because of this conference, and they all speak very highly of my students, Stetson, and ACA. I am sure that there will be ample opportunities to collaborate with these people in the future and that the impact of the Listening Pasts – Listening Futures conference will be felt for years to come.
Here are a few links where you can learn more about the conference:
The spring 2023 semester provided an opportunity for me to finally show a new sound sculpture that have been in development since 2018. The piece entitled every morning explores the soundscape at DeLeon Spring State Park, where I made 24 visits and recorded over 16 hours of audio field recordings. It was originally selected for inclusion at an international conference in 2020 that was twice delayed because of the pandemic. My work was eventually withdrawn because there was no good way to convert this work to an online format. Stetson’s Faculty Biennial Exhibition at the Hand Art Center gave me an opportunity to finally finish and exhibit the work. It was rewarding to share this piece with my students, the campus, and the local community. Because it was on campus, we also had the chance to visit with Young Sound Seekers during our February 2023 excursion. Sharing such a significant project with the kids in that group was a special treat for me, and gave them some insight into how I use field recordings in my own work.
If you would like to hear the four sound compositions that are presented within the installation’s headphones, you can find them here on Bandcamp:
In January of 2022, I joined the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) because I was seeking an organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of sound. The journal copies that started arriving did not disappoint, bouncing between topics like physics, bioacoustics, medicine, music, linguistics, and noise. I followed up by attending their December 2022 conference in Nashville and presented research from my sabbatical on the patterns of helicopter overflights in Northeast Scotland. It was an exhilarating week full of great conversations with people from a range of disciplines who were all passionate about sound. Each person had a wealth of experience in their specialty, but also an openness to receiving input from other perspectives on sound.
If you are interested in learning more about this research started during my Fulbright stay in Aberdeen, visit the following links:
This past summer, I was contacted by Dr. Steven Shepard, who wanted to interview me for an episode of his podcast called The Natural Curiosity Project. It has been awhile since I had to chance to talk about my work in this way, and it was well before I took this career turn into acoustic ecology and field recording. Steve did a great job producing a final result that blends my comments with excerpts from my field recordings. It’s nice to have an updated overview of where my work sits in the grand scheme of things. You can listen to this 23-minute episode of his podcast here:
In summer 2020, I began a collaboration with my student Grace McEllroy to explore the potential of 3D printing. We wondered if this might be a tool for creating tactile learning aids. The work was motivated by what was then an upcoming project called Young Sound Seekers, taking blind and partially sighted students on excursions to Canaveral National Seashore.
In July 2022, we are presenting our research at the International Computer Music Conference in Limerick, Ireland. The paper focuses on the design process and how the resulting models can be used to teach about specific features of sound. We’ve learned a lot about the process of converting visual representations of recorded sound in tangible models that you can hold in your hand, and we are looking forward to sharing that knowledge with others.
If you are interested in reading this research or printing your own copies of these models, visit the following links:
3D model based on a short field recording from Canaveral. It features a few sharp peaks in the lower right corner created by an owl hooting, some wide vertical ridges created by a frog croak in the middle left, and a horizontal ridge toward the upper edge created by crickets.
There have been many highlights recently for my continuing community engagement project Young Sound Seekers. Arguably at the top of that list was a week-long summer camp that we developed and delivered in June 2022. The camp was a partnership with Atlantic Center for the Arts and Stetson’s office of Continuing Education and Outreach, and funded entirely by a grant from the National Environmental Education Foundation. It allowed us to teach audio editing (using Reaper and OSARA) and story telling skills that are associated with podcasting, with each student producing a unique audio story by the end of our camp. The residential camp format allowed us to develop skills much faster than our typical once-a-month format. It also allowed us to bring in Andy Slater, a sound artist and disability advocate, to mentor our kids in Young Sound Seekers. Everyone involved consistently speaks of how meaningful that week was, and perhaps the best compliment is that the kids keep asking me, “When is the next camp at Stetson?”
To summarize the week, Connor Bradt, a 2022 graduate of Digital Arts, served as a counselor during the camp and produced this 10-minute wrap-up video:
Wrap-up video from our Young Sound Seekers Audio Camp.
Since late 2020, I have been collaborating with my Stetson colleague Chaz Underriner to establish a live audio stream from Lake Beresford. This project took a lot of twists and turns, starting with some small-scale tests, working through the Raspberry Pi configuration, and installing the necessary cabling. But I’m happy to report that the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience now hosts a 24/7 live audio stream from the Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center.
Our live stream is part of the Locus Sonus soundmap project which promotes and supports a network of similar open-mics throughout the world. I wrote the following summary of what you can expect to hear:
Overnight and pre-dawn, you will often hear frogs and insects chorussing. During the day, you will hear various birds, including osprey and hawks that like to perch in a nearby pine tree and sandhill cranes that sometimes visit the shoreline. Florida thunderstorms can be powerful sonic events whenever they pass through. You will also hear the train whistle and clatter passing through daily via the tracks found on the opposite shore. Finally, because this is an actively used building, you will occasionally hear people and their associated sounds throughout the day.
Sunset on the shore of Lake Beresford at the Sandra Stetson Aquatic Center. The two-story building is on the left with its lights on and the large doors to the lower-level storage open. The water’s edge begins in the lower right corner and extends out of the frame. Several tall palm and oak trees dot the shoreline. Because the water is calm, the surface reflects the image of several trees.
In DIGA 366, I gave my students six weeks at the end of the term to develop advanced creative projects. There were a range of options, but only three requirements:
reach for 4-6 minutes duration
apply learning from the overall course sequence (DIGA 365 & 366)
demonstrate improved skill with hardware or software tools
The final results were amazingly diverse! There were some live performance by laptop performers, original sound designs for video, procedural audio for video games, sonification of COVID and threatened species data, and soundscapes for theatre.
