Ecological Sound Art: Steps towards a new field
JONATHAN GILMURRAY
CRiSAP, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, Elephant and Castle, London SE1 6SB
Email: jonathangilmurray@yahoo.co.uk
The years since the turn of the millennium have seen an
increasing number of sound artists engaging with
contemporary environmental issues such as biodiversity loss,
sustainability and climate change through their work, forming
a growing movement of environmentally concerned sound art;
however, their work has yet to achieve the recognition enjoyed
by comparable environmentalist practices in almost every
other art form. This article argues that this increasingly
significant area of sound arts practice should be recognised as
a distinct field in its own right, and proposes that it be termed
‘ecological sound art’, reflecting its equivalent in the visual
arts. After establishing its current absence from both
ecocritical and sound arts scholarship, it proceeds to outline
some of the core approaches which characterise works of
ecological sound art, as the first step towards its establishment
as a coherent field of practice. The final section draws from key
works of contemporary ecological theory, examining the
fundamental accord that exists between the new modes of
thought they propose and the ways in which we experience and
relate to sound art, demonstrating that ecological sound art
represents not only a significant new field of sound arts
practice, but also a powerful ecological art form.
1. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, environmental issues such as bio-
diversity loss, pollution, sustainability, global environ-
mental justice and, particularly, climate change have
grown to become some of the most significant socio
political – and, many would argue, moral – issues of our
time; however, it is generally acknowledged that
humankind is still failing to respond to them with
the necessary degree of urgency. In a 2005 article on
climate change, leading US environmentalist Bill
McKibben argued that this problem of inaction was
fundamentally a cultural one, and that the arts could
play a crucial role in facilitating our ability to tackle
contemporary environmental challenges, noting that
‘[a]rt, like religion, is one of the ways we digest what is
happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds
to action’, and asking ‘[w]here are the books? The
poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?’ (McKibben
2005). Far from being a lone ecological voice crying in a
cultural wilderness, however, McKibben’s call-to-arms
coincided with the beginning of a huge surge of interest
around arts and ecology – a fact which he acknowl-
edged in a follow-up piece four years later, in which he
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reflected that at the time he wrote his article, ‘[c]learly
there were lots and lots of people already thinking the
same way, because ever since it’s seemed to me as if
deep and moving images and sounds and words have
been flooding out into the world’ (McKibben 2009).
This surge in ecological engagement has been evi-
dent in every area of the arts; and sound art is no
exception, with an increasing number of artists such as
Leah Barclay, David Monacchi, Matthew Burtner,
Andrea Polli, David Dunn and Jana Winderen using
sound as a medium to creatively address a wide variety
of contemporary environmental issues. In October
2006, Joel Chadabe and the Electronic Music Foun-
dation evidenced this trend with the staging of Ear to
the Earth, a five-day festival of environmentally con-
cerned sound art in New York – an event which would
continue to be held annually for the next seven years,
and which today operates as ‘a global community of
environmental sound artists responding to climate
change’ (Ear to the Earth 2011); while in 2008,
Matthew Burtner established EcoSono, described as
‘an activism network advocating environmental pre-
servation through experimental sound art’ (Burtner
2011: 234), through which he has staged an annual
educational ‘EcoSono Institute’ for the creation of new
environmentalist sound works.
2. ECOLOGICAL SOUND ART: A NEW TERM
FOR A GROWING MOVEMENT
The exponential increase in environmentally concerned
sound arts activity over the past decade clearly
demonstrates the existence of a significant con-
temporary movement; however, this movement has yet
to achieve the recognition enjoyed by environmentalist
works in almost every other art form. Perhaps most
fundamentally, there currently exists no generic termi-
nology with which to identify, define or describe
it – something which is a prerequisite for any field if it is
to gain a coherent identity, and become part of a
meaningful discourse. The term ‘environmental sound
art’ is already in limited use (Bakht 2009; Otsuka and
Sandberg 2009; Cummings 2010; Koutsomichalis 2013;
Wright 2015; Bianchi and Manzo 2016; Blackburn
2016) as an umbrella term for sound works in which the
doi:10.1017/S1355771816000315

‘environment’, in its most general sense, functions as
site, subject or material; however, the fact that there is
no separate terminology with which to distinguish the
growing movement of environmentalist sound works
means that the philosophies, meanings and methodo-
logies that lie at its heart are in danger of being lost,
ignored, diluted or misunderstood through being
subsumed within this wide field.
In this respect, today’s environmentally concerned
sound art is in the same situation that was resolved
within the visual arts a quarter of a century ago, when
the 1992 exhibition Fragile Ecologies collected
together environmentalist art from the previous thirty
years and recognised it as a distinct movement in its
own right. Up until this point, as the exhibition’s
curator Barbara C. Matilsky observed, ‘critics and
curators often lumped dissimilar artists together,
which resulted in a confusion of different sensibilities
and tendencies that continues to this day’ (Matilsky
1992: 38). In particular, environmentalist artworks
were commonly conflated with the movement known
variously as land art, earth art or earthworks, within
the more general category of ‘environmental art’;
however, as Matilsky noted, ‘[n]ot all environmental
art is environmentally sound nor does it carry an eco-
logical message’ (Matilsky 1992: 43). To address this,
the movement of environmentalist art represented by
Fragile Ecologies was christened ‘ecological art’,
defined as ‘a new approach to art and nature based
upon environmental ethics’ (Matilsky 1992: 56) – ter-
minology which, either in full or in its abbreviated
form of ‘eco-art’, is now in common usage, a fact
demonstrated by its entry in the Oxford English
Dictionary.
Just as the last twenty-five years have seen ‘ecological’
or ‘eco-’ art gain widespread recognition as a specific
movement of environmentalist works within the wider
field of environmental art, there is now a pressing need
for the same to happen for today’s environmentalist
sound art. Reflecting its equivalent in the visual arts,
therefore, this article proposes the adoption of ‘eco-
logical sound art’ as the most suitable terminology for
this important contemporary movement.
3. THE ABSENCE OF ECOLOGICAL SOUND
ART FROM CURRENT CRITICAL DISCOURSE
In most areas of the creative arts, the explosion in
engagement with environmental issues has been
reflected by growing bodies of both academic and
popular literature, with an abundance of ecocritical
texts in the fields of art (Matilsky 1992; Weintraub
2012; Kagan 2013; Brown 2014; Miles 2014), fashion
(Hethorn and Ulasewicz 2008; Brown 2010; Minney
2011; Black 2013; Gordon and Hill 2015), design and
architecture (Guy and Moore 2005; Stang and
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Ecological Sound Art 33
Hawthorne 2005; Shedroff 2009; Anker 2010;
Bergman 2012), literature (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996;
Armbruster and Wallace 2001; Buell 2005; Garrard
2012; Westling 2014), film (Ingram 2000; Willoquet-
Maricondi 2010; Gustafsson and Kääpä 2013; Rust,
Monani and Cubitt 2013; O’Brien 2016), theatre
(Heinlein 2007; Cless 2010; Arons and May 2012;
Besel and Blau 2014; Lavery and Finburgh 2015), and
music (Mellers 2001; Ingram 2010; Pedelty 2012; Von
Glahn 2013; Allen and Dawe 2016). Such scholarship
serves an important function in recognising, con-
solidating and promoting common bodies of environ-
mentalist practice within these art forms, providing
critical analysis, evaluating their significance and
enabling their incorporation into the wider critical
discourse surrounding the cultural response to con-
temporary environmental issues. In surveying this
extensive canon of ecocritical scholarship, however,
sound art is notable by its absence.
While we might perhaps expect to find ecological
sound works incorporated into the critical discourse
surrounding eco-art, all existing texts in this field limit
their coverage to the visual arts (Matilsky 1992; Spaid
2002; Natural World Museum 2007; Weintraub 2012;
Kagan 2013; Brown 2014; Miles 2014). Linda
Weintraub’s extensive review of the field, To Life! Eco
Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, provides a stark
example, with a taxonomy which divides the field into
eleven kinds of art practice including paint/print,
sculpture, performance, photo/video, bio art,
generative art, social practice, digital art, installation,
public art, and design – but with sound art nowhere to
be found (Weintraub 2012: xviii–xxi).
Another place in which we might expect to find some
engagement with ecological sound art is the recently
established field of ecomusicology, defined by Aaron S.
Allen in the Grove Dictionary of American Music as
‘the study of music, culture, and nature in all the
complexities of those terms … consider[ing] musical
and sonic issues, both textual and performative, related
to ecology and the natural environment’ (Allen 2013).
Indeed, some critics have explicitly argued for sound
art’s inclusion within ecomusicology: Jeff Todd Titon
states that ‘the proper frame [for ecomusicology] is
sound and sustainability; music is too narrowing’
(Titon 2013: 8), while Alexander Rehding argues that
if ecomusicology is to achieve the same level of impact
as ecological movements in other art forms, it must
expand its definition of music, noting that ‘[n]on-
Western musical traditions and sound art, in a post-
Cagean universe, hold considerable potential in this
regard, as does the pioneering work in sound studies
that has exploded traditional notions of music and
musicological enterprise’ (Rehding 2011: 412). In the
recent collection Current Directions in Ecomusicology:
Music, Culture, Nature, meanwhile, editors Aaron
S. Allen and Kevin Dawe claim that ‘[w]ork in
 34 Jonathan Gilmurray
ecomusicology is on a music-sound continuum: the
ecomusicological objects and/or subjects of study are
parts of complex systems involving a wide range of
sonic phenomena’ (Allen and Dawe 2016: 8). Despite
these encouragingly inclusive statements, however,
sound art is once again notable by its almost complete
absence from current ecomusicological scholarship,
which remains confined to the more traditional, ‘note-
based’ musical genres of popular (Ingram 2010;
Pedelty 2012) and classical music (Mellers 2001; Von
Glahn 2013).
In many ways, this situation merely reflects an
ongoing problem faced by sound art as a whole: while
it has for some years been gaining increasing recogni-
tion in the gallery-based art world, academia has been
slow to follow this trend, with the established dis-
ciplines of both art history and musicology largely
failing to engage with it. This has led to the gradual
emergence of sound arts as an independent field of
study, with its own growing body of critical scholar-
ship; and within this can be found a number of texts
which do engage with the links between the environ-
ment, environmental sound and sound art (Truax
2001; LaBelle 2006; Bandt, Duffy and MacKinnon
2007; Carlyle 2007; Rudi 2011; Bijsterveld 2013;
Belgiojoso 2014; Gandy and Nilsen 2014). However, in
these texts such issues are invariably viewed through
the lens of acoustic ecology; and while many of its core
principles are of undeniable importance to ecological
sound art, the fundamental fact that acoustic ecology is
by definition a field concerned with the acoustic
environment means that it only tends to engage with
contemporary environmental issues to the extent that
they impact the environmental soundscape. Many of
today’s environmentally concerned sound artists are
moving beyond these boundaries, however, using
sound as a medium to creatively address every facet of
the growing world environmental crisis in ways which,
despite their enormous contemporary relevance, are
still being almost completely overlooked by current
sound arts scholarship.
Thus seemingly neither ‘visual’ enough for eco-art,
nor ‘musical’ enough for ecomusicology, and with
acoustic ecology-based sound arts scholarship largely
failing to engage with the wider environmental issues
which are its central concern, the growing movement
of ecological sound art is in danger of silently dis-
appearing through the cracks. Furthermore, addres-
sing this problem is not merely in the interest of the
artists involved, but also in that of the field of sound art
as a whole: for an art form still battling to achieve the
widespread public recognition enjoyed by art in almost
every other medium, its active engagement with issues
of such huge global importance represents a prime
opportunity for sound art to impact upon public con-
cerns and agendas outside the academic institutions
and specialist circles to which it is still largely confined.
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4. COMMON APPROACHES WITHIN
ECOLOGICAL SOUND ART
As a first step towards establishing it as a coherent field
of practice, this article will now proceed to outline
some of the core approaches that characterise eco-
logical sound art, through a summary of some of the
key works in the field. This brief list is offered here as
an initial description of a dynamic and growing field,
and should by no means be taken to represent the full
extent of its possibilities; nor should these approaches
be understood as mutually exclusive categories, since a
number of them may be (and often are) combined
within a single work.
4.1. Enacting metaphors which facilitate a personal
connection with environmental issues
Perhaps the most common approach within ecological
sound art is the enactment of artistic metaphors which
facilitate a heightened awareness, deeper under-
standing and, most importantly, a personal connection
with contemporary environmental issues. One example
is Suspended Sounds, a collaborative work created for
the inaugural Ear to the Earth festival in New York in
2006, in which sound artists Joan La Barbara, Joel
Chadabe, Alvin Curran, David Monacchi, Aleksei
Stevens and Rama Gottfried composed 8-channel
sound works from recordings of the sounds of extinct
and endangered species, which were diffused in an
immersive sound environment designed by Alban
Bassuet. As Joan La Barbara commented: ‘As
I worked with the sounds of these now extinct or
endangered animals and birds, the depth of the
poignancy of the situation was almost overwhelming.
I felt as if I were breathing life into beings that no
longer exist’ (La Barbara, in Ear to the Earth 2015).
An even more direct and personal connection was
achieved in Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the sound of)
(2007/8), in which a phone line connected callers to a
microphone buried in an Icelandic glacier, enabling them
to listen to it melting in real-time. For her related
work Langjökull, Snœfellsjökull, Solheimajökull (2007),
meanwhile, Paterson made recordings of the melting
sounds of the three glaciers of the title, pressed them onto
records made from their own refrozen meltwater, and
played them on turntables until they completely melted.
As Andrew Brown comments, through these simple
yet powerful sound works, Paterson ‘transform[s] us
into silent and impotent witnesses as the polar ice cap
recedes before our very ears’ (Brown 2014: 78).
The transplanting of sound from one location to
another was also at the heart of Graciela Muñoz’s El
Sonido Recobrado (‘Sound Recovered’) (2014), a work
which deals with the ongoing issue of water rights in
Chile, whose largest and most powerful river, the
Baker, is just one of many being illegally dammed and

drained by mining, agriculture and hydroelectric com-
panies, causing ongoing problems for local commu-
nities. Muñoz recorded the sounds of the Baker at five
different locations along its length, then brought the
recordings to her own home town of Petorca, whose
river was also dammed and has been completely dry
since the 1990s, where she played back the sounds of the
Baker over twenty-eight speakers set in the dry river
bed. In doing so, Munõz’s work ‘temporarily recovered
a lost experience where a sound that does not exist
anymore appears again, superimposing the past over an
uncertain present’ (Velasco, Pohl and Nieto 2015: 1),
creating a powerful statement which connects the
exploitation of the Petorca with the similar fate faced by
the Baker and the communities which live around it.
4.2. Articulating the harmonious coexistence of humans,
technology and the natural world
Other works use sound as a medium for the investiga-
tion and articulation of ways in which human beings
and our technologies can coexist harmoniously with the
rest of the natural world. David Monacchi’s Integrated
Ecosystem (2009), one of several artistic outputs from
his ongoing Greenpeace-sponsored project Fragments
of Extinction, is composed from field recordings of
soundscapes from areas of primary equatorial rain-
forest. The work functions as a demonstration of Bernie
Krause’s Acoustic Niche Hypothesis, which states that
in a healthy ecosystem ‘each creature … [has] its own
sonic niche … [which is] occupied by no other at that
particular moment’ (Krause 1987: 3): it is accompanied
by projected real-time spectrogram analyses which
allow the audience to correlate the sounds they are
hearing with their arrangement in the frequency spec-
trum, while Monacchi’s own improvisations on flute
and live electronics are strictly confined to the available
acoustic niches, thus ‘building a powerful metaphor as
of one species that performs within a composite eco-
system while trying to find a balanced, harmonic rela-
tionship to it … [and thereby] help[ing] to create an
ecological awareness for repositioning our species
within nature’ (Monacchi 2011: 247–8).
While Monacchi’s works are generally intended for
the concert hall or gallery, the numerous electronic
compositions which comprise Walter Branchi’s all-
encompassing work Intero (‘Whole’) (1979–present)
are designed to be heard outdoors in specific environ-
mental locations, with the object of facilitating a
heightened appreciation of their natural soundscapes.
This approach, which Branchi calls ‘integrated’ or
‘eco-’ music, stems from his strong ecological con-
victions, representing an attempt to nurture human-
kind’s relationship with the natural world:
It is a music that goes beyond the concept of the world
centred exclusively on anthropocentric values, but is
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Ecological Sound Art 35
based on ecocentric values … It is a music interwoven into
a network of interdependent relationships with the world
outside … [in which the listener] is not the center of the
happening, but is included; he listens to music, listening to
the environment. (Branchi 2012: 71)
The interaction of electronic technology with
environmental soundscapes also represents a central
part of David Dunn’s artistic practice, in which sound
is used as a medium to explore the ways in which eco-
systems function. In works such as Entrainments 1
(1984), Sonic Mirror (1986–7) and Autonomous
Systems (2003–5), automated electronic systems are set
up in which the soundscape of a natural ecosystem is
recorded, processed, played back into the environment
and then recorded again, creating a feedback loop
shaped by the interaction between the technological
system and the living ecosystem, and in which ‘certain
participants in the environment – the flies, the birds –
begin to “play” the system, interacting with it’ (Burt
2007). Dunn regards these sonic experiments as a step
towards humanity finding a way back into the inter-
connected ecosystem from which we have become
estranged:
I’m very interested in these archaic systems of under-
standing environmental balance: seeing ourselves as an
intrinsic part of larger systems. I would be happy if my
work serves no other purpose than to suggest ways in
which we might rediscover this sense of fundamental
connectedness … We need to compose processes of
interaction which will help reestablish a saner balance of
humanity within the biosphere. The language I’m envi-
sioning is an experiential, dynamic process that explores
whatever tools and metaphors are available in that
direction. (Dunn 1988: 15–16)
4.3. Allowing us to experience normally inaccessible
aspects of the environment
Ecological sound art can also allow audiences to
experience aspects of the environment they would not
normally have access to, facilitating a heightened
knowledge of, and respect for, the world we live in.
Another of Dunn’s works, The Sound of Light in Trees
(2006), features detailed recordings of the pine bark
beetle which is responsible for decimating the popula-
tion of piñon pines in New Mexico, raising awareness
of the problem by allowing us to hear the destruction
going on inside the trees, invisible to the naked
eye. However, this constitutes only one element of the
work: Dunn also discovered that playing the record-
ings back to the beetles had a profound effect on their
neural system, causing them to cease their tunnelling
and feeding behaviours, and even shutting down their
reproductive cycle, enabling him to use his work as an
effective, and eco-friendly, form of pest control to
actively combat the problem.
 36 Jonathan Gilmurray
A different kind of hidden world is revealed in
the sound works of former marine biologist Jana
Winderen, which provide a sonic window into the
underwater ecosystems which exist largely indepen-
dently of human beings, encouraging our awareness
and respect, and reminding us that we are not the
centre of the universe:
[T]his relates back to the importance of the inaudible, to
that which lies outside our senses and our possibility of
perception. This is a field which we are not able to
experience and yet other creatures are operating there.
For me, it is important to hear this field since it is
inhabited by beings who have existed for many millions of
years longer than our species. Without wanting to sound
at all New Age, it is an issue of respect, of sensitivity and
of developing a questioning approach to the environment.
(Winderen, in Lane and Carlyle 2013: 157)
One recent project entitled Silencing of the Reefs saw
Winderen working in collaboration with Germany’s
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation
to explore the changing soundscapes of the earth’s
remaining coral reefs and promote greater under-
standing of how they are being negatively impacted by
human actions, asking: ‘[w]ill the reefs be silenced
before we even have had the chance to listen to them
and even begin to fully understand these fragile
ecosystems?’ (Winderen 2013).
In December 2015, two works staged at the COP21
climate summit in Paris used sound to transport
visitors to two very different environments under
threat from climate change, bringing a vitally tangible
and experiential dimension to the issues being
discussed in theoretical terms at the summit. Leah
Barclay’s Rainforest Listening (2015) was based at the
Eiffel Tower and accessed via a mobile app which
immersed visitors in a variety of rainforest sounds-
capes as they moved around, with each level’s viewing
platform corresponding to a different layer of rain-
forest vegetation. On the streets of Paris, meanwhile,
Holly Owen and Kristina Pulejkova were dressed as
polar explorers, wearing ‘backpack cinemas’ equipped
with headphones on which audiences could experience
their work Switching Heads – Sound Mapping the
Arctic (2015), in which an ice sculpture of a human
head with binaural microphones planted in its ears
explores the Norwegian island of Tromsø, listening to
its soundscapes and hearing local people’s testimonies
of the ways in which climate change is affecting it.
4.4. Communicating environmental data through sound
Some ecological sound works utilise sonification as a
means to achieve an experiential understanding of
ecological dynamics and processes. As a technique
which involves mapping data sets onto sonic or
musical parameters, sonification is increasingly being
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employed as a scientific tool in a range of fields, and for
a wide variety of purposes (Hermann et al. 2011).
Artist Andrea Polli collaborates with climate scientists
and meteorologists to produce sonification-based
sound works which comment upon climate issues,
such as her Airlight series (2006–7), in which data from
air quality monitoring stations in Taipei, Socal and
Boulder are translated into sound to create a real-
time aural representation of the levels of various
atmospheric pollutants; and Sonic Antarctica (2009),
the product of an artistic residency with the National
Science Foundation, which blends field recordings,
interviews with scientists, and sonifications of the
climate data they are studying, enabling us to ‘hear’
our warming world from multiple perspectives. Heat
and the Heartbeat of the City (2004), meanwhile, is an
interactive work centred on sonifications of projected
temperature increases in Central Park caused by global
warming. In an interview regarding this project, Polli
commented on what she felt sonification could bring to
our understanding of the issue:
I think that sound is a very visceral thing and I think that
if people can really feel the potential difficulties, the
potential discomfort, but more than just uncomfortable,
actual problems that will result from global warming,
maybe in some way they will be convinced to think more
seriously about the issue. (Polli 2005)
Sonification is also at the heart of the compositional
approach which Matthew Burtner has named
‘ecoacoustic’, describing it as ‘a type of environ-
mentalism in sound … tak[ing] the form of musical
procedures and materials that either directly or
indirectly draw on environmental systems to structure
music’ (Burtner 2005: 10). Burtner has composed
many such ‘ecoacoustic’ sound works, such as Iceprints
(2009), in which a hydrophone recording made
beneath the Arctic ice is combined with a piano part
based on a transcription of the recording, with its pitch
determined by mapping the progressive decline in
Arctic ice over the forty years between 1970 and 2010
onto the first six octaves of the keyboard, and each
page of the score covering one year, thus translating
the process of ecological change into music. Auksalaq
(2012), meanwhile, is a multimedia ‘opera’ composed
around a narrative which addresses the effects of
climate change upon the Arctic through a combination
of sonification-based compositions, field recordings,
video and interviews with both climate scientists and
the native Alaskan Inupiat people whose way of life is
being threatened by the melting of the Arctic ice.
Perhaps the most widely known sonification-based
work of ecological sound art, however, is John Luther
Adams’s The Place Where You Go To Listen (2004–6),
a permanent sound and light installation at the
Museum of the North in Fairbanks involving the real-
time sonification of geophysical and climatological

data from the surrounding environment, allowing
visitors to ‘hear’ the dynamics of the Alaskan eco-
system as a constantly unfolding composition. In the
accompanying book, Adams reveals that the project
stems from his conviction that ‘music can contribute to
the awakening of our ecological understanding. By
deepening our awareness of our connections to the
earth, music can provide a sounding model for the
renewal of human consciousness and culture’ (Adams
2009: 1).
4.5. Facilitating community engagement with
ecological issues
Finally, some works of ecological sound art move
beyond the one-way ‘artist-to-audience’ dynamic to
engage communities as active participants and colla-
borators, facilitating a direct and personal engagement
with the environmental issues that most affect them.
Leah Barclay has realised many such projects, under-
pinned by her ‘Sonic Ecologies Framework’, ‘a multi-
platform methodology proposed to initiate cultural
change through sound … [which] pivots on a site-
specific creative project embedded in a multi-layered
community cultural engagement process developed in
response to a specific environment’ (Barclay 2012: 17).
Her projects have included Sonic Explorers, which
engages young people in ecological sound art; The
Dam(n) Project, which has seen Barclay working with
communities in India’s Narmada valley, using sound
art as an activist tool to respond to the destructive
damming projects which threaten their water supplies;
and Biosphere Soundscapes, an ongoing series of net-
worked projects in which artists and communities are
working together to use sound as a means of under-
standing the environmental health of UNESCO bio-
sphere reserves. All these projects stem from Barclay’s
firm belief in the power of sound art to impact how we
approach today’s urgent environmental issues:
Now, more than ever, there is a critical need to listen to
our environment and generate a paradigm shift that
engages our auditory perception. Sound, as a creative
medium, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful means
to stimulate this shift in consciousness. Electro-acoustic
music, with the use of natural sounds exposing the state of
the world, could be an unprecedented tool in artists taking
action in ecological crisis. (Barclay 2012: 22)
5. THE ECOLOGICAL AGENCY OF
SOUND ART
The five approaches outlined above serve to demon-
strate just a few of the ways in which ecological sound
art might help audiences to engage with contemporary
environmental issues. However, it still remains to
address perhaps the most vital question of all: that of
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Ecological Sound Art 37
whether ecological sound art can be regarded as a
significant and effective means of approaching today’s
urgent ecological crises. To answer this question, the
final section of this article will draw from three key
works of contemporary ecological theory, examining
the parallels that exist between the new modes of
thought they propose and the ways in which we
experience sound art, and which reveal it to be an
inherently ecological medium.
5.1. The ecological thought: sensing the mesh of
vibrant matter
One of the fundamental pillars of contemporary eco-
logical theory is the principle of interconnectedness
between the different elements within the earth’s eco-
systems, our understanding of which Timothy Morton
describes as ‘thinking the ecological thought’:
The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes
easy – for some, strangely or frighteningly easy – to join
the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is
the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the
more our world opens up. (Morton 2010: 1)
Morton coins the term ‘the mesh’ to describe the net-
work of interconnections between everything, noting
that ‘[t]he mesh of interconnected things is vast, per-
haps immeasurably so … Nothing exists all by itself,
and so nothing is fully “itself”’ (Morton 2010: 15). He
explains that the mesh does not just include living or
organic forms, but all matter – every ‘thing’ on the
planet – and that ‘each being in the mesh interacts with
others. The mesh isn’t static. We can’t rigidly specify
anything as irrelevant’ (Morton 2010: 29–30).
In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram states
that the only way to truly internalise this principle of
ecological interconnectedness is through the cultiva-
tion of our sensorial perception of the world around us,
since to do so is to ‘enter into a sympathetic relation
with the perceived … Perception, in this sense, is an
attunement or synchronisation between my own
rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves,
their own tones and textures’ (Abram 1996: 54).
Becoming sensorially attuned to the world in this way,
argues Abram, will result in an embodied under-
standing of our place within the earth’s biosphere:
As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our
sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast,
interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations
borne by countless other bodies … It is, indeed, nothing
other than the biosphere – the matrix of earthly life in
which we ourselves are embedded. Yet this is not the
biosphere as it is conceived by an abstract and objectify-
ing science … it is, rather, the biosphere as it is experi-
enced and lived from within by the intelligent body – by the
attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world
that he, or she, experiences. (Abram 1996: 65)
 38 Jonathan Gilmurray
In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett argues that it is our
failure to acknowledge the vitality and power of non-
human matter which ‘feeds human hubris and our
earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consump-
tion … preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the non-
human powers circulating around and within our
bodies … [and impeding] the emergence of more
ecological and more materially sustainable modes of
production and consumption’ (Bennett 2010: vii–ix).
Like Abram, Bennett advocates ‘a cultivated, patient,
sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces’ (Bennett
2010: xiv) as the key to enhancing our perception of,
and respect for, their agency, arguing that ‘[s]uch a
newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers …
can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all
bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in
a dense network of relations’ (Bennett 2010: 13) – in
other words, facilitating our thinking of Morton’s
‘ecological thought’.
5.2. Sensing ecological relationships through sound
Sound’s unique ability to reveal the system of dynamic
relationships that exists between things in the world is,
of course, a fundamental pillar of acoustic ecology:
in Acoustic Communication, Barry Truax states that
‘[l]istening … is the primary interface between the
individual and the environment … Moreover, listening
habits create a relationship between the listener and the
environment … the interlocking behavior of sound, the
listener, and the environment [are understood as] as a
system of relationships, not as isolated entities … With
sound, everything interacts with everything else’
(Truax 2001: xviii–xix). More recently, in Sonic Pos-
sible Worlds, Salomé Voegelin notes that ‘[s]ound is the
invisible layer of the world that shows its relationships,
actions, and dynamics … [and] augments, expands and
critically evaluates how we see the world and how we
arrange ourselves to live in it’ (Voegelin 2014: 2).
Voegelin explains that, since sound is the product of a
dynamic event, it indicates not what is, but what is
happening, in our environment, facilitating our per-
ception of the network of relationships between things:
Sound … [indicates] phenomena that function not as
objects or subjects, as entities, but sound the temporal
connections between objects and subjects as things
thinging, contingently … We do not hear entities but
relationships, the commingling of things which generate a
sonic world. (Voegelin 2014: 162)
In The Tone of our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and
Ecology, Frances Dyson similarly notes that ‘[s]ensa-
tion is heralded by noise – the noise of movement,
not of things. Sensation flickers on the skin and
gathers up the body, pulls it out of its tempestuous
inner monologue, and presents it with the world’
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(Dyson 2014: 109). Like Abram and Bennett, Dyson
argues that only a new sensibility, grounded in the
direct sensing of the dynamic, vibrant world around us,
can hope to furnish us with the true ‘common sense’
which is the necessary foundation for a heightened
ecological consciousness – and ‘this is where sound and
listening play a pivotal role’ (Dyson 2014: 149):
Sound’s ephemeral and atmospheric nature is, like the
environment, something that circulates outside of
exchange, and refocuses attention on the space and the
environment of the subject rather than the subject per se
… [that] offers some entry into the dilemma of how to
hear the world and in hearing, also be able to act, with the
aim and existential condition of the ‘in-common’. (Dyson
2014: 149)
Comparable descriptions of the inherently ecological
nature of sound are also found within ecomusicology:
in Music and the Skilful Listener: American Women
Compose the Natural World, Denise Von Glahn
observes that the fact that music ‘surrounds us and
enfolds us in space simulates our relationship within
the all-embracing natural world’ (Von Glahn 2013: 6–
7), and argues that the act of listening encourages a
particular mode of being in the world based on
‘growing into an environment rather than insisting
upon reshaping it’ (Von Glahn 2013: 322). In The
Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and Popular Music
Since 1960, meanwhile, David Ingram explores the
notion of ‘eco-listening’, which argues that ‘the activity
of listening itself has a special role to play in the for-
mation of ecological awareness’ (Ingram 2010: 16),
concluding that ‘music is the art form best suited to
fostering the ecological self … [since] the dominance of
the visual sense in human beings encourages a sense of
separation between subject and object, or human
perceiver and things in the world, which has had
disastrous consequences for the health of the environ-
ment … [while] the sense of hearing overcomes the
limitations of sight by enacting the fundamental
ecological principle of holistic interconnectedness’
(Ingram 2010: 59).
5.3. Sonic possible worlds
To move towards genuine and lasting ecological
change, however, requires not just the attainment of
more ecological ways of thinking and being in the
present, but also that we are able to conceive of alter-
native futures: to re-imagine how things could be. In
Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a
Period of Climate Change, Malcolm Miles considers
art’s ability to help us to do this, asserting that ‘art
inflects life, just as life inflects art. Representations of
ideas establish them’ (Miles 2014: 11), and going on to
reflect that ‘[p]erhaps I am lost in a dreamworld if
I imagine a postcapitalist, environmentally just and

sustainably joyful society, yet unless I can imagine it
I have no way to contribute to it … art … is an
imaginative as well as an interruptive project, requiring
a re-visioning of the world’s value structures’ (Miles
2014: 29–30).
The power of sound art to realise such a re-visioning –
or, perhaps more correctly, a re-listening – of the world
is explored by Salomé Voegelin in Sonic Possible
Worlds, in which she outlines how listening to sound can
impact our perception not only of what the world is, but
also, crucially, of what it could be:
Listening to the landscape’s pluralities and possibilities,
hearing the dense multiplicity of its mobile production,
allows us to challenge the singularity of actuality and
articulate a different sense of place and a different sense of
self that lives in those possibilities and shows us how else
things could be … Sound slices through the visual frame
and organisation to propose others: temporary, invisible,
and ephemeral re-framings that demand our participation
and re-frame the listener also. (Voegelin 2014: 22)
When we listen to a sound work, Voegelin argues, we
become submerged in a ‘sonic possible world’, which is
created and recreated by our experience of what we
hear. Furthermore, when we emerge from the possible
world that has been generated through our listening,
we do not do so into the version of the world
we previously inhabited – indeed, we cannot – since the
new thoughts, perceptions and sensations that we have
experienced will be carried forth into the actual world,
creating ‘a different actuality linked to and infected by
new possibilities’ (Voegelin 2014: 31). For Voegelin, this
has ‘not only an aesthetic but also a social and political
significance in that it has an impact on ideas about what
the world and what the subject is presumed to be and
what else they could be’ (Voegelin 2014: 2–3). Thus the
effect of the sound work is to create not only a new
possible world, but also a new possible listener with a
renewed relationship with the world that is inherently
ecological; as Voegelin explains, ‘[t]he listening subject
inhabiting the sensorial sense of the work is not a
humanist subject but a post-humanist subject who lives
in equivalence and reciprocity with her environment
and understands her role as one of responsibility instead
of superiority’ (Voegelin 2014: 141).
Furthermore, the fact that these new possibilities are
generated neither by the sound nor by the listener
alone, but rather by the interaction of the sound with
the consciousness of the listener, reveals ‘that the out-
side is not overwhelming and infinite, but is the inter-
twining of himself, his agency, with the agency of
nature, equivalent, reciprocal, and generative … Such
a worldview is more equal and does not grant the
power of conquest but the responsibility of together-
ness’ (Voegelin 2014: 118). Sound art is thus revealed
as a medium which inherently embodies and ties
together the fundamental principles of contemporary
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Ecological Sound Art 39
ecological theory outlined by Morton, Abram and
Bennett: providing a sensuous experience of the inter-
connectedness of our own agency with the agency of
vibrant matter, as part of the dynamic and shifting
mesh of the earth’s ecosystem.
6. CONCLUSION
As global weather patterns grow increasingly erratic,
the Arctic ice sheets continue to recede and scientists
issue ever-starker warnings concerning our fate, it has
become increasingly clear that the numerous environ-
mental crises we face require urgent action on an
unprecedented scale; however, as Naomi Klein points
out, ‘[f]aced with a crisis that threatens our survival as
a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very
thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of
elbow grease behind it’ (Klein 2014: 2). Given this
situation, perhaps the most critical question of all is
how we might begin to re-imagine our relationship to
these environmental crises in order to overcome this
state of fatal inaction: as Bill McKibben notes, ‘[w]e
can register what is happening with satellites and
scientific instruments, but can we register it in our
imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?’
(McKibben 2005).
In recent years, an increasing number of artists have
begun using sound as a medium to help us to do exactly
that, creating works which take a variety of approaches
including (but not necessarily limited to) creating
metaphors to help us connect with environmental issues
on a deeper and more personal level; articulating the
harmonious coexistence of humankind and our tech-
nologies with the earth’s ecosystems; engendering
awareness and respect for invisible or inaccessible areas
of the environment; expressing environmental data
through sound; and actively engaging communities in
the environmental issues that most affect them.
This article has argued that this growing area of
sound arts practice must be recognised as a significant
contemporary movement in its own right; and that,
following the precedent set within the visual arts, it
should be distinguished from the wider field of
environmental sound art by the terminology ‘ecological
sound art’. Such a move is vital if this important
movement is to be afforded the same recognition as that
currently enjoyed by comparable ecological movements
in other art forms, and included within the wider critical
discourse surrounding the cultural response to con-
temporary environmental issues – a discourse from
which it is currently notable by its absence.
Furthermore, the recognition that the fundamental
characteristics of how we experience and relate to
sound art directly embody the new modes of thought
proposed by some of today’s leading ecological
theorists regarding our understanding of today’s
 40 Jonathan Gilmurray
urgent and complex environmental issues reveals
sound art to be an inherently ecological medium – one
which enables a direct, sensorial engagement with the
agency of vibrant matter, facilitating an embodied
understanding of our embeddedness within an inter-
connected ecosystem, and creating sonic possible
worlds which allow us to re-imagine how things could
be. Taken together, all of these factors make plain the
importance of establishing ecological sound art as a
distinct and significant new field of practice within
contemporary sound arts: one which, in the words of
David Dunn, might perhaps serve as ‘a conservation
strategy for keeping something alive that we now need
to make more conscious, a way of making sense of the
world from which we might refashion our relationship
to nonhuman living systems … [and which might]
provide us with clues to our future survival – and that is
a responsibility worth pursuing’ (Dunn 2009: 97).
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