Listening to Climate Change: experiments with sonic democracy

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This project engages publics with issues of climate change through the medium of sound. It starts from the assumption that the complex temporalities and interconnections which characterise climate change issues and the hard-to-articulate hopes, fears and expectations that these provoke might be usefully delineated and voiced through sound. The project focuses on the vulnerable coastal marshes of Blakeney Point, Norfolk, currently in the care of the National Trust (NT), the main project partner. It connects with NT's own concern to encourage residents, stakeholders and visitors to engage constructively with the challenges posed by climatic change in coastal landscapes. The project explores the role of sonic art practice to facilitate and empower residents and other users of Blakeney Point to engage with the challenges raised by climate change and explore possible desired and undesired future scenarios for this location. This study builds and extends the NT's recent initiative Sounds of our Shores (2015-16).Issues of climate change pose extraordinary challenges for the communication of scientific knowledge and for broader public debate concerning environmental uncertainties, possibilities, options and futures. As complex, seemingly intangible phenomena or 'invisible risks', involving a range of timescales and geographically extensive consequences, climate change issues are notoriously difficult to trace, imagine and bring into presence. Arts-based communication of climate change has proved one important means of giving shape and form to such complex issues within certain arenas of public debate. Yet in spite of Hulme's (2008,2009) plea that climate change is very much a cultural problem, much climate change-related arts-based work is made by artists for publics in the hope of provoking responses rather than by publics themselves as an active and ongoing part of facilitating dialogue.This project adopts a social process-based arts methodology to help move arts-based work concerning climate change towards a more clearly articulated model of conversation and mutual learning. It explores the assertion that sound has a distinctive ability to bring together apparently and otherwise incommensurable 'voices', traces, data sonifications and environmental sounds, in a shared space in which each might speak to the other. The potential here is to initiate some form of meaningful communication between social and natural worlds and to enable participants and audiences to better imagine the implications, potentials and possibilities of environmental change.We address three questions in this research:Q1. How can sound help explore and more widely communicate the complex temporal nature of climate change?Q2. To what extent can a sonically based engagement strategy facilitate dialogue, response and conversation between a diverse range of interested parties including various human interests, flora, fauna and environmental processes?Q3. What role can collaborative participatory sonic art play in the creative collective imagining of environmental futures in the context of human-induced climate change?The project team includes geographers, musician-composer-sound artists, community engagement specialists, arts-documentary-makers, local partners: the NT, Blakeney Primary School and Future Radio. A thirty-one month programme of co-devised workshops, sonic data collection and participant-led and composed performance will lead to the production of a Sonic Estuary Plan as an interactive multi-media e-book for Blakeney Point. Other outputs include a sonic exhibition, live performance, a radio ballad and a documentary film to tour/engage with other National Trust coastal sites. Another e-book about these participatory methods of sonic engagement will bring together best practice from elsewhere, critically reflecting on the sonic experiments undertaken in the project.