Ecotones: Soundscapes of Trees

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The Ecotones network comprises a programme of activity that raises awareness of environmental issues through forest ecosystems with the aim of building long-term, international, transdisciplinary collaborations. Artists, researchers and cultural organisations from the UK and South Korea will bring insights and practice from music, ecology, conservation, social science, health and wellbeing, and education to address issues of environmentally sustainable growth and urban development in new ways. Different disciplinary perspectives and practices from both countries will be shared and combined regarding the relationship between forests and human health, the psychological benefits from forest and nature spaces, especially deep listening (Oliveros 2005, 2010) to sounds of nature, and the connections to be made between traditional music and nature. Listening to sounds in nature will help to develop ecoliteracy essential for environmentally sustainable growth and 'deep ecological urbanism' (Griffith 2014).Our increasingly globalized world bombarded by anthropogenic noise creates an incentive for finding new models for practice-led research to cultivate 'arts of attentiveness' (van Dooren, Kirksey, Münster 2016). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of nature to people, with sounds becoming part of the public discourse during the initial lockdown in 2020, as people talked about their areas being less busy with traffic. Hearing bird song became a key way in which people started to connect and reconnect with nature. Drawing attention to these biophonies and anthropophonies will expand our understanding of the ways trees, woods and forests contribute to quality of life. The Ecotones network will address the global challenges of urban development and environmentally sustainable growth by focusing on the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15, Life on Land, and its Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030). Workshops will include a pilot study to quantify soundscapes by involving listening walks and field recordings in both urban and rural environments in South Korea and the UK. A participatory soundscape mapping exercise will be developed as a tool for encouraging community participation in soundscapes of trees, through biodiversity monitoring at sites across the UK and South Korea. Furthermore, through the repeated Ecotones activities an open access soundbank will be released consisting of recordings from each of the Ecotones workshop locations, and uploaded to the international open source library, Sounds of the Forest, used for the annual Timber Festival. These recordings will benefit those interested in the fields of bioacoustics and natural soundscapes. A socio-cultural response to ecological and climate emergencies needs to involve interactions between nature, culture and education. What can educational engagements with nature and culture, specifically trees and music, offer these intertwined crises? The Ecotones network will explore ways in which nature-culture relations can bring an environmental focus to music pedagogy. In the context of both music and science education, nature sounds bring an awareness of habitats, and of place, cultivating interspecies knowledge as a route to sustaining environments and cultures. A focus on listening will help to evaluate trees and ecosystem services, climate change, biodiversity values and human health improvement as a major consideration in urban development plans. The impact of climate change and increased risk of pest and pathogens on the services provided by trees, and their environmental, social and cultural benefits will be evaluated in the context of urban development and environmentally sustainable growth. Understanding a range of interactions of humans with trees and forests, will help us to evaluate possible strategies to develop valuable insight into successful forest-human relationships.