Scales of Change: Addressing Global Environmental Change through Transdisciplinary Sonic Practices

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The climate crisis is often represented in spectacular images of forest fires, floods and landscapes in drought. Yet it also has a sound: it is registered in geophysical tremors, the sonic signatures of volatile storms and the silencing of landscapes where biodiversity is shrinking. Sound is a powerful medium through which relationships between humans and environments can be mapped, felt and experienced at different scales. This practice-based doctoral project explores how sound-based research methods across the arts and sciences engender new understandings of, and responses to, the global climate emergency. This will be accomplished through: a survey of sonic practices across the arts and sciences; fieldwork with three laboratories pioneering the use of sound to study climate change; and three sonic-arts outputs linked to these fieldwork sites. Fieldwork will occur at: The Centre for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University, where scientists use sound to study the links between biodiversity and climate change; The Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of San Diego, where scientists listen to powerful storms; The Centre for Quaternary Research at Royal Holloway University, where geographers investigate the sounds of glaciers in the Patagonian Andes. Through an in-depth engagement with these scientific approaches, this project will generate three original sound artworks responding to environmental change in i) landscape, ii) air, and iii) ice. Drawing on my professional skills as a sound artist, this creative, practice-based project will investigate the communication of environmental data and explore how sound elicits public responses to the climate crisis. As the first arts-based investigation of environmental sound at the proposed fieldwork sites, this project will address a gap in understanding how artists and scientists use sound, and will make an original contribution to knowledge in sound arts, cultural geography and the geohumanities.