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Long abstract:

Atmospheric Listening: Attuning to a polyphony of environmental voices.

This ongoing artistic research intends to bring forth a hybrid listening to atmospheric phenomena to foster a deeper empathy with our natural environments. The atmosphere is a complex system of geophonic soundscapes that requires an interdisciplinary engagement to reveal its audition. This kind of augmented perception is possible with technoscientific instruments to attune to the natural environment, sourcing electromagnetic signals and weather data sonification. Hence, I aim to explore the possibility of a nonhuman voice of the atmosphere, that emerges from a resonance with the atmospheric medium, custom-made instruments, and listener’s positionality.

Psychologist Jaime Berenguer promotes a profound shift in perspective to nurture a deeper empathy for the natural environment. This transformative change involves moving away from an anthropocentric outlook, centered on self-preservation and altruism for humans, and embracing an ecocentric viewpoint that perceives the environment as a self-contained entity.

Delving into ecocentrism, I look into Listening after Nature by Mark Peter Wright, as a shift from perceiving nature as a distant object or idyll. Wright emphasizes attending to natural environments' invisible and unsounding aspects to counteract the human-centered intentionality often prevalent in field recordings. In harmony with this idea, my research aims for a critical exploration of the nonhuman voice of nature.

In this performance lecture, I present advances of my ongoing artistic research, with sound compositions created for attuning to a polyphonic soundscape found in the hybrid intersection across technology, atmospheric dynamics, and our embodied positionality as listeners.