Investigating environmental soundscapes

By Kayla Smith

Listen up! Sounds of the Great Lakes environment have multiple benefits, including creative education, scientific data collection and spiritual growth.

One example: A flock of zebra finches perch on amplified electric guitars, filling a makeshift aviary in the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts with bird song and reverb.

The result is a “living and ephemeral work,” as described by its creator, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

Guests walk through the exhibit, as finches add melodic accompaniment to experimental sounds made by the birds’ movement on their instrument perches. The project, called hear to ear, is showing until March 23. Check out the video to see the animals artists in action.

Boursier-Mougenot’s art mixes natural bird song with a manipulated environment, producing a symbolic song of organic and non-organic sounds, according to an excerpt from the host museum’s website.

The goal of the installment is to present listeners with a broader understanding of sound by mixing elements of bird song with man-made instruments.

Elsewhere in the Great Lakes basin there are similar examples. Eric Leonardson, an acoustic ecologist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, mixes the art of sound and the science of ecology to promote a greater understanding of self and the natural world.

“I’ve been trying to promote a broad understanding and appreciation of the acoustic dimensions of life for quite some time,” Leonardson told Echo.

The World Listening Project, directed by Leonardson, is devoted to understanding the world through the practice of listening and field recording. The project hosts artistic recordings of soundscapes.

A soundscape is greater than any one individual sound. It’s a collection of all the sounds in a certain location or “the sound of here and now,” Leonardson said. If you were sitting by a lake, the lapping water, a child splashing around, the buzzing of a fly, and the chatter of fellow beachgoers would be your soundscape.

The act of listening slows down “a kind of hyperactivity” that “deafens the individual to the subtle, quiet, deep, and tactile bonds to out psyche and our nature,” Leonardson said in an email.

“With insensitivity comes an inability to sense anything,” he said. “This includes the world we’re a part of.”

The World Listening Project urges people to listen to the sound of everyday life. It encourages soundwalks to get people surrounded by wildlife and simply listen, building observation techniques as they go.

Scientific fieldwork relies on listening strategies that one can develop during a soundwalk, says Bob Mulvihill, the head scientist at the National Aviary in Pittsburg. Scientists must listen, observe and take samples to learn more about the natural world.

“Bird populations are measured at different scales by using birdsong as a detection cue,” Mulvihill said.

Bird population data has been boosted by national citizen science projects since the 1980’s. Listening is a big part of that, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website.

The Cornell Lab, located in Ithaca, New York, accepts bird population numbers from bird watchers who observe and record data. Birders stop and listen for three minutes every couple of miles and record every type of bird they hear.

 “Birders are going to [record data] anyways, so a lot of bird population data comes from amateurs,” Mulvihill said.

 This project has contributed valuable information, enabling scientists to monitor changes in the distribution and abundance of birds across the country, Mulvihill said.

Listening to birds has been an indicator of environmental health. Perhaps most famously, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring used the absence of bird song to raise awareness to the growing disappearance of birds in the 1960’s, due to the chemical DDT.

“Rachel Carson’s symbolic title is based in reality,” Mulvihill said. “Like the canary in the coal mine, bird calls can show environmental quality and change.”

But it’s not just art or science that benefit from paying attention to environmental sound.

Birdcalls are a source of comfort, said Marcia Hyatt, a leadership coach based in Lutsen, Minnesota on the coast of Lake Superior. Hyatt talks people through difficult life changes and advises them how to better their disposition.

She and her husband own a retreat cabin where one or two people can get away from the “pace of the city.”

The sound around her Lake Superior cabin has a psychological effect if you get quiet enough to listen, she said.

“There’s a slower more humane quality to the water lapping,” Hyatt said. “It quiets the noise down in the brain.”

Like Leonardson, Hyatt appreciates the sounds of nature as a tool for education.

Her renters are often looking for a more balanced lifestyle, or to “change the storyline [of their life],” she said.

“You have a wisdom, that’s like a whisper,” said Hyatt. “When you can go into the profound nature you can get quiet enough to hear it.”

Hyatt’s favorite soundscape comes from the lake.

A video from the Great Lakes Alliance shows off her favorite sounds below.

“The waves grab my attention. [They tell me] there’s something happening here, and its always happening,” she said.

Leonardson will host a soundwalk March 20, at Brushwood Center in Ryerson Woods, Chicago. There will also be a performance by the Chicago Phonography, a collection of sound artists, who use recordings of Chicago’s urban soundscape to make music.

Got a favorite soundscape? Let us know. Write greatlakesecho@gmail.com with a subject line that reads “soundscapes.” Include a description or even a sound clip recording (.wav or .mp3) of your favorite Great Lakes region sound. We’ll compile them and post them later.