(image: A Leggett)
Outdoor events involving technical equipment are always a gamble. Winter announced her presence early this year in the Central West of New South Wales, cloaked in cold southerly winds, showers, and overcast days with plunging temperatures in the week leading up to World Environment Day 2024 on 5 June. Of course, I had planned an outdoor listening event for the occasion.
I was part of a program of place-based interventions across the country by members of the ecoartspace Australian Dialogues, each of us marking World Environment Day by creating hopeful actions to address the issues impacting the environments where we live and work. This is the first of a series of events we’re planning over the next 12 to 18 months.
An urban setting was chosen for my Lunchtime Listening Lab event—not an environment I usually work in, or my personal preference. However, I believe an intervention requires one to go where the people are rather than expecting them to come to me. My event location was on the lawns at the front of the Western Plains Cultural Centre in the regional city of Dubbo—facing a busy street and close to the path leading into the gallery museum complex’s popular café.
With my background in communications, the event had been heavily promoted through social media posts and shares, support from the Cultural Centre team, posters in various spots around the cultural precinct and my local shopping centre, and an ABC Radio interview on the day. There was also great support from ecoartspace, promoting the events internationally. Still, you just never know who will turn up…if anyone.
I’d spent an hour setting up before the clock hit midday and I was worried. The lawn and the trees I’d planned to listen to were not producing the sounds they could, or that I wanted to showcase. The sounds on any given day will depend on the type of tree, the age of the tree, the time of day, the weather conditions, the seasonal conditions, watering regimes, and a host of other factors I have no control over. Nature isn’t a trick pony, and like animals, doesn’t always perform on cue. The lawns had been buzzing with electrical interference sounds I’d picked up a few days prior when I’d been sampling sound at the site in preparation for a wet weather Plan B, but then they went quiet too.
My event marketing had said you’d hear the heartbeat of a tree and the energy of the earth beneath your feet. I explained in my radio interview that this was just a hook—in the case of the trees, it’s often more like a grumbling tummy. But today, I was given the silent treatment. I’d spent hours promoting the event over two weeks and a day preparing equipment in the hope of wowing people with the magic of acoustic ecology and field recording, so this wasn’t ideal.
Fourteen people turned out in the cold to listen on World Environment Day. One of the early visitors was a woman who’d seen the event on Facebook and was unsure of what to expect. She was interested to know how the trees in this manicured urban lawn compared to listening to trees on the river. We spoke for several minutes about the differences and how deep listening to natural environments, without the use of technology, can lead you to a point of feeling the ground beneath you vibrating.
A boy of preschool age and his father arrived on the dot of noon. The boy sat on the camping stool next to the geofón plunged 20cm into the lawn, holding headphones against his ears. When he realised he could hear his feet stamping the ground, my footsteps around the tree, and his father running his hand over the grass nearby, he was captivated. Father and son left, returning half an hour later for a second round of listening. This child was hooked even though he couldn’t hear any invertebrate activity in the lawn or the gurgling and creaking of the trees. He left thinking about the idea of earthworms and grubs in the ground hearing his footsteps.
Over another hour, I had conversations with many more who turned up keen to hear something, but who were just as interested in the microphones and equipment on display, and my practice as a field recording sound artist. I also chatted about the SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes project and how listening to the environment will play a big role in that research over the coming year.
The Lunchtime Listening Lab event’s real impact was the stories shared about the environments we live in today, the choices we’ve made about what we surround ourselves with, the environments we aspire to live with, the environments we need for our future, and the need to listen—deeply.
Some were disappointed and less than impressed based on the formal and informal event feedback. I had set up a quick online survey for people to access via a QR code, as well as a blank notepad asking visitors to write a single word or phrase to describe what they experienced, felt or heard.
The responses were: peaceful, interesting, conversation starter, fascinating, thankful, mind opening…and not much.
I guess the not much comment was fair enough given the silence at this event. However, negative comments about these facilitated listening experiences remind me of something I heard after a live audience presentation of a soundscape I’d composed using ‘hidden’ and acousmatic sounds from the river. Because the audience recognised some of the sounds in the composition, they believed they heard these sounds all the time—ignoring or dismissing sounds they couldn’t make sense of, or attributing them to something more familiar.
The Lunchtime Listening Lab event’s real impact was the stories shared about the environments we live in today, the choices we’ve made about what we surround ourselves with, the environments we aspire to live with, the environments we need for our future, and the need to listen—deeply. These are critically important conversations to be having today and every other day of the year.
Extra: For those who missed this event or were disappointed with what they didn’t hear, the video below is a sample of sounds gathered from this same site a few days earlier (a rainy day Plan B exercise). These types of sounds are always best listened to with headphones or earbuds.
The Lunchtime Listening Lab was supported by Dubbo Regional Council’s SPARC Support Grant Program and the Western Plains Cultural Centre. A heartfelt thank you to all who braved a grey, cold day to learn more about listening to the world around us.