Sound design,Soundscape Ecology,Soundscape Composition Research Papers (original) (raw)

I am a human being. I am also an artist, and as such, my work entails an understanding of how to feel and interpret things. The planet on which I was born will radically change within my lifetime, and the decline of the entire biosphere is now unavoidable. Mankind is responsible for the massive changes that are happening, which will affect the survival of the majority of creatures in all of Earth's biomes. This ecocide is progressively damaging the magnificent choirs of natural sound, 'eco-symphonies' we have not even heard, much less recorded. About 15 years ago, I felt compelled to invest my life in a sound-art project, which would promote public awareness on the most silent catastrophe of our times: the Sixth Mass Extinction. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (signed by some 1360 world scientists and released by the United Nations in 2005), the current global extinction rate is between 100 and 1,000 times higher than it would naturally be. Immediate projections for the future indicated that this rate may reach 12,000 within our lifetime 1. As a result of the direct human pressure on ecosystems (mostly deforestation and overexploitation) and the effects of human impact on the biosphere (as invasive species-triggering and pollution) an exponentially growing number of the planet's recently estimated 8.7 million living species are going extinct. The rate of 30,000 species per year was already predicted in 1993 by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson (estimates which order of magnitude has since been revealed correct by most current studies), which equals to some 3 species going extinct every hour. Current estimates do not even include climate change. This is all the more shocking if we consider that, at present, only 1.9 million species have been described, most of which have barely been studied, if at all. Of all known species, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, and 41% of amphibians now appear on the IUCN Red List of threatened species 2. We are facing the collapse of life itself. From an ontological point of view, our species is only one among others on Earth's network of interconnected ecosystems. Every single species, the smallest microorganism and the largest mammals, all thrive and conduct their lives without any external support device to survive and propagate their own genetic heritage. Rare individuals of the same species meet in vast spaces and mate through no force but their own natural communications. I am speechless as to how these coordinated and interdependent mechanisms can happen at every scale of life, within extremely complex processes of natural selection and co-evolution, and how these cycles have slowly refined themselves over the last 65 millions of years. I wish I could regain the perspective of a guest and in-depth observer of this highly evolved web of life. The time has come to reverse the anthropocentric view of evolution and to envision a new inner space for a deeper understanding of the complex, now vanishing equilibrium of the natural world. To achieve these aims, I have used environmental sound of ecosystems as the object of investigation and conservation, as the model for compositional creation, and as the entity for designing worlds of perception for diverse audiences.