Nature sound recording has long been criticised for the artifice of the documents it produces. Joining this easy target is the implication that the form's aesthetic frame, which often intends to promote our connection to nature, actually serves to disconnect us. This paper reviews critiques of nature sound recording and suggests that by confronting what it excludes from ‘nature’, the form might yet come to terms with ecology.

This paper presents a detailed study of two works that arrive at sounds composed through the experience of sounds heard. Frances White's composition Centre Bridge, composed in 1999 for two shakuhachi and tape, is based largely on the sounds of a sonorous metal grate bridge that crosses the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. ASound Map of the Danube, composed by Annea Lockwood in 2005, reflects four years of sound recording along the length of that river's European to Balkan trajectory. Employing a range of diverse technical tools and aesthetic ideas, both works convey, powerfully and dynamically, a sense of deeply invested listening. I approach the discussion of specific compositional processes and musical outcomes in these two works through an investigation of Lockwood's and White's firsthand experiences as both listeners and composers. Centring on the exchange between sensing body and thinking mind, my research here engages with the arc of the creative process as an experience permeated by spaces of perception, reflection, imagination and action.

The paper examines issues emergent from the construction of my work the bird ghost at the zaouia, which transliterates recorded experience and memory of time and place. Islamic ritual and public spaces were recorded, reworked, re-routed and re-sited in a work that references, comments upon and potentially reconfigures the Islamic sonic-social. Tracing my own stance, the paper foregrounds emergent issues in the recording and use of highly culturally freighted sounds. I trace three broad areas: 1. Sonic Orientalism – the use of sound that carries ‘Eastern’ cultural and religious significance in order to signal a certain kind of alterity; 2. The development of a compositional strategy that seeks a middle-path between acousmatic and acoustic-ecological debates; and 3. A cross-cultural comparison between modes of listening. In addition I discuss the contexts of debates on the permissibility of music within Islam, and also world-musics that trade on the romanticised alterity of sonic tourism. I draw parallels between an ‘ethically responsive sensorium’ characteristic of Islamic aural disciplines and the ‘aesthetically attuned sensorium’ engaged by sonic arts. I argue for an approach that is inclusive of the sonic and the full spectrum of vibration through ramified networks of memory and meaning.

Audio excerpts available at: www.sethayyaz.com/sound-works/bird-ghost-at-the-zaouia

This is an essay exploring issues of essentialism, sound-in-itself and representation that were central to a project I completed in 2010. It covers this project in the context of theory and work by Seth Kim-Cohen, CREED, Don Ihde and Annea Lockwood.

The field recording is often presented in sound art as an unproblematic account of a sonic event or environment. It also prompts a particular kind of listening that approaches the sound as somehow real or accurate. This article, and my work in general, problematises this encounter and seeks to uncover the various approaches to listening that occur when dealing with field recordings, as well as the possibilities within field recordings for exploring essentialism, imagined sound and the conceptual.

This article describes several recent projects that together illustrate an evolving practice and a philosophy of ecoacoustic sound art called EcoSono. These projects foreground adventure – the live, in-person engagement with the world. As a technological sound art practice, EcoSono uses technology to link human and environmental expression, in an attempt to define a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between humans and the natural world. At the core of this work are computational and transduction technologies enabling deeper human–environment interaction. This paper describes three projects including the MICE (Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble) World Tour, the EcoSono Institute music/science collaboration adventure, and the Agents Against Agency series in emergent and improvised musical forms. The article also addresses several key values of interactive ecoacoustics. First, it describes the importance of ‘impracticality’ in creating a productive environmentalist art work. The article also makes the case that the purpose of outdoor recording is not the acquisition of material samples, but to hear the world and learn from it.

This article presents the different tools for assessing soundscapes within urban public spaces and develops in particular the use of the sonic mind map. We will successively define the notions of sonic perception and representation, and sonic and spatial evaluation; we will approach the concept of soundscape and finally give details about the sonic mind-map tool. Through this tool, the soundscape of urban public spaces can be understood, not through speech analysis, but through spatial representations of memorised sonic ambiances.

Investigation results based among other things on sonic mind-map analyses explain the significance of sonic spatialisation and of the sound source distance in urban soundscape assessment. Using the sonic mind map to analyse the sonic representations associated with certain urban spaces seems to be relevant for researchers in space sciences or even for urban planners.

Environmental sounds give information to individuals who have learned to interpret them as members of their acoustic communities. Those living within a soundscape not only receive the acoustic information passively, but also construct their surroundings by their activities.

A lot of acoustic information escapes our conscious attention partly for perceptual psychological reasons, partly because of the amount of acoustic information. A method called sound/listening walk has been applied to enhance these everyday meanings connected to sounds and to emphasise the cultural and historical layers related to them.

The article introduces earlier research and methodology on the subject, applies the recording of acoustic environments to sound/listening walks and then proposes a preliminary method called recorded listening walk for acoustic communication research and soundscape education. The article draws theoretically on acoustic communication and acoustemology.

Drawing on field research carried out in the abandoned villages of the Ara Valley, this article seeks to readdress notions of acoustic community and communication in terms of a ‘haptic aurality’ in which listening, as a mode of touch, approximates a figure of spacing, fragmentation and withdrawal in contrast to more conventional communicational models of intimacy, presence and exchange. Arguing that soundscape compositions present an ‘acoustic ontology’, the article explores a form of belonging and being that is, following Jean-Luc Nancy, singular plural in which sound signals ‘unwork’ collectivities through the processes of ‘sharing’ and ‘splitting’ (partage) characteristic of listening and recording. Referring to the work of writer W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), whose hybrid ‘literary ethnography’ was the impetus for my own soundwalks and fieldwork, and considering the role of soundscape composition within the discipline of Trauma Studies, the article scopes out to consider the possibilities of soundscape composition as a form of testimony in light of Agamben's (1999) insistence that testimony is necessarily incomplete. As a form of ‘myopic witnessing’ (Jenckes 2010), the sonic memories of ruined soundscapes are presented as spacings and absences, fragments and lacunae, that are themselves characteristic of both the ontology of ruins and those of testimony.

In this paper, the authors describe and discuss UrbanRemix, a platform consisting of mobile-device applications and web-based tools to facilitate collaborative field recording, sound exploration, and soundscape creation. Reflecting on its use at workshops, festivals and community events, they evaluate the project in terms of its ability to enable participants to engage with their aural environments and to uncover their own creativity in the process.