Environmental +Sonic Workshops
With one pilot program complete, described below, I recently received a grant to continue leading community workshops for young adults and high school students, introducing experiential listening and sound-based storytelling practices. In these project-based workshops, spanning three to five days, attendees will create one to two minute audio pieces. Paired in small groups, students will find inspiration in myths and folklore related to water and ecology. Using data sonification, voiceovers,and local natural soundscapes, projects will recontextualize these stories, reflecting oncurrent environmental realities and climate trends.



Once Upon a Wave
United World College Red Cross - Nordic, an international high school in Flekke, Norway, brought me to campus for a week this past February to lead a workshop with eight twelfth graders from eight countries. Titled “Once Upon a Wave,” the word wave alludes to both narrative subject and medium as .wav is a standard audio type. Students wove together water and forest centered folklore from their home regions with data from rising sea levels and temperatures, fluctuating biodiversity loss, and global CO2 emissions.
Data sonification is essentially the sound version of charts and graphs — numbers are translated into musical patterns which helps an audience experience data. In this workshop the numbers correlated with notes. These notes created musical tracks, grounded by ecological sounds recorded around the campus forests and fjords and punctuated by occasional voiceovers.
Students presented their work with listening instructions. Some groups asked listeners to move around a mossy forest exploratively, as inspired by the sound. Others asked we close our eyes and remain still. Others asked that we sit by the water’s edge and read written lyrics while listening. Students thoughtfully curated these listening experiences to bring more meaning and interactivity to their projects.