Soundscapes
Contents
Welikia Soundscape Engine
In collaboration with the New York Botanical Garden as part of their Welikia project, we are reconstructing soundscapes for the historic ecosystems of New York City. Soundscapes are organic phenomena comprised of innumerable geographical, biological, and temporal factors, offering us a window into the ecological conditions of a place, helping us to better understand the health, diversity, and extent of an ecosystem. At the same time, soundscapes act as spatial and cultural archives. By speculatively reconstructing past soundscapes, we can assemble sonic-spatial narratives that document New York City’s ever-changing history of landscape ecology. Our goal for the Welikia project is to recreate an auditory past of NYC using historical ecological data and speculative sound reconstruction. We envision this project as an ecosystemic sound art project that blends scientific accuracy with immersive and realistic listening experiences. To achieve a sonic reconstruction that is faithful to existing Welikia Project data, we propose an approach rooted in theories of ecoacoustics and object-based audio, supported by the creation of a domain-specific ontology, the construction of a semantically annotated sound database, a Max/MSP-based generative engine for soundscape composition and spatialization, and a set of real-time tools for parameter control and sound visualization.
Team: XYZ Collective, Brendan Harmon, Jesse Allison, Hye Yeon Nam, Carlos Roman, & Joseph Brooks
Grant: Harmon, Brendan, Jesse Allison, Hye Yeon Nam, Carlos Roman, and Joseph Brooks (2025). Welikia Soundscape Engine. The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). $19,992.
