CAInC Colloquium: The Experience of Listening: Birdsong in a Time of Extinction

Speakers include Dr Jonathan Skinner (University of Warwick), Professor Zoë Skoulding, Professor Andrew Lewis, Dr Whitney Fleming, Dr Tyler Hallman, Joe Roy, Michael Auld and Alice Priggen.

Diminished interactions with natural environments have contributed to an ‘extinction of experience’ (Pyle, 1978; Soga and Gaston, 2016), an erosion of attention exacerbated by urbanised and increasingly digital living. This in turn weakens human engagement with ecological issues such as biodiversity loss. How can the arts and sciences together deepen environmental awareness through listening as an impetus to action?

Birdsong, as a recognisable sound in the landscape, provides a focal point for considering the ways in which changing acoustic environments are perceived and reflected through poetry and music.

• What kinds of listening are activated in citizen science and how do they change the listener?
• How does collective participation in active listening to natural environments, either in the context of citizen science or artistic practice, influence wellbeing or an individual's desire to act?
• How does an art form shape environmental listening – or vice versa? In what ways does 'art as experience' (Dewey, 1934) enable renewed attention to environments?
• What impact do poetry and music that draw attention to biodiversity have on individual or collective wellbeing?
• How do the arts and sciences mediate questions of individual versus collective efficacy? What does 'action' mean in the arts? 
   

In creative research practices, poetry and music embody tacit knowledges that are not immediately or directly reducible to summary, but which encode and enable future-oriented collective thinking. How can these knowledges complement or interact with the quantifiable insights of data-led science?

Supported by WREC Wales Research Environment and Culture.

Places are limited. 

Please register here before May 26/05/26 if you would like to attend