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Kristin McGee, Senior Researcher, University of Groningen
keywords: soundscape improvisation, biodiversity, urban forest, inter-species connectivity, birdsong
A recent project Listen Here Now at the University of Groningen involved the study of biodiversity and well-being in relation to the urban forest. During two years, weincorporated approaches to soundscape study such as sound appraisal, birdsong analysis, soundwalks, and artistic soundscape performances. The creation of artistic performances in relation to urban forest recordings can be used for aesthetic enjoyment, but they can also draw attention to the sonic identity and heritage of a place. Interactive creative engagements with such soundscapes can also encourage forms of ecological consciousness raising and even climate action. As soundscape artist and sound ecologist Leah Barclay claims, participatory acoustic ecology projects should seek to “value artistic, aesthetic and scientific perspectives.” Through the study of various soundscapes from the anthrophonic to biophonic, and especially the chatter and song vocalizations, we re-prioritized the life-worlds of local urban environments and their transforming and sometimes disappearing habitats and ecosystems. Through our design, we developed and adapted key concepts including slow listening, response-ability, and interspecies kinmaking through sound. Rather than othering and exoticizing nature in a transformation akin to the 1950’s studio-driven, high fidelity genre of exotica, we adapted some of this genre’s binaries to undo it’s masculinist subjectivity and instrumentalization of wild sounds to instead promote the primacy of birdsong and local non-human animals in the urban forest. Our performances at local festivals aimed to provoke, stimulate, and imagine interspecies worldmaking for more sustainable and liveable future cities, where urban forests are protected and cultivated for interspecies flourishing.
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Kristin McGee is an Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Groningen and a Senior Lecturer in Jazz and Contemporary Music Performance at the School of Music at the Australian National University. Her research focuses upon ecocritical approaches to contemporary soundscapes and upon popular music and jazz performance and media through the lens of intersectionality. Publications include Some Liked it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928-1959 (Wesleyan University Press 2009), Remixing European Jazz Culture (Routledge 2020) and a co-edited volume Beyoncé in the World: Meaning Making in Troubled Times, McGee is also a saxophonist and has performed with groups in Chicago and Groningen.