Soda investigates the springs on Jaara Country near Naarm/Melbourne, charting the way the water courses through a mix of wild and built environments, extracted for human use and flowing on into the valley below, depending on conditions. Recorded along Wild Cat Creek and Spring Creek, Hepburn Springs on Jaara Country Download Produced for SNOsound and featured on ORF 1’s Kunst zum Hören.…

Tumut listens to Grey-headed Flying-foxes waking and heading out from their colony on an island in the Tumut river, below the town of the same name. The river flows through Wiradjuri Country in Australia. Recorded using an ambisonic microphone, the piece tracks an encounter between the flying-foxes, some of their neighbors, and the recordist. Flying-foxes cover great range and are found all along the east coast of Australia but have been documented to be moving south and becoming more localized in specific areas over the last decade, threatened by habitat destruction, global warming, extreme weather events, and food scarcity.…

Walking near Cape Conran I came upon a family of lyrebirds, seemingly a mother and three offspring. Disturbed by us, the mother called to chicks until they joined her in one of the trees in the forest. We kept walking and when we returned later on our way back, we heard her singing. The group were near to where we first encountered them, not far from the path we were walking.…

Deep below rising sea levels, whales sing to one another across hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometres. But whales’ voices are changing and so is the way they speak to us. Their songs shift as they cross the oceans. Their pitch is moving downward, perhaps to be heard in an ever noisier seascape. Whalefall, made in collaboration with Miyuki Jokiranta, listens to the stories of leviathans, mythic and real. These giants of the deep swim through our imagination, as sea monsters to be feared and tamed, the power of the state as conceived by Thomas Hobbes, and echoes of natural beauty.…

Framing creative practice as research has helped to develop the presence and role of art, media, and design in universities, forwarding diverse knowledges that institutions previously did not respect. Not all creative practice is research and vice versa but there is a rich overlap between them, many and varied possibilities for research to drive creative practice, and likewise for creativity as part of research methodology. Influential methodological theories for staging this - such as practice-based and practice-led research, research-led practice, and research-creation - all frame particular practice grounded knowledge claims.…

There was no emphasis on methodology in my training. In retrospect I think this was because I entered sound studies by way of a cultural studies disciplinary framing, with a strong influence from critical theory and cultural marxism. This produced a philosophical approach combined with a concern for everyday culture that was at once suspicious of formalized methodology and assumed a methodology driven by textual analysis, decoding meaning, and critical thinking.…

Recently my car suddenly threw up an ‘Engine Fault’ warning and I called my mechanic, who said to bring it straight over. When I arrived I pulled up, got out, and started to describe the situation. Before I could finish he said, ‘I can hear it’s only running on three cylinders’. What sounded like a small engine growling and a fan going into overdrive was much more nuanced to him. It reminded me of when I traveled across Russia by train many years ago.…

The word listen is an intransitive verb. It requires pairing with the preposition to in order to be able to act on or affect something else, a direct object. I listen to music. This can seem like a limitation, an indication that listening as a practice isn’t active, doesn’t act on the world. However, this detail of language reflects a reality of listening. It is possible, perhaps even more fundamental, to listen without listening to something in particular.…