In this blog post I will share my thoughts to an interesting paper published at the 2021 NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference. The paper carries the title Living Sounds: Live Nature Sound as Online Performance Space and was written by Gershon Dublon and Xin Liu.
One of the remarkable aspects of the experience was that small, otherwise inconsequential events, such as a bumblebee flying around a microphone, could bring distant, isolated listeners together in the continuously unfolding story.
(Dublon & Liu, 2021)
Living Sounds describes itself as “an internet radio station and online venue hosted by nature” (Dublon & Liu, 2021). It essentially streams the sound of microphones that are installed in a wetland wildlife sanctuary around the clock on the homepage livingsounds.earth. Furthermore, the project regularly invites artists to perform on the stream, using the live sound from the microphones via a self-built online interface which provides the artists with the raw multichannel audio stream to work with.