Sound in the Land 2014 – Music and the Environment

Thursday, June 5 – Sunday, June 8, 2014

Sound In the Land “…is a Festival/Conference of Mennonites and music scheduled for June 5 – 8, 2014 at Conrad Grebel/University of Waterloo. This event will seek to explore and discover new ways of hearing the earth, listening to the environment, and creating musical and scholarly responses to what we hear.” Keynote speakers include R. Murray Schafer and Gus Mills.

Sound in the Land 2014 Schedule

My contribution to the conference consists of two tasks. On Thursday, June 5 as the President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology I will welcome conference participants and thank the university and its organizers. On Friday, June 6 I give my presentation entitled “Acoustic Ecology and Ethical Listening,” based on my post for the City Creatures blog on animal encounters in Chicago’s urban wilderness. It serves as a basic introduction to Acoustic Ecology and playfully asks what a “listening ethic” actually might be. Its publication coincided with the Forum on Ethics & Nature: A Cascade of Loss, an Ethics of Recovery, a one-day symposium on May 2, 2014 organized by the Center for Humans and Nature and the Chicago Botanic Gardens.

Sound In the Land is an opportunity for me to meet with Murray Schafer and my colleagues in The Canadian Association for Sound Ecology/ Association canadienne pour L’écologie sonore/. As always, these conferences are invaluable opportunities to reconnect with old friends and to make new ones.