You are invited to participate in World Listening Day 2020 an annual global event held every July 18.
This year’s theme, created by Wild Sanctuary Vice President Katherine Krause is “The Collective Field.”
The Collective Field
There is something new afoot. The field itself is changing.
The creature world knows. The creative one does too.
So what does it mean now to listen? How do we express what we know?
Be alert.
Individually and in concert,
There is sanctity in it.
Amid new conditions, travel the field and explore
By call and response
The rhythm within.
How does your song fit
Within the collective chorus?
Current times have asked each of us, individually and in concert, to retreat, reflect, and rethink the world we thought we knew, but how do we respond? Energizing this shared global experience holds gifts of rejuvenation. Respect this momentary silence – but glean what it yields. The Collective Field invites you to express your recent journey through what was, what is, and what will be, evoked only by wandering into new territory. Stay silent until you know. Then speak. Share. Perform. How have you been transformed? We are all in the woods of a new age, and we’re listening to the future.
Help us share and grow participation in this global community event by adding your information to this short online survey. We welcome everyone to share news, ideas, and questions about participation in the comments of this post, in our Facebook Page and our Facebook Group. Learn more about the work of Katherine and Bernie Krause at Wild Sanctuary.
Since its inception in 2010, thousands of people from six continents have participated in World Listening Day. July 18th is the birth date of renowned Canadian composer, music educator, and author, R. Murray Schafer. His World Soundscape Project developed the fundamental ideas and practices of acoustic ecology in the 1970s. These inform the current, burgeoning interest in our changing acoustic environment. Thus, World Listening Day honors Schafer’s contribution to understanding our world.
36 responses to “World Listening Day 2020: The Collective Field”
We are very glad to participate this year WLD. Since 2017, soundscape association of Taiwan has conducted Taiwan listening day on 7.17, one day before WLD. Because 717 sounds like “ listen and listen” in Mandarin. But the whole event will take one or two weeks, also including the world listening day. We have a local major topic which will associate with your topic every year. We are appreciated to listen to the world together.Thank you!
Dear Laila,
Thank you so much! We’re happy you are planning to participate in World Listening Day again with a homophonously selected date of July 17. We encourage you please to share any links to your events, and also find and complete our short online survey. The survey should only take a minute to complete. The data helps us know who, what, how, and where people are participating.
All the best,
Eric Leonardson, President
HI Eric
There are some fields in this forms that only accept number formats (eg. your name???). I did submit the form and included the missing information in the last field.
cheers
Perdy
Dear Perdy,
Thank you for informing us of the error. It has been fixed.
The survey form allows anyone who has submitted information to edit their responses and update their submission, which I hope you will do.
Thanks again!
Thank you for promoting this important simple yet multifaceted act – Listening.
I attempted to submit my personal project for today, not sure it went through so will append below, and since I don’t do social media – missing out on tweets and FBs..
As a zoologist I value listening related to curiosity and animal communication, between individual and environment and of course concern about the impact of human noise. Personally I find using listening is part of my restoration – to reboot and relax – to tune out of this overly visual world and go within and with Nature to notice and harmonize. Related to this, I believe there is a physiological aspect via physical sound waves or the metaphor of attuning that restores wholeness and brings natural healing. Socially I find it a sense that is being lost – our ability to focus, attend, realize that communication is two way – that deep listening that transcends hearing, connects us to ourselves, each other and wider circles of stories through time and space.
My personal acts for WLD: 1) Sent an invite to friends of this website and related links asking them to “Stop, Tune in and Listen for nine minutes or 90 seconds. 2) Working now on a Sound Walk in my community and will edit and share. 3) Created and shared an audio story of an evening walk along rice fields in Northern California.
THANK YOU and best to all!
World Listening Day 2020 – The Collective Field: Thoughts & Recordings by Norman W. Long:
I do not know what it means to listen now. But it is a good question as I sit and listen to a community isolated from the rest of the city of Chicago. I live in South Deering, a community on the south-east side of Chicago. It is a majority Black and Brown community that straddles residential, industrial and wasted space. Single family homes surrounded by land fills, factories, rail yards, brown fields, and un/underused industrial structures. Most work sites are still open (if they haven’t been abandoned due to disinvestment), many in the community have been given essential (sacrificial) worker status leaving themselves vulnerable to COVID-19 while many others are unemployed due to work stoppages and lay-offs. During the isolation order, I was able to walk and record my local nature trail. This trail opened in my neighborhood last fall. It was converted from an open space wetland/prairie with no community access to Marian R. Byrnes Park on the south-east side of Chicago with walking trails. The prairie is located between a residential neighborhood and a large rail yard. It was my intention along with my creative partner Sara Zalek to lead a soundwalk at Byrnes Park before the stay at home order was implemented. I’ve led several soundwalks here in Chicago and elsewhere. One of the exercises I introduce to the group before we start our walk is a breathing exercise where we focus on our breath by concentrating on our inhalations and exhalations. Before I did any walking meditation or performing, I started with breathing exercises. That was the foundation for my practice of self-care, listening, composing and performing. Disconnection is a process. That process is fueled by white supremacy and capitalism. African Americans experience and witness this disconnection to our environment, economy, sense of self and place. With these walks we are brought back to our bodies, our time and our space. I invite you to listen as part of the collective field because as we listen and sound we expand our awareness of our connection and disconnection.
This mindfulness practice of breathing brought me back to the COVID-19 respiratory virus, and the murder of George Floyd. Both of these instances African Americans are more vulnerable to contract the virus and more likely to be murdered by police. There is also the fact that most areas with high rates of air pollution and toxicity are overwhelmingly poor and African-American. When we breathe we are mindful of our mind/body/land connection, our connection to each other and our connection to those who cannot breathe. We can breathe for them and listen to the streets, the noises and disruptions and join in the chorus that demands justice for Black and Brown people all over the world.
Blog entry, photos and sound here:
https://intothebreaks.blogspot.com/2020/06/world-listening-day-2020-collective.html
My listening has become more local, exploring the differences a few meters apart. I can’t travel long distances, so I am traveling very short distances and finding sonic diversity in an area of only a few acres. The acoustics change, the presence and absence of species changes, the feeling of the place changes. I am finding new and surprising features of a soundscape I have inhabited for almost 20 years.
It is an interesting breakthrough to begin perceiving the amoeba-like shape of sonic diversity, one of the benefits of nuanced listening! #WayCool
I grew up close near a pine forest. My house is surrounded by green, and many different animals thrive in my garden, which sounds I’ve incorporated into my mind. That’s the soundscape that brings me calm, down to earth, and allows me to be present. I always miss it when I’m not here. I try to find it in other places, to bring together the smell of the pine trees, of that particular type of forest…, the sound of the wind moving their trunks, maybe some doves calling their own kind with a deep low call, or a group of magpies defending their territories chaotically. Always with a touch of blackbirds and their complex symphonies. Possibly a squirrel, although these have declined over the years, and now they are really rare to spot. I love their playful communication while they jump a tree after picking some nuts from the floor. And many other things that I’m not even aware of…., but as a whole, that’s my acoustic fingerprint, deeply rooted in my brain. That’s how my local soundscape connects with me, and how I merge with the collective chorus!
So, I can’t wait to participate in the World listening day! I hope to contribute with some of my local soundscapes, but also with new material from an exotic location that I’m really excited about. Looking forward to listening to other people’s contributions!
Reading about your ‘acoustic fingerprint’ and how resonant this memory is to your sense of place is a pleasure. I can almost hear the chattering of the animals and the wingbeats of the birds. Looking forward to hearing more about your local sounds.
My introduction to soundscape as an art and natural resource came through the work of R. Murray Schafer and his influence in the Pacific Northwest and with Vancouver New Music. This knowledge was furthered by reading Dr. Bernie Krause’s book “The Great Animal Orchestra.” This 2020 WLD theme is a perfect collaboration between these two mentors. Kat Krause has outlined the essence of collaboration by inspiring me to listen in a changing world, where the creatives and the creatures are humming the same tune. Can these two groups find a broader audience to shift perceptions of listening? I will contribute to WLD on behalf of the ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore, and pose a question for contemplation about how individuals can push the collective field. We all have shifted our perception of quiet, and of the animal orchestra, due to the stillness during quarantine. This is the time to slow down, listen, and re-learn our connections. Thanks Kat for sharing this prompt! I hope everyone participates in some small way to build the collective field.
as the years before, radio aporee also participates in this year’s World Listenig Day. If you’re planning to take field recordings during this event, you’re kindly invited to share them with others on the radio aporee ::: maps. More info at
https://aporee.org/wld2020/ Hope to hear from you, stay well, Udo / radio aporee
I’ve never managed to participate in WLD in the past, having always managed to find myself out somewhere on the day, but am thinking about what I could offer this year. I’m looking forward to listening to everyone’s contributions!
We are very glad to participate again in such an important sound event…
The Portuguese netlabel Green Field Recordings joins, for the 10th year, the World Listening Project, through World Listening Day, with another field recording sound compilation.
All interested artists should send their recordings or sound pieces via wetransfer to greenfieldrecordings@gmail.com, until July 15, under the following conditions/information:
Artist Name:
Country:
Track name:
Track time: (min. 3:00 / max. 10:00)
Location of the recording(s):
Audio Format: wave or mp3 (320kbps)
Deadline: July 15
Release date: July 18
1st compilation (2010-2011)
https://archive.org/details/Va-OColecionadorDeSons-WorldListeningDay
2nd compilation (2012)
https://archive.org/details/Va-GreenFieldRecordings-WorldListeningDay
3rd compilation (2013)
https://archive.org/details/VaGreenFieldRecordingsWorldListeningDay2013
4th compilation (2014)
https://archive.org/details/VaGreenFieldRecordingsWorldListeningDay2014
5th compilation (2015)
https://archive.org/details/Httpgreenfieldrecordings.yolasite.comaudio-2015.php
6th compilation (2016)
https://archive.org/details/VAGreenFieldRecordingsWorldListeningDay2016
7th compilation (2017)
https://archive.org/details/Vagfrworldlisteningday2017
8th compilation (2018)
https://archive.org/details/vagreenfieldrecordingswld2019
And in turn Green Field Recordings is invited to post to the Radio Aporee map for #WLD2020 here: https://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=wld2020
My current experience of listening is related to the process of relocation. I had to travel and to keep facing myself in different dwellings amid the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with my journey in Montreal, Canada. Then I had the opportunity to teach Sound Art and Acoustic Ecology class in the United Emirates at the University of New York in Abu Dhabi. The sound of the desert and the Muslim call of prayer was the aural footprint that marked my everyday life. After the lockdown, I had to move to Helsinki, Finland, where the soundscape of the leaves and the trees accompanied the various birds singing in the forest, which marked my days and nights. The presence of the human language has pointed out the diversity of the phonetics, which marks the idea of the collective field, through the cultural realm and the natural resources that are tangled, living in an ecosystem. I’m so grateful to have a set of ears and humans who I can share these listening experiences, in the collective field.
Two days before the WLD 2020, I will participate in an online exhibition within Un-Earthed: A festival of listening and environment organized by CRiSAP in London (https://www.crisap.org/event/acts-of-air-reshaping-the-urban-sonic/). My piece is a set of instructions for how to engage in listening of and from the perspective of urban peripheries. Just like the participants I encourage through my project, I intend to spend the day on exploring soundscapes of peripheries in Vancouver, where I am currently located. The project emerged from Inaudible Cities, an exploration of the peripheries of Stockholm. More: http://www.para-archives.net/inaudiblecities.html
Hello,
Find here my WLD stream
http://planktone.be/WLD
Grtz,
W
I’ll definitely participate this year. Looking to share some field recordings and do a live stream composition using with the locus cast app (https://locusonus.org/soundmap)
Soundtrackcity presents Homing inside out at World Listening Day. Homing inside out is a listening guide to experience your home in a completely new way. Due to the Covid-19 situation, we are challenged to stay at home as much as possible. Homing inside out provides a collection of scores for a do-it-yourself home expedition filled with listening-exercises.
The Listening Guide will be launched on World Listening Day, July 18th 16:30 at Public Library OBA de Hallen, Amsterdam. Due to the corona measures there is only space for a limited amount of people at the launch. You have to make reservations at info@soundtrackcity.nl
Instead of suggesting just one way of listening different makers and professionals were asked to share their perspective on listening, creating a very diverse collection of listening scores to help tune you into all the sonic richness inside your home.
To make these scores available to an international public the guide is published in English and distributed as a pdf. The pdf is designed to be easily printed and provides room to draw or write down your own impressions. A limited hardcopy edition, carefully printed on eco-friendly paper stock, will be available after the launch for 2,50 euros p/p (excl. postage). After July 18th the guide will be free to download as a pdf via the website of Soundtrackcity.
Created by Soundtrackcity, STEIM, The Mystifiers, Vivian Mac Gillavry, Michiel Huijsman, Sharon Stewart, Guy Wood and Renate Zentschnig.
Homing inside out is one of a growing collection of NO / CITY WALKS, a series of artistic strategies in response to a new reality we all need to adapt to.
The listening guide is now available at https://soundtrackcity.net/homing-inside-out/
[…] World Listening Day 2020: The Collective Field Next Article […]
Tune in this Saturday July 18th, from 12:00 Am EST (USA) time to the Lake Beresford Soundscape Live!
Streaming from Beresford, Fl in participation with World Listening Day 2020!
Follow the link provided here (http://locus.creacast.com:9001/deland_ssac.mp3) when the stream begins.
This project is brought to you by the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, and organized by members of Stetson University: Nathan Wolek, Charles Underriner, and Jose Moncayo.
Nos complace el celebrar y conmemorar por un año más con una serie de actividades el Día Mundial de la Escucha. Seminario de dos días, conciertos y lanzamiento de disco desde el 17 al 19 de Julio 2020.
Toda la información en http://www.tsonami.cl
Programación especial en http://www.radiotsonami.cl
Fernando Godoy M. – Director Tsonami Arte Sonoro
Rodrigo Ríos Zunino – Director Radio Tsonami
We’re excited to participate in WLD and invite everyone to explore hundreds of forest sounds.
Over the past month, Timber Festival has been collecting the sounds of woodlands and forests from people all over the globe to create the first ever forest soundmap of the world!
https://timberfestival.org.uk/soundsoftheforest-soundmap/
Enjoy!
As part of World Listening Day 2020 I propose to ‘Listen in Silence’.
It is an open invitation to engage in 18 minutes of listening as a tribute to silence and a practice of ecological spectatorship.
I will be listening next to Sluizen Weerdsingel, Utrecht, Netherlands, from 18.00 – 18.18 (CEST)
Listen in Silence
An invitation to engage in 18 minutes of listening as a tribute to silence and a practice of ecological spectatorship.
I will be at Sluizen Weerdsingel, Utrecht 18.00 -18.18 CEST
[…] days ago we did a mobile phone field experiment in preparation for World Listening Day 2020.’The Collective Field‘. We were both amazed by the size of a herd we came across on a walk outside […]
From South Brazil, a podcast about WLD 2020, by Rio Grande do Sul Federal University Radio:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1y8pIj97HsbUtPnNxFlpJk?si=lj2d-R4LTOGhpFBf_P2htg
Kudos to the organizers and participants of this wonderful day. As I’ve done before, curating the relevant links and tweets from this Planeta page
https://www.planeta.com/wld2020
Related: I am trying to figure out how best to use new Airpods.
Adding here a project I did this spring making an extensive survey of soundscapes around where I live, not venturing more than 250 meters from my house. The focus here being on gathering many of the non-human elements that coexist along with ‘us’, revealing the diversity of sentient activity that takes place this type of rural agricultural environment, encouraging one to reorient our anthropocentric nature through active listening.
https://maaheli.ee/main/field-recording-collection-covid-spring-rural-estonia/
Sounds of Your Park is an open call for contributions to help create a global collection of the sounds of the world’s parks and protected areas. The initiative is led by members of the NPS, Parks Canada, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, the George Wright Society, and #NatureForAll. Email them at soundsofyourpark@gmail.com to find our more and indicate your interest in submitting your high-quality audio recordings.
The Artsbirthday 2020 live stream simulcast is underway now. Listen at https://www.artsbirthday.net/cast/
Field Noise Transmissions blog posted “Outside the Center of Sound” on #WLD2020, and the sound collective Disquiet Junto Project 0446 issued its weekly open call for works based on the 2020 theme for World listening Day, “The Collective Field.” Deadline July 20.
Starting now at 4:00 p.m. (Central US), Midwest for Acoustic Ecology’s Treasurer and teaching artist, Norman W. Long will web stream soundscape from the Southwest side of Chicago on https://mixlr.com/reservematinee
Today at 7:00 p.m. (Central US) Experimental Sound Studio’s Dreamstream live stream fundraiser continues with a stellar performance lined up. ESS is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to artistic evolution and the creative exploration of sound. In response to the pandemic, ESS has raised many thousands of dollars to help artists through “The Quarantine Concerts” series. Tonight, one of the Midwest for Acoustic Ecology’s teaching artists, Veronica Salinas (MFA, Sound 2020) will kick off the performances with claire rousay from San Antonio, Texas. Salinas was recently honored with the Alba Sonic Arts Residency at ESS.
Read our World Listening Day 2020 Greeting and please feel welcome to subscribe to our newsletter, thank you!
[…] the occasion of World Listening Day 2020, we would like to honour R. Murray Schafer’s birthday listening anew to his seminal words about […]
Por vez primera, Yucatán se une a la celebración del Día Mundial de la Escucha 2020 #WLD2020, a través de un conservatorio virtual donde cuatro especialistas reflexionarán desde sus diferentes perspectivas y experiencias creativas lo que significa escuchar desde el campo colectivo.
18 de julio 20202
19 hrs
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1768979236588926&id=100004305994702
[…] Links worldlisteningproject.org 2020 Facebook […]
[…] global que el World Listening Project ha llançat els últims 10 anys amb motiu del Dia Mundial de l’Escolta (World Listening Day). En aquesta edició el lema que inspira la crida, proposat per la vicepresidenta del Wild […]