Resonant Ecologies, Session 2: Leah Barclay and Alice Eldridge

Resonant Ecologies: Music and more-than-human creativities Seminar Series 1 (online), 2025–2026 Co-curated by Liza Lim (Sydney) & Nicolas Donin (Geneva)

Ecological thinking is reshaping music and musicology, challenging us to rethink what music is, does, and allows. This seminar explores how musical practices engage webs of connection—from infrastructure to imagination—and open pathways for collaboration and coevolution between human and more-than-human musics.

First Nations knowledge systems offer profound models of ecological attunement, where sound is inseparable from Country, kinship, and custodianship. These perspectives remind us that music is not only made by humans but is part of a living web of relationships that includes rivers, winds, animals, and ancestral presences.

Grounded in composition, performance, and musicology, and committed to cross-disciplinary collaboration, we ask:

· What creative practices foster ecological consciousness?

· How can music think beyond representation?

· What does sound offer that text and image cannot?

Mottos to guide our inquiry:

· “We are not alone” – Who or what else is present when we musick?

· “Let’s think against Aboutism” – Beyond messaging, music as ecological thinking.

· “Sounding ecologies” – What comes to us specifically through sound?

Join us in exploring more-than-human creativity—including AI, animal communication, and the expressive agencies of trees, waters, winds, and other non-human entities. This series invites participants to listen deeply, think relationally, and engage with music as a medium of ecological consciousness and cultural responsibility.

You may also be interested in the other sessions in this seminar series:

Session 3: Helen Prior and Tore Størvold (February 27, 2026)

From Leah Barclay:

This talk explores a series of recent projects in South East Queensland on Kabi Kabi and Butchulla Country that explore deep listening and environmental soundscapes to attune to the more-than-human world. Building on transdisciplinary ecoacoustic methods developed through Biosphere Soundscapes and River Listening, these works create place-based, transient listening experiences that immerse audiences in the ecological and cultural soundscapes of place. They include immersive sound walks, interactive installations, and site-responsive performances on boats where live hydrophones, weather, and tides shape the work – allowing environmental unpredictability to become a compositional collaborator. Through long-term collaborations this work bridges Indigenous knowledge systems, art, science and technology, and demonstrates how ecoacoustics can cultivate reciprocal relationships between humans and ecosystems. Here, listening becomes an act of participation, care, and connection rather than observation, an invitation to engage with living systems and evoke a deeper sense of ecological empathy through sound and creativity.

From Alice Eldridge:

Ecolistening for regenerative futures

Various schools of thought arrive at a similar understanding of the roots of our contemporary crises: that our current inability to perceive the true complexity of the world creates a disconnect from wider nature, each other and ourselves. Founded on the conviction that listening connects, our Ecolistening group at the University of Sussex develops, explores and applies different forms of technologically-mediated listening to address these issues at ecosystem, community and personal scales. This sounds grand but is sometimes very simple. I will share some of our ongoing collaborative projects in what we might dub regenerative techno-listening - from interpretable AI for ecological monitoring in nature recovery projects and community-based soundscape projects for eco-cultural connection in the UK, through indigenous-led participatory projects for intergenerational transmission of ancestral knowledge and bio-cultural heritage in Ecuador, to tuning in to non-dual experiences of rewilding landscapes with micro-phenomenology.

Watch in advance: a film made for the Sacha Taki project:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoXr2gff4s

Some context is given here: https://sachawarmi.org/en/sacha-taki-voices-and-songs-of-the-forest-biocultural-landscape-of-the-kichwa-people-of-kawsak-sacha/

And the website of the communities here: https://pakks.org.ec/https://www.facebook.com/kawsaksacha