Environmentalist in Residence
“I am delighted to be Environmentalist in Residence at Suffolk Libraries from April to October 2024. The residency offers me a fantastic opportunity to help connect the public with their acoustic habitats. The impact of this type of habitat is subtle, powerful, and highly influential upon our lives, and those of all living things. In this role I hope to bring a closer awareness of this influence, and to offer the public opportunities to actively listen for the benefit of their creativity, education, health and wellbeing.
As part of my residency, titled Seconds of Sound (S.0.S), I will be sound-walking between every library run by Suffolk Libraries. On this walk I will be recording and live-streaming the acoustic habitats I travel through, inviting others to walk with me (either in person or remotely), and delivering active environmental listening activities however, whenever, and wherever, I can. At each library I will be leaving an ever-growing collection of sounds and images from my walk, shared through a unique resource, a museum in a box. We also hope to be making portable audio recorders available for loan from libraries in order for members of the public to capture their own acoustic habitats, and share stories of what the sounds of these habitats mean to them.
The modern public library is arguably a noisier place than ever before. Just so the modern world, with acoustic habitats unencumbered by human generated sound few, and getting farther between. As environmental sound is commonly an aspect of our lives that is borderless and beyond our control (think of traffic or industrial noise) we often take back control by creating individual acoustic habitats, increasingly through technology but also by isolating ourselves in other ways. This isolation has consequences for the natural world. As our encounters with the infinite richness and complexity of natural sound decrease in number, the appreciation of its influence and importance declines in equal measure. Through technology we can listen to environmental sound from all over the world like never before, but in a search for meaning, the basis of caring, nothing beats actively listening for a few seconds to wherever you are, right now.
The countless opportunities for active listening presented by my Residency at Suffolk Libraries fills me with an almost overwhelming excitement! I’m delighted to be invited to take up this role, not least because I imagine I’m going to be pretty fit by the end of it!”
Martin Scaiff - HomeSounds Director
