Listening Forward
An interactive instrument for speculative environmental soundscapes
Tune a possible future.
About the project
Listening Forward asks how listening can become a practice of imagining environmental futures.
Developed by composer and interdisciplinary sound artist Anna Troisi, the project brings environmental recordings, computational listening and human-authored compositional decisions into an interactive soundscape instrument.
The web-based prototype takes the form of a radio. Listeners tune across four possible future conditions—Repair, Automation, Habitation and Biodiversity—and encounter changing relationships among environmental sounds, human activity and technological infrastructures. Each tuning produces a temporary sonic proposition: one possible way in which a future environment might be heard.
How it works
The project begins with a curated collection of environmental recordings. The sounds are annotated through characteristics including environment, activity, density, human presence, intensity, mood and possible future scenarios.
Computational audio embeddings model acoustic relationships among the recordings. These relationships inform how sounds may be brought into proximity within the system.
The scenario vocabularies, selection rules and compositional organisation are developed as artistic decisions. Together, these processes guide which sounds meet, how they are layered and how the listener moves through the sound collection.
Listening as speculation
Listening Forward approaches listening as a form of environmental imagination. The generated soundscapes do not predict a single future. They create spaces in which ecological change, repair, technological activity, habitation and more-than-human presence can be explored through sound.
The project forms part of Anna Troisi’s wider research into environmental sound, artistic computation and computational systems in which human authorship remains visible through curation, annotation and compositional decision-making.
An evolving project
Listening Forward is an ongoing artistic research project. The current version presents the first public web instrument.
Future developments will expand the sound collection through site-specific field recording, explore the distinctive acoustic and social conditions of particular places, and investigate physical radio-like forms through which audiences can encounter speculative soundscapes in galleries and public settings.
Credits
Concept, artistic direction, composition and development: Anna Troisi
Format: Interactive web-based sound instrument
Research areas: Environmental sound, computational listening, soundscape composition and artistic computation
Project status: Ongoing
Source code and technical documentation: