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Unplanned meetings can stem from complex movements across geographies, with serendipity playing a key role. Media artist Budhaditya Chattopadhyay unexpectedly meets researcher Budhaditya Chattopadhyay at a café in Budapest. This is their eighth meeting, following previous encounters in Copenhagen (2017), Den Haag (2021c), Kolkata (2021b), Berlin (2022a), Beirut (2022b), Basel (2023), and Rampurhat (2024). Each interaction has fostered a reflexive exchange of ideas, merging their artistic and theoretical perspectives on sound, listening, migratory experiences, and decolonial activism. Despite the differing lenses they bring, their conversations generate new insights. In the bustling café, surrounded by disengaged students emblematic of the isolation in European universities, the two engage in thoughtful discussions on acoustic ecologies, sonic environments, field recording, and audiovisual media. Their dialogue embodies a spirit of camaraderie, underscoring the value of interdisciplinary exchanges in nurturing knowledge and understanding across artistic and scholarly domains. Encontros não planejados podem surgir de movimentos complexos através de geografias, com a imponderabilidade desempenhando um papel crucial. O artista midiático Budhaditya Chattopadhyay encontra inesperadamente o pesquisador Budhaditya Chattopadhyay em um café em Budapeste. Este é o oitavo encontro deles, após interações anteriores em Copenhague (2017), Haia (2021c), Calcutá (2021b), Berlim (2022a), Beirute (2022b), Basel (2023) e Rampurhat (2024). Cada interação promoveu uma troca reflexiva de ideias, fundindo suas perspectivas artísticas e teóricas sobre som, escuta, experiências migratórias e ativismo decolonial. Apesar das diferentes lentes que trazem, suas conversas geram novos insights. No café movimentado, cercados por estudantes desengajados, sintomas do isolamento típico de universidades europeias, os dois se envolvem em discussões ponderadas sobre ecologias acústicas, ambientes sonoros, gravações de campo e mídias audiovisuais. Seu diálogo reflete um espírito de camaradagem, destacando o valor das trocas interdisciplinares na promoção do conhecimento e da compreensão entre os domínios artístico e acadêmico.

Varieties of sound-based research methods have been used for exploring participants' relations with environment, space and place. For example, soundwalking, field-recording and audio guides have all been employed to help research participants become attuned to the sonic environment. Some of these have been used as participant-led approaches, enabling participants to devise walking routes and produce their own soundscape compositions. This paper explores these various uses and reports on two primary research collaborations that adopt mobile, participant-led approaches, in which participants negotiate the precise nature of the research collaboration. Furthermore, it examines diverse methods for disseminating soundscape recordings that emerge from such projects. The examples presented here reveal that sound-based research can be employed to do more than attune participants to sonic environments. This research highlights instances of productive, participant-led research that reveal diverse strategies for disseminating this work. There are many channels and media through which sound work can be made available to a wider audience, across disciplines and beyond academia. Reflexively adopted, dissemination through web and social media, exhibition spaces and other public events offers researchers and their participants a performative complement to the publication of work through journal articles.

The intersection between sound and music computing and Virtual Reality (VR) has grown significantly over the past decades, amounting to an established area of research today. However, still scarce research has been conducted on the development of specific tools for sound design and composition. In this paper, we investigate a new way of exploring online sound repositories to retrieve sounds to be used in soundscape composition, which leverages the VR medium. Specifically, we created a VR system that allows users to search, download, and explore Freesound content in an immersive manner, as well as to use it for soundscape composition practices via a virtual digital audio workstation (DAW). The tags associated to a sound in the repository were converted into virtual objects and environments, which the user could navigate while listening to the sound. We conducted a user study with 16 composers where the developed system was compared against a conventional counterpart comprising the Freesound web version and the Audacity DAW. Overall, quantitative and qualitative results did not indicate a clear and generalized preference for a system over the other. The usability of the two systems along with their offered creativity support, cognitive workload and emotional impact were deemed to be at a comparable level. Nevertheless, the full potential of VR in creating novel compositional experiences also clearly emerged. Our study shows that VR is an effective medium to support users’ creativity during the process of exploring and selecting sounds from an online repository as well as for composing a soundscape.

Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems remain largely unexplored. The aim of this study was to determine how the acoustic fish biodiversity varied depending on the depth and the type of island in six Polynesian islands. The link between benthic cover and fish sound diversity was established. In most islands, acoustic fish α-diversity decreased between 20 and 60 m but not between 60 and 120 m. Fish sound types community composition was more driven by depth, likely due to benthic coral cover differences, than by the type of island. These results show fish sounds exhibit a bathymetric stratification and can reflect different habitat features. It opens perspectives in the monitoring of mesophotic coral ecosystems using passive acoustics.

Aim Mountain ecosystems are hotspots of biodiversity due to their high variation in climate and habitats. Yet, above average rates of climate change and enhanced forest disturbance regimes alter local climatic conditions and vegetation structure, which should impact biodiversity. We here investigated the impact of vegetation and elevation as well as their interactions on bird communities to improve our ability to predict climate change effects on bird communities. Location European Alps, Germany. Methods We studied patterns and drivers of bird communities at 213 plots along gradients in vegetation density and elevation using autonomous sound recorders. Bird species were identified from soundscapes by Convolutional Neural Networks (BirdNET) and taxonomists. Results Bird diversity and community metrics were moderately to strongly correlated for data based on either identification by BirdNET or taxonomists (Pearson's r = .47–.94), and ecological findings were overall similar for both datasets. Vegetation density 1–2 m and >2 m above ground strongly affected bird diversity and community composition and mediated effects of elevation. Community composition changed with elevation more strongly in habitats with low than high vegetation density >2 m. Species numbers decreased with elevation in habitats with low vegetation density 1–2 m and >2 m above ground, but increased in habitats with high vegetation density. Overall, functional and phylogenetic diversity increased with elevation indicating lower habitat filtering, but patterns were also mediated by vegetation density. Main Conclusions Our results indicate that bird communities in the German Alps are determined by strong interactive effects of elevation and vegetation, underlining the importance to consider variation in vegetation in studies of biodiversity patterns along elevational gradients and under climate change. Combining remote sensing data and biodiversity monitoring based on autonomous sampling and AI‐based species identification opens new avenues for bird monitoring and research in remote areas.

Changes in marine animal communities shape ecological processes and ecosystem functioning. Monitoring temporal community dynamics is increasingly important under global change, yet remains challenging because community fluctuations can arise from multiple natural processes and are difficult to assess. Passive acoustic monitoring of signals produced by marine fauna offers a non-invasive means of tracking community dynamics, providing continuous, high-resolution data that capture temporal patterns often missed by traditional methods. Despite their potential as proxies for macrofaunal assemblages and associated dynamics, the responses of acoustic communities to environmental variability in marine ecosystems remain largely unexplored. This study aimed to characterize fish acoustic communities in a tidal European kelp forest and identify the environmental drivers shaping their temporal variability. Continuous acoustic recordings were combined with environmental measurements and underwater visual surveys to address these objectives. Generalized linear models revealed that diel and tidal cycles were the dominant drivers of acoustic activity, diversity, and community composition during the summer study period. Other environmental variables had weaker effects, reflecting the fauna’s adaptation to marked short-term fluctuations in this dynamic ecosystem. Acoustic activity and richness increased at low water height, contrasting with higher visually observed fish abundance at high water height. This discrepancy suggests that sound production reflects behavioural interactions rather than fish abundance alone. The greater number of sound types (26) relative to observed species (19) indicates either behavioural sound diversity within species or the presence of undocumented soniferous taxa. Calmer sea conditions also promoted higher vocal activity and acoustic richness. This study provides an unprecedented description of kelp forest acoustic communities in Europe, demonstrating the value of ecoacoustics to complement visual surveys for capturing natural variability and establishing essential baseline information for detecting long-term ecological shifts in these climate-sensitive habitats. Graphical Abstract

Marine soundscapes often differ among habitats; however, relatively little is known about whether soundscapes on naturally occurring habitats differ from soundscapes on humanmade structures. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated whether temporal and spectral characteristics of biological sound production differ between natural and artificial offshore reefs. Specifically, we analyzed recordings from 5 week-long hydrophone deployments on 2 natural rocky reefs and 2 artificial reefs on the North Carolina, USA, continental shelf. Analysis of sound pressure levels (SPLs) on hourly and seasonal scales revealed similar temporal patterns between the reef types. These patterns were largely driven by 4 dominant fish vocalizers with seasonal chorusing patterns, including a toadfish Opsanus sp. Despite similar temporal patterns within reef types, soundscape spectral content was more similar within than between reef types, especially during the April deployment, which had the most acoustic activity. Our findings suggest that the soundscapes of shipwreck artificial reefs may differ from the soundscapes of natural rocky reefs, possibly due to differing community composition. As sound plays an important role in the navigation and settlement of many marine species, soundscape differences between natural and artificial habitats could affect ecosystem function through species behavior and interactions.

Assessing marine soundscapes provides an understanding of the biological, geological and anthropogenic composition of a habitat, including species diversity, community composition, and human impacts. For this study, nine acoustic recorders were deployed between December 2016 and June 2017 off six Caribbean islands in several Marine Parks: the Dominican Republic (DR), St. Martin (SM), Guadeloupe east and west (GE, GW), Martinique (MA), Aruba (AR), and Bonaire (BO). Humpback whale song was recorded at five sites on four islands (DR, SM, GE, GW and MA) and occurred on 49 to 93% of recording days. Song appeared first at the DR site and began 4 to 6 weeks later at GE, GW and MA. No song was heard in AR and BO, the southernmost islands. A two-week period was examined for the hourly presence of vessel noise and the number and duration of ship passages. Hourly vessel presence ranged from low (20% - DR, 30% - SM), medium (52% -MA, 54% - BO, 77% - GE) to near continuous (99% - GW; 100% - AR). Diurnal patterns were observed at BO, GE, and MA with few to no vessels present during night time hours, possibly reflecting the activity of recreational craft and fishing vessels. At the DR and GW sites, vessel traffic was ubiquitous for most of the day, likely reflecting heavy cruise ship and container ship presence. Soundscapes were diverse across islands with persistent fish choruses, sporadic sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and dolphin (Delphinidae) presence at BO, minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) from late December to late February at MA and an earthquake recorded across all sites. These analyses provide an important first step in characterizing the health and species richness in Caribbean marine parks and demonstrate a surprising high anthropogenic foot print. Vessel traffic in particular contributes adversely to marine soundscapes, masking marine mammal sounds, potentially changing typical animal behavior and raising the risk of ship strike.

This case study piloted an experiment to design a water soundscape with waterfalls using the recycled water meter box, covers and other materials with inspiration from the Suikinkutsu, an ancient Japanese garden music device. The objectives of the experiment were to make the composition of design elements visually pleasing by following the Zen garden design principles of simplicity with primitive numbers and to create a water soundscape that is harmonious in design with visual and aural effects in a residential garden setting. The construction methods, the soundscape implications, the design principles, the visual effects, and the spatial composition of design elements were investigated. The sound waves were recorded and analyzed; their waveforms were compared among themselves and with sound waves from the traditional thirteen-stringed Koto “Harp” and the two-stringed violin. The sound perceptions, such as pitch, duration, loudness, timbre, sonic texture, and spatial location were also analyzed. Finally, the design elements were documented in a table format with primitive numbers for easy descriptive explanation and summation. This experiment demonstrated that displaced water meter boxes and covers, though ordinary looking could be recycled with artistic inspiration. As more urban development encroach the natural landscape, the essences of this experiment, to create a soundscape that allows people to immerse their imagination into it with open ears and relaxed mind become imperative. In addition, the spatial composition of the design elements and their relationship can be explained in a spatial structure and pattern with primitive numbers while achieving harmonious visual and aural perceptions. The soundscape widened the perceptions and provided another spectrum of experience in life; this experiment discovered that Mother Nature could create its own rhythmic music when the soundscape environment is available.

Does a building contain its own Voice? And if so, can that Voice be discovered, transformed and augmented by soundscape design? Barry Blesser’s writings on acoustic space, discuss reverberation and resonant frequencies as providing architectural spaces with characteristic listening conditions related to the architectural space’s dimensions and materiality. The paper argues that Blesser and Salter expand such discussion into pantheistic speculation when suggesting that humanity contains the imaginative capacity to experience spaces as “living spirits”. This argument is achieved by building on the speculation through the discussion of a soundscape design methodology that considers space as containing pantheistic qualities. Sonic architectures are created with electroacoustic sound installations that recompose existing architectural soundscapes, to create the conditions for the emergence of the Voices of buildings. This paper describes two soundscape designs, Revoicing the Striated Soundscape and Subterranean Voices, which transformed existing architectural soundscapes for the emergence of Voices in a laneway and a building located in the City of Melbourne, Australia.