Vanishing Soundscapes

In order to access all features of the app you have to visit the Vanishing Soundscapes installation at Harvard Yard during the Harvard Arts First Festival.

Sound in urban environments is ubiquitous, from speech utterance, traffic & industrial noises, to machines communicating with each other. We are increasingly retreating from nature, surrounded by opaque concrete walls and polymer environments, isolated from the eco-symphony of the living organisms. In 1866, the German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology to describe the infinite intricate interactions between organisms and their environment. However, dire research papers predict that only 154 years after, we are about to lose 2/3 of the wild habitat.
There is ubiquitous information about endangered species and how their loss will affect the existing ecology. Nevertheless, we are not fully aware of the impact this loss will have on our audio-sensorial environment. Vanishing soundscapes addresses precisely this gap, by creating immersive acoustic experience of natural environments, amplifying the sounds we are about to lose. The app plays the sounds from the 48 different bird species in the vicinities of Harvard Yard. This app enables the urbanites to enter into dialogue with their environment by creating a meditative site, where one can pause, immerse, reflect and become more conscious.
*The sound data is obtained from Cornell Lab of Ornithology and further recomposed. The sounds are triggered by an image of the bird species printed on a set of playing cards. Your phone should be unmuted in order to be able to play the sounds.