Listening to Place Press Release

2005/6 Acoustic Ecology Lecture Series at CSF

This page includes a full description of each lecture, along with lecturer bios and photos.

See links after each lecture date to jump to the relevant section.

A monthly series of informal talks on a broad range of topics featuring four nationally known speakers who explore the sonic environment and the ways that humans interact with the world through sound. Each evening will include a variety of field recordings presented as integral components of the presentation. Questions and discussion will be welcomed.

7:00 PM – 9:00 PM. Always free.
The College of Santa Fe – Benildus Hall, O'Shaughnessy Performance Space. This space in the Contemporary Music Program's new building is just around the corner from The Screen. If you enter from St. Michael's, follow signs for the Screen or Contemporary Music (left out of the traffic circle, then a right a ways down the road), and when you get to the final stop sign where you'd go left to The Screen, turn right instead. The next parking lot on your left will be in front of the new building, one of the only two stories buildings in that area. If you enter from Siringo, then just go past The Screen and continue straight through the first intersection, and you'll see the lot on your left. Wish we could have a searchlight or something but really, it's not hard to find.

For more information, contact:

Jim Cummings, ASAE – 505.466.6963;

Acoustic Ecology Fall Series ‘05/6

Note: Program Descriptions and Bios are located on this page; click on link to jump to one in particular, or scroll down to see all of them.

Wednesday, November 16 – Steve Feld, “Sound and Spirit”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio

Monday, January 23 – Jim Cummings, “Meetings with Remarkable Ears: Recent Soundscape Art Releases from Around the World.”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio and photo

Monday, February 20 – Donna Howell, “Through the Ears of Bats”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio and photo

Monday, March 27 – Steven Miller, “New Works With Acoustic Environments”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio and photo

Info on our sponsors, the College of Santa Fe Contemporary Music Program and the American Society for Acoustic Ecology NM Chapter Sponsor Info

For more information, contact:

Jim Cummings, ASAE – 505.466.6963;

Steven M. Miller, 505.473.6197, [E-MAIL]

Upcoming Program descriptions:

Steven Feld: “Sound and Spirit: New soundscape compositions from Japan, Ghana, and Europe”

Sound and Spirit: New soundscape compositions from Japan, Ghana, and Europe. In his years of traveling, listening, and recording in New Guinea, Europe, Africa, and Asia, Steve Feld has repeatedly returned to what he calls the "acoustemological triangle" -- the dynamic linking sound, ecology, and cosmology. Tonight he’ll present new recording projects that explore how sound can trigger human consciousness into deeper connection with spirit and place.

Steven Feld is Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico., and visiting professor of Ethnomusicology at the Greig Academy of Music at the University of Bergen in Norway. A long time Santa Fe resident, he has been active in New Mexico music since the mid 1970s when he was a founder of the New Mexico Jazz Workshop. He previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Pennsylvania.

Feld’s research principally concerns the anthropology of sound and voice, incorporating studies in linguistics and poetics, music and aesthetics, acoustics and ecology. Since the mid-1970s he has studied the sound world of the Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea. He has more recently researched the sound world of Greek Macedonia and Romani (“Gypsy”) instrumentalists.

Feld received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius prize” fellowship in 1991, and in 1994 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2003 recipient of the Koizumi Fumio Prize, the major international award to honor an ethnomusicologist for a cumulative body of research. For 2003-2004 he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to pursue a multi-CD project on the history and culture of bells, with initial fieldwork in France, Finland, Norway, Greece, and Italy.

In 2003 he founded VoxLox Documentary Sound Art, a media label devoted to recordings in the field of human rights and acoustic ecology.

His books include the prize-winning Sound and Sentiment (1982/1990) and Music Groves (with Charles Keil, 1994), as well as Senses of Places (edited with Keith Basso, 1996), Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary (with Bambi Schieffelin, 1998) and Jean Rouch: Cine-Ethnography (editor and translator, 2003).

His CDs include Voices of the Rainforest (1991); Rainforest Soundwalks (2001); Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea (2001); Bright Balkan Morning (2002); Bells and Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia (2003); Primo Maggio Anarchico: A Soundscape of Anarchist May Day in Carrara (2003); and the initial releases on his VoxLox label, Iraqi Music in a Time of War: Rahim AlHaj Live in New York (2003), and The Time of Bells (2004).

Jim Cummings, “Meetings With Remarkable Ears”

ASAE President and EarthEar founder Jim Cummings will present a wide-ranging selection of new soundscape art pieces from producers worldwide. Expect to hear nature, human life, and musical interactions between the two. Included will be selections from Gordon Hempton's extensive new series of independently released works, David Rothenberg's inquiry into Why Birds Sing, a UK radio-based work Twice Around the World, and many more.

Jim Cummings is a writer, editor, and founder of the Acoustic Ecology Institute and EarthEar. He has lived in northern New Mexico since the early ‘80s, and has written on environmental topics and music for Crosswinds, Pasatiempo, The Reporter, and New Mexico Magazine. He was executive producer of a series of award-winning CDs on the EarthEar label, featuring soundscape composers and writers, including Steve Feld, David Dunn, Doug Quin, and David Rothenberg. He also edited and ghost-co-wrote Investing with Your Values (Bloomberg, New Society).

Donna Howell, Ph.D., "Through the Ears of Bats"

Thomas Nagel, modern philosopher of the mind, wrote that we are "inadequate to the task" of imagining what it is like to be a bat. He argues that bat echolocation experiences are so unlike our experiences that we could never relate. However, bats’ experiences are less alien to us than Nagel supposes since bat sonar involves hearing. In this presentation on the basic elements of echolocation, participants can imaginatively adopt a hungry bat's viewpoint, trying to avoid jamming by thousands of other bats exiting the cave, trying to determine the speed,direction, identity and palatability of dinner, trying to concentrate in a cluttered environment. Howell will bring live bats, photographs of inside and outside the bat’s machinery and Tuvan throat music to enhance your appreciation of this infinitely malleable toolbox bats use to cope with ever-changing acoustic problems.

Donna J. Howell received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, did post-doctoral work at Princeton University and taught at Princeton, Harvard and Purdue. At Princeton, she worked with the late Glen Wever, one of the pioneers of acoustic research. While there she investigated and published on multiple sonar systems in bats and on the relationship of sonar to feeding strategies in bats. Her last academic position was an endowed chair, the James Professorship of Biology at Southern Methodist University. Since leaving academics, she has done independent contract work for government agencies on endangered species, presented programs and developed science curricula for schools and has lead naturalist tours in the southwest U.S., Mexico and Alaska. She was a federal employee with the BLM, Department of Defense and US Fish and Wildlife Service and a team leader on the interagency President's Plan for the Northwest Forests. She currently works for New Mexico Department of Game and Fish as Coordinator for the Share with Wildlife program and for scientific permits.

She has done fieldwork in South and Central America, Mexico, Africa, England and the West Indies. The BBC did a half hour documentary on her research and she was invited to Tokyo to participate in a television documentary on outstanding women in Science with Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas.

Steven M. Miller: New Works with Acoustic Environments

I will be presenting excerpts from and talking about recent electroacoustic pieces that incorporate aspects of the sonic environment in various ways. These will include Along the Pecos (2005-2006), an installation piece for multichannel sound and large-format B&W prints created with photographer Jennifer Schlesinger; River Crossings (for Pauline Oliveros) (2004-2005), a performance piece for field recordings and live signal processing; and Recirculations (for Steve Peters) (2002), a performance piece for multichannel feedback and live signal processing.

Steven M. Miller is a composer, performer, educator, audio engineer, and producer. His primary musical interests are in electroacoustic and computer music, improvisation, world music, and acoustic ecology/acoustic communication. His work has appeared on numerous CD and DVD releases. He is Associate Professor of Contemporary Music and the former director of the Contemporary Music Program at The College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, where he teaches courses in electroacoustic music, world music, gamelan, acoustic ecology/acoustic communication, and composition, and produces the annual Santa Fe International Festival of Electroacoustic Music.

Miller has performed in a variety of solo and ensemble contexts across the US. Performances and radio broadcasts of his electroacoustic music have occurred in North & South America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and Australia. He coordinates and co-hosts the weekly radio show "Other Voices, Other Sounds" on KUNM 89.9 FM in Albuquerque, NM. His book and CD reviews are published in the Computer Music Journal and elsewhere. He is the founding Vice President of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, and serves on the board of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. His website is at pubweb.csf.edu/~smill

(not certain yet)

David Dunn, “The Sound of Light in Trees”

For over 30 years David Dunn has been recording the natural world as a sound artist, composer and bio-acoustician. This has led him to explore a wide range of diverse natural phenomena including many that are only accessible through the use of unique audio technologies that he has developed.

Composer and sound artist David Dunn was born in 1953 in San Diego, California. From 1970 to 1974 he was assistant to the American composer Harry Partch and remained active as a performer in the Harry Partch Ensemble for over a decade. He studied composition with David Ernst, Kenneth Gaburo, Norman Lowrey, and Pauline Oliveros; violin and viola with Mary Gerard, James Glazebrook, and Howard Hill; and physical theater techniques with Jerzy Grotowski. He has worked in a wide variety of audio media inclusive of traditional and experimental music, installations for public exhibitions, video and film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, and bio-acoustic research.

From 1984 to 1988 Dunn was Vice-President of the International Synergy Institute, a media think tank centered in Hollywood, California. He functioned as a creative consultant to a variety of major media and Hollywood studios, including Disney, Epcot, Turner Broadcasting and MGM, in addition to co-producing extended workshops for Hollywood executive personnel at the American Film Institute.

Dunn is the recipient of a variety of awards and grants including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (3), the Rockefeller Foundation (3), Langlois Foundation (2), McCune Foundation (2), Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, New Mexico Arts Division, various Meet the Composer grants (4), academic research grants, and travel grants from the Japan Foundation and the United States Embassy to Argentina. In addition he has received numerous commissions from major institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He is the composer of 56 major music compositions for various media, author/editor of 5 books and over 50 academic and theoretical publications in major journals with translations into seven foreign languages. Since 1973 he has given over 500 concert performances, lectures and radio broadcasts in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. He has over 100 additional international recording credits on LPs, CDs, internet, exhibition, film and video soundtracks.

In recent years he has lectured and/or performed at such prestigious venues as SoundCulture (Japan), Beyond Music Festival (USA), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Styrian Autumn Festival (Austria), L'Immagine Elletronica Festival (Italy), the Institute for New Media (Germany), New Music Across America, Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), Composer to Composer Festival (Telluride), Santa Fe Institute, Experimenta Festival (Argentina), Cranbrook Art Academy, Instituto Torcuato Ditella (Argentina), Graduate Center of CUNY, The Exploratorium (San Francisco), Institute for Advanced Study (Hungary), feature radio broadcasts throughout the world, various guest composer residencies at American universities, and wildlife field recording expeditions in North America, South America, Australia, and Southern Africa.

He is the author of Music, Language, and Environment (a cdrom of selected scores, writings, sounds, and images), Skydrift (a book documenting a large environmental sound project), and Why Do Whales and Children Sing?:A Guide to Hearing in Nature. He is the editor of Harry Partch: An Anthology of Critical Perspectives and Eigenwelt der Apparate-welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art. His works are published and distributed by Ars Electronica, Innova Recordings, O.O. Discs, EarthEar, Pogus Recordings, Lingua Press, Frog Peak, Deep Listening Publications, Nonsequitur Foundation, W.W. Norton, Gordon and Breach, Schirmer Books, the Inial Group, and IML Records.

Currently Dunn is President and Program Director of the Art and Science Laboratory and was recently artist-in-residence at the following institutions: Cranbrook Art Academy, Detroit Zoo, Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, and the Art Technology Center at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In addition to his artistic work his current projects include sonification research of deterministic chaotic systems and the design of bioacoustic techniques for: tracking jaguars in New Mexico and Arizona, studying the acoustic properties of Narwhal teeth, high-speed sampling for ultrasonic recording, and the development of acoustic techniques for the early monitoring of bark beetles in conifers.

The American Society for Acoustic Ecology (ASAE) is a membership organization dedicated to exploring the role of sound in natural habitats and human societies, and promoting public dialogue concerning the identification, preservation, and restoration of natural and cultural sound environments.

The Contemporary Music Program is uniquely situated to provide intensive pre-professional studies within a liberal arts setting. A focus on training and skills acquisition to prepare students for careers in a broad range of contemporary music fields is matched with a commitment to the liberal arts tradition of cultural literacy, moral and philosophical development, personal responsibility, and citizenship in the broadest sense. The CMP embodies the belief that the goals of musical creativity are enhanced by simultaneous development of an articulate understanding of the roles of the arts within human culture and passionate advocacy for the position of the arts in contemporary society.

Contact Steven:
Southwest/Southern Rockies
Steven Miller, Jim Cummings, Steve Feld

American Society for Acoustic Ecology

New Mexico Chapter