Sound art has always pushed at the edges of how we listen—from the radical noise experiments of the early 20th century to today’s immersive, multimedia explorations. Unlike music, sound art isn’t about harmony or melody; it’s about experience—the textures of a place, the act of listening, the hidden acoustics of our environments.
Our new online exhibition brings together works that explore how the world sounds, whether biological, technological, or metaphorical. Each piece offers a different way of tuning into the world around us.
Link in bio
🌳 🎧🔊 Over the past 9 months, 35 trees and 2 forests have been indexed on arboreus.earth thanks to 17 field recordists from across the globe 🌏 🙌🏼
11 new listings are now live, from the US and Australia, including the Domestic Apple, Texas Live Oak, and several eucalypts and coastal species from eastern Australia with thanks to @anneyoncha@colettemedia and @ecosoundscape
From Venezuela to Kenya, Australia to Canada, the US to England and Europe — Germany, France and Poland, this virtual, global forest is growing. There’s room for more and while you can submit at any time, there are submission round dates and a fresh 2026 submission form now on the website. How many other countries, forests and species can we include this year? The next round closes 23 March so we can get a new grove of trees online for arboreus.earth’s first birthday on World Earth Day, 22 April.
🔗 https://arboreus.earth/ (link in bio)
ID: A social media tile showing 10 tree species from the trees listed on arboreus.earth in the last round of submissions, overlayed with a red audio waveform graphic and the arboreus.earth logo in white in the centre of the tile.
#ArboreusEarth #Trees #Forests #Soundscapes #Listening
✨ Reminder: Artist Talk with Anne Yoncha is TOMORROW! ✨
Join us Saturday at 6pm EST for an intimate artist dialog with eco-artist Anne Yoncha at The 109 Gallery — attend in person or virtually. 🌿
Anne’s work blends ecology, data, and sound, inviting us to listen differently to the landscapes we move through. A selection of her work is on view in our collaborative WEAD × 109 Gallery exhibition, with the full show available online.
📍 The 109 Gallery (doors open at 5pm)
💻 Zoom option available
🔗 RSVP + link in bio
#AnneYoncha #EcoArt #109Gallery #WEAD #ArtistTalk #ChattanoogaArts #SupportLocalArt
For the last couple of years @ecoartspace has been organising Soil Shroud, an international artist collaboration based on the Soil Science buried cloth process which tests the health of soil based on how much underground microbes eat away at the cellulose of cotton cloth buried in the earth for 30 days.
This unique piece stitched by @saskiajorda collages fabric buried in three disparate locations: @jopearlceramics garden in London, @AnneYoncha in Ada, Oklahoma and Saskia in Sedona, Arizona. Jo’s contribution included screen printed whispered messages from the soil microbes on the cloth buried in her garden. Saskia’s stitches artfully suggest mycelium networks and roots, using colourful thread inspired by Anne’s painted silhouettes of commonly occurring soil microbes.
The intention is that this piece will be attached to other sewn creations by artists in the ecoartspace Soil Dialogues network to form a larger shroud, and exhibited in 2026. Watch this space for how that develops.
Making some progress on this animation component of our project Ruminant - which we will share on Wednesday evening Oct 1 at @serestoration in Denver! Here are a few clips from the draft so far.
///
Ruminant: an Art-Science Collaboration Visualizing + Sonifying Bison Carcass Decomposition and its Impact on Soil Health
MSU Denver Faculty:
Anne Yoncha, Art MSU Denver
Sarah Schliemann, Earth and Atmospheric Science MSU Denver
David Farrell, Music MSU Denver
Community Partners:
Scott Bartell, Denver Mountain Parks
Kate Wilkins + Tim Luethke, Denver Zoo
Conrad Kehn, Playground Ensemble
Study site: Genesee Mountain Park
“Ruminant” is a collaborative artwork visualizing and sonifying soil data around bison carcasses at Colorado’s Genesee Park, allowing viewers to experience soil chemistry changes happening invisibly underground.
Tracings: This section documents my process of projecting landscape images onto our exhumed fabric. These are attempts to contact and locate, and illustrations of shifting soil, the carcass' movement as it is moved by scavengers, and shifting electrons in the elements we are studying. The fabric’s warp and weft is a mesh made first by plants (cotton material), then woven by humans, and partially deconstructed by soil microbes. The fabric’s regular pattern can warp/conform/adjust to its surroundings, referencing Donna Haraway’s ideas of entanglement between human and non-human neighbors, our connection to this bison carcass, and to the soil chemistry below it. The web connecting us is strong, permeable, and porous. Tendons in the bison carcass, the strength of its connective tissue which remains months after death, represents this web as well. Another grid is drawn on top of the fabric mesh: the projection. This grid of pixels is warped as light travels to contact the fabric surface.
One of us is a larch seedling I planted 7 years ago, and one of us has tenure! It is officially time to stop assisting and start associating!
Things I'd rank 0/10 do not recommend: a 4/4 teaching load at my first U that sometimes swelled to stacks of 7/9 preps (but tbh thanks ECU for the teaching bootcamp), international and xc moves during covid, a weird broken hip situation, and a 3.5 year relationship that lasted about 3.5 years too long. However! I also got to learn Arduino and design a class around it, bring students to conferences in Austin and Albuquerque, host a music festival outside my office and meet Johny Barbata, learn how to do trail work on 11 miles of super fun MTB trails just 2 miles from my front door, teach students to design and paint murals, meet faculty friends on Fridays at Ada's beer garden, take the day long Chinati tour and bikepack in Big Bend Ranch State Park because it was "nearby", paddle so many amazing Oklahoma lakes, take part in a coastal VA residency right near family, collaborate on a recycled glass aquifer health sculpture project which absolutely necessitated kayaking as field work, build an at home bouldering wall, visit 2 more Venice Biennales, share HAB work in 3 countries, meet collaborators in Italy for a conference, become part of an amazing group of women in art and science at Taos FEMeeting, propose and run a new bio art class with great colleagues, volunteer at the research garden at Denver Botanic Gardens, and start new bison and aspen projects. Thanks career goals! Because of you I've met a ton of great people, and had enough bittersweet goodbyes to last a lifetime.
Collar Song
For 20-30 players, or 20-30 electronic tracks/layers/inputs
Suggested performance time: 5-15 minutes
About the score: This score is a painting made with charcoal drawings of each pruning cut site on one tree in the orchard on a base layer of vinyl flashe paint. The vinyl material was chosen to evoke the plasticity of the tree as it forms new cells responding to its wounds. Its reflectivity demonstrates the tree’s responsiveness to this sudden change. Limbs connect to the trunk at a point called a collar – which Alex Shigo calls "a tissue switching zone. Branch collars form underneath, moving water and elements laterally from roots to branches and back. Trunk collars form on top, enveloping the branch collars, and move elements vertically, from roots to tissues above. The collar also is the site of the division, or compartmentalization, in a tree after pruning or limb death, walling off the branch core."
Instructions for performer: Each performer or electronic input should be assigned to one collar drawing. In some places a cluster of pruning sites and their collars may be performed as one group. Begin performing each collar simultaneously. The collar surrounds the pruning site, or the wound in the tree. Attempt to shape your sound slowly around this missing middle. Envelop it softly, protect it, until it is fully closed. Your sound may evoke the tissue switching zone, and the layers of the collar, with lateral and vertical movements. Some wound sites are larger and will take more time to close than others. Not all performers will finish making their sound at the same time.
----
Stretch-Rift-Graft-Lift:
Graphic scores in collaboration with the orchard at Moon Randolph Homestead
by forty 130-year-old apple trees
in collaboration with Anne Yoncha
supported by Open AIR artist residency program
and homestead caretakers Katie Nelson + Caroline Stephens
Missoula, Montana
Summer 2025
About the score book:
These compositions engage trees as agents and composers, and humans as performers
They are meant to reposition ourselves, humans, as the ones reading and interpreting information from the tree. The trees are acting, and we are responding.
With my time at @moonrandolphhomestead with @openairmt I'm exploring ways of composing with trees, and ideas from sound philosopher Pauline Oliveros. This is one of a set of scores I'm making this summer:
Wound Song
For 13 performers of any kind
Suggested performance time: dependent on ensemble
About the score: This score is a painting depicting 13 healed wounds on one tree.
Alex Shigo, pruning expert, writes: "Trees stand in place and receive many wounds. Trees cannot restore or heal wounded wood. Trees are generating systems. They survive as long as they can form new parts in new positions faster than old parts are breaking down.
"You can live while you maintain perfect order. Life is the momentary perfect order of movement within cells. You cannot always maintain perfect order."
Instructions for performers: Assign one performer per visual wound. Each performer should choose a tone and sustain it. Visual characteristics of the wound, and its size, can impact volume and changes within this tone. Depending on the size of the wound, each performer chooses a time to drop out. Larger wounds were made on a larger branch, and therefore inflicted when the tree was older. When you drop out, move to a new tone and sustain it if others in the group are still making sound. When moving to a new tone you may also physically move to a new place in the performance space. However, maintain a silence between tone changes lasting 10 breaths. The performance continues if all performers successfully generate a new tone before silence emerges.
Iron poured on piles of drawings of the piles of iron things at @moonrandolphhomestead
Thank you @jesseblumenthalart for inviting me to be part of the pour!
The drawings are made on yupo / polypropylene paper so they didn't immediately burn in the pour. This is somehow about reuse at the homestead, material transformation and permanence, and layers of history on the site. Thoughts still forming!
I'm determined to figure out something cool to do with this thing.
One of the pour crew: good luck with your bubblegum!
Experiments with listening to the 100 year old apple orchard @moonrandolphhomestead via @openairmt .
These recordings are made with a contact microphone, you may be able to hear more with headphones.
