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The Multi-Elemental Radio Station
The EDC’s Multi-Elemental Radio Station (MERS) is an interactive environmental sound installation, accessible via the EDC website. Inspired by ETH Zürich’s “Sounding Soil,” composers Ellen Reid and Jana Winderen’s sonic installations and soundwalks, and acoustic ecologist Bernie Krause’s “Great Animal Orchestra,” MERS currently consists of pre-recorded sounds of three elements – soil, water, wind – along with sounds of weather patterns, plant, animal, insect, and human life. The initial set of sounds will continuously loop and will come from around Baltimore. In the future, MERS might include a broader collection of global environmental sounds, perhaps adhering to themes.
Visitors to the group’s page can engage further with this soundscape. There, they will be able to:
– Access to learning and teaching tools that guide visitors in listening to, interpreting, and
interacting with the environment, both on and off the EDC website.
– Access to soundwalking instructions.
– Space to upload their own recordings that could be cycled into MERS.
– Space to upload descriptions of their own soundwalks.
– Space to share resources about environmental sounds, music, and scholarship.In the future, we hope to expand MERS. Future projects include:
– Include global environmental sounds on MERS.
– Include environmentally themed music on MERS.
– Upgrade MERS to a livestream.
– Cycle podcasts/interviews into the MERS stream.
– Create a Digital Audio Workstation tool for visitors to the EDC/MERS Group to manipulate snippets of environmental recordings to create their own soundscapes.MERS provides a distinct opportunity for EDC visitors to access and interpret the deep history of human and nonhuman life. It ultimately invites them to answer and consider the ethical implications of composer Hildegard Westerkamp’s appeal to members of the World Soundscape Project in 1974: imagine “the ideal soundscape in the context of [your] surroundings. What would be its main characteristics? Is it just an idealistic dream or could it be made a reality?
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