Environmental Sonic Translation

Environmental Sonic Translation offers a collection of compositional techniques drawing on detailed analyses of environment-derived soundscapes, which can be found in geological, biological, and anthropogenic sources. It relies on audio technology to collect sounds, analyze their spectra and reassign their features to musical instruments. This research is situated within the fields of Ecoacoustics/Acoustic Ecology, Spectralism, and musique concrète, building a framework that responds to the aesthetic, conceptual and technical principles of environmental sonic translation. The main purpose of this work is to embody the various ways in which sound exists in the world.

In this dissertation, I offer a systematic analytic and notational methodology applicable to a wide field of soundscapes, culminating in a compositional body of work generated with the techniques presented. As a background, I discuss influential work that has contributed to the field of environmental sonic translation.