Encoded Listening
2026 - Current
Multi Channel Sound Works + Research
“My inner and imaginary sounds are part of the soundscape” – Pauline Oliveros
Encoded Listening is an ongoing project exploring how soundscapes are shaped not only by ecology and place, but by memory, perception, and technological mediation.
The project focuses on endangered and disappearing sonic environments: places undergoing change through shifting ecological conditions. Rather than treating field recording as a neutral act of documentation, Encoded Listening considers how sound is filtered, encoded, reconstructed, and transformed through digital systems.
Developed through ongoing PhD research, the project uses neural audio codecs and learned audio representations as compositional tools. Environmental recordings are compressed, transformed, and reconstructed through these systems, creating speculative sonic environments that move between recognition and unfamiliarity. Familiar textures and atmospheres remain partially intact, while other aspects of the recording become altered, unstable, or abstracted.
At the centre of the project is an interest in listening as a mediated experience. Sound is approached not only as an ecological archive, but as something continually shaped by the technologies through which it is captured and heard. Through this process, the work explores how environmental experience is increasingly mediated through systems of filtering, compression, and reconstruction.
Encoded Listening combines field recording, sensing technologies such as geophones, multichannel sound composition, and site-responsive installation. The project pays close attention to the material conditions of a place: its geology, biology, architecture, weather patterns, and acoustic properties. These elements inform both the recording process and the eventual transformation of the sound material.
The resulting works take the form of multichannel installations, performances, and sound pieces that create feedback loops between landscape, recording, and reconstruction. They seek to create sonic monuments to environments in flux, reflecting not only what is being lost, but how sound itself is continually transformed through ecological change and technological mediation.