Listening to Climate Change: experiments with sonic democracy

This project engages publics with issues of climate change through the medium of sound. It starts from the assumption that the complex temporalities and interconnections which characterise climate change issues and the hard-to-articulate hopes, fears and expectations that these provoke might be usefully delineated and voiced through sound. The project focuses on the vulnerable coastal marshes of Blakeney Point, Norfolk, currently in the care of the National Trust (NT), the main project partner. It connects with NT's own concern to encourage residents, stakeholders and visitors to engage constructively with the challenges posed by climatic change in coastal landscapes. The project explores the role of sonic art practice to facilitate and empower residents and other users of Blakeney Point to engage with the challenges raised by climate change and explore possible desired and undesired future scenarios for this location. This study builds and extends the NT's recent initiative Sounds of our Shores (2015-16).

Issues of climate change pose extraordinary challenges for the communication of scientific knowledge and for broader public debate concerning environmental uncertainties, possibilities, options and futures. As complex, seemingly intangible phenomena or 'invisible risks', involving a range of timescales and geographically extensive consequences, climate change issues are notoriously difficult to trace, imagine and bring into presence. Arts-based communication of climate change has proved one important means of giving shape and form to such complex issues within certain arenas of public debate. Yet in spite of Hulme's (2008,2009) plea that climate change is very much a cultural problem, much climate change-related arts-based work is made by artists for publics in the hope of provoking responses rather than by publics themselves as an active and ongoing part of facilitating dialogue.

This project adopts a social process-based arts methodology to help move arts-based work concerning climate change towards a more clearly articulated model of conversation and mutual learning. It explores the assertion that sound has a distinctive ability to bring together apparently and otherwise incommensurable 'voices', traces, data sonifications and environmental sounds, in a shared space in which each might speak to the other. The potential here is to initiate some form of meaningful communication between social and natural worlds and to enable participants and audiences to better imagine the implications, potentials and possibilities of environmental change.

We address three questions in this research:
Q1. How can sound help explore and more widely communicate the complex temporal nature of climate change?
Q2. To what extent can a sonically based engagement strategy facilitate dialogue, response and conversation between a diverse range of interested parties including various human interests, flora, fauna and environmental processes?
Q3. What role can collaborative participatory sonic art play in the creative collective imagining of environmental futures in the context of human-induced climate change?

The project team includes geographers, musician-composer-sound artists, community engagement specialists, arts-documentary-makers, local partners: the NT, Blakeney Primary School and Future Radio. A thirty-one month programme of co-devised workshops, sonic data collection and participant-led and composed performance will lead to the production of a Sonic Estuary Plan as an interactive multi-media e-book for Blakeney Point. Other outputs include a sonic exhibition, live performance, a radio ballad and a documentary film to tour/engage with other National Trust coastal sites. Another e-book about these participatory methods of sonic engagement will bring together best practice from elsewhere, critically reflecting on the sonic experiments undertaken in the project.

The research undertaken for this project will benefit a variety of specialist and non specialist audiences as follows:

1 The National Trust (NT) particularly the East of England Region and the team based at Blakeney Point (Norfolk) as primary project partners. The project engages with the NT's initiatives to address coastal environmental change in the light of climate change and to engage publics and with the issues, dilemmas and opportunities this poses, see the publication Shifting Shores (NT: 2013, 2015). The most important outputs in this regard are:

a) Interactive Sonic Exhibition at Blakeney Point (NT) as a primary forum for bringing together a range of voices, understandings, interpretations, hopes, wishes and valuations of the Blakeney sonic environment allowing participants to share thoughts and express views, wishes and judgement on possible alternative futures.
b) Art Film/project documentary will form the centre piece of the concluding exhibition that will visit other NT coastal sites.
c) Sonic Estuary Plan, requested by the NT, is central to engagement with the Trust. This interactive multi-media E-book offers new ways of working creatively with locality, people and environment. In addition it pioneers new social process art engagement methods that may be adapted and adaptable as models for future engagement strategies elsewhere and in other contexts.

2 Residents, Users and Stakeholders at Blakeney. Coastal change in East Anglia is proving highly controversial, threatening livelihoods, properties, ecosystems and ways of life. This project experiments with a four stage social process arts research methodology which aims to empower publics as actively involved participants in ongoing discussion concerning climate change and the management of coastal landscape. In the short term this provides a platform for opinions to be voiced, whilst at the same time providing a forum to facilitate listening to those of others. Inclusion of the Sonic Estuary Plan in future discussions concerning NT public engagements, management policy and practice offer a distinctive opportunity for these individuals and groups, some of whom may not be otherwise heard or represented, to enter the conversation.

3 Publics beyond Blakeney. These groups are initially consulted in festival based workshops that draw on interim materials from the Blakeney case study. Beyond Blakeney, engagement methods are designed to experiment across a range of spatial scales. The Radio Ballad will engage across the UK and internationally aiming to provoke conversation with and responses from experience in other places. Whilst the OU/National Trust touring exhibition, aims to bring the issues raised at Blakeney to other coastal locations managed by the NT. Some material will also be developed as open access educational materials (via OU OpenLearn, OU YouTube, iTunesU).

4 Practitioners and professionals concerned with arts based environmental engagement. This project is both an exercise in sonic process art engagement and an experiment trialing sonic methodologies. The express purpose is to explore the possibilities of an expanded politics involving a range of human, non-human and environmental 'voices' and engage a wide range of publics and stakeholders in environmental decision making and thinking about environmental futures. The project will impact on professionals and practitioners by providing new methodologies for sonic process art, climate change and other environmental engagements. The free to download Sonic Methods 'Cook book' (e-book) will carry these findings, discussion and examples of good practice to practitioners, policy makers and others concerned with sound art and public engagement. It will challenge current practices and provide examples which demonstrate the possibilities and potentials for sonic based public engagement. Other project materials will be freely available via the British Library and East Anglian Film Archive.