From August 24 to September 7, 2026, I’m undertaking an artist residency at the Internationales Waldkunstzentrum (IWZ) in Darmstadt, Germany, developing a new work called Listening with Songs of the Trees. The residency overlaps with The Global Composition 2026, a conference on sound, media, and the environment held September 3–6 at the Mediencampus in Dieburg under the theme “connective resonance for (post)humans,” and the project is a forest listening installation sited along the Internationaler Waldkunstpfad.
The premise is simple to state and, I hope, quietly transformative to experience: trees are not silent. Water moving through a tree’s xylem — the internal plumbing that carries water from roots to leaves — produces faint acoustic activity, including brief high-frequency events associated with cavitation, when a water column under tension breaks. This has been documented by plant physiologists since the 1960s, and more recent work continues to refine our understanding of it. None of it is audible to us under ordinary circumstances. The installation places passive, electricity-free listening structures — contact horns, tuned resonators, and related devices — at points along the trail, so that visitors can press an ear, so to speak, to the inner life of a tree they’d otherwise walk straight past.
I want to be clear about what this project is not. There’s a lineage of sound art that renders plant activity audible through sensors and digital sonification — turning biological data into sound via electronics and software. That’s valuable work, and I’m attracted to it, but Listening with Songs of the Trees takes a different path deliberately. Nothing here is powered, translated, or synthesized. The structures amplify and channel; they don’t convert data into sound. What you hear in the forest is the tree’s own sound, not a representation of it. That distinction matters to me — it’s about direct, embodied listening rather than mediated data experience.
The title carries some of its own history. “Listening with” borrows from Annea Lockwood’s theme for World Listening Day 2019, itself drawing on Donna Haraway’s ideas described her book, Staying with the Trouble — listening as a form of staying present with something rather than extracting information from it. “Songs of Trees” nods to David George Haskell’s book of the same name, which traces how trees exist as networks of relationship rather than isolated organisms. And James Bridle’s writing on more-than-human intelligence has shaped how I think about what it might mean for a tree to have something like a voice, or at least a form of expression we’ve simply never learned to hear.
Underneath all of this is a conviction I’ve carried through a lot of my work: that a soundscape isn’t a backdrop or a resource to be mined for content, but a web of relationships between listener and environment. That framing comes from the World Soundscape Project’s founder, R. Murray Schafer, and its research team, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax, Howard Broomfield and Hildegard Westerkamp. It’s the lens I’m using here rather than more categorical ways of dividing up environmental sound (Biophony, Geophony, Anthropophony). The forest isn’t a source of material. It’s something I’m in relation with, and the installation is an invitation for visitors to enter that relation too, even briefly.
If you’re in the Darmstadt area during the conference, I’d love for you to experience it in person. There are three public moments built into the residency:
— August 30: A forest artist talk with fellow artist Bidisha Das, an informal conversation among the trees about our respective works on the Waldkunstpfad. — September 2, 3:00 PM: A guided listening tour for Global Composition conference participants. — September 6, 2:00 PM: An artist talk at the installations themselves, again with Bidisha Das.
All events take place on the Internationaler Waldkunstpfad, accessible via the entrance at Böllenfalltor in Darmstadt. I’ll share more details, including exact positions of the listening structures along the trail, as the residency progresses.