Listening in/to South Florida Workshop

Listening in/to South Florida (LSF) explores how soundscapes connect us to the environment and serve as data for interpreting our relationship with nature. Sounds are ephemeral, yet they mark temporal and ambient relations through sensorial data as the acceleration of climate change impacts coastal and island regions. The project considers the ever-evolving environment as a readable text that enriches both our attention to and our relationship with place and sound. LSF draws from digital environmental humanities and sound studies to offer visitors a chance to interact with environmental stories through aural and visual narratives. The project connects visitors to soundscapes through a digital repository map that mixes urban, elemental, and animal sounds in South Florida. The maps are accessible and interactive, encouraging visitors to tune into and “catch” soundscapes as users or contributors.

LSF begins by asking how do recorded South Florida soundscapes connect us to the environment and help us interpret our relationship with nature? The LSF project collects and stores otherwise ephemeral sounds as social memories, thereby archiving soundscapes that cross languages, cultures, and even species. By calling specific attention to sounds that emanate from certain physical spaces, LSF asks visitors to question their ontological position amidst an environment teeming with sounds that influence their personal experiences of local environments in ways that they may have not previously considered. Regionally, a South Floridian may then ask: “When I close my eyes, what does my neighborhood sound like?” The project team hopes that this relational emphasis with sounds archived in a digital space invites pause and opportunity for the visitor to aurally engage their surroundings and contribute to the archive.LSF’s public engagement documents soundscapes of South Florida to spark dialogue on climate, culture, and the precarious ecological future of coastal and island regions while simultaneously modeling methods for building local archives with long-term cultural and environmental value.

As a contribution to the America 250 and Florida Digital Humanities conference, LSF would like to conduct a 60-minute interactive workshop. The first half will overview LSF’s purpose and rationale, demonstrate digital tools used, and segue into a 15-minute discussion with the audience about how their local and regional soundscapes influence their lives. By explaining the logic and tools behind LSF, the team will demonstrate how this project may be replicated for other neighborhoods or regions of Florida. The discussion will be led by at least two members of LSF’s team and discussion will be guided by the following questions: What does data sound like? What do we hear when we listen to our surroundings? How do overlapping sounds complicate our expected interactions with the environment? What do we seek out, if anything, when we listen to South Florida? What is absent from the digital sound record? For the final 15-minutes, LSF will invite participants to record and submit soundscapes in and around University of South Florida as part of their visit. Through participatory humanities, LSF offers audience members not just a way to archive their stories through sound but also centers the community’s interpretations and interactions with the environment.

The audience of LSF includes scholars, teachers, and students of sound studies, environmental humanities, and digital storytelling, as well as community members of South Florida who contribute to the project. LSF showcases how sounds synthesize teaching, research, and service into one digital home that engenders outreach and collaboration between public and academic institutions and fosters conversations about our shared environment. The digital environment invites us to narrate sounds and listen through archiving, reimagining how we interact, see, and treat the changing environment.