How can AI-driven sound shape environments? This work recalls stories of a post-natural world that has been computationally updated, where nature itself has been reprogrammed. It takes the form of an LP record and a multi-channel playback experience in the Len Lye Cinema, and was devised by Machine Listening, an artist collective known for exploring the politics of AI, data sets, and networked technology through sound.

Environments 12 is an artistic intervention into the histories of ambient soundscape recordings — the sampling of the natural world popularised by the wellness industry. It takes after the work of Irv Teibel, an ambient new-age music pioneer and field recordist who founded the Environments Series, eleven records produced between 1969 and 1979.

With titles such as Psychologically Ultimate Seashore, Gentle Rain in a Pine Forest, and Ultimate Heartbeat — marketed as “a stethoscope recording which could be used to calm infants, aid meditation or enhance lovemaking” — the series was released around the time of the 1979 oil crisis. Although it was a response to early signs of climate emergency, each recording was smoothed and edited to auditory perfection so it could be “even better than the real thing.”

As a speculative twelfth edition to the Environments Series, Machine Listening’s new record could be thought of as an inverted or speculative environmental recording. Rather than presenting the ‘sounds of nature’ on their own, it is about these sounds, how they came into being, and how they are being used to reprogramme nature itself. 

Through a chorus of AI clones trained on human voices that embody the unhinged anxiety of climate grief, the narrative recounts tales of an environment-to-come that seems all too close. Artificial voices evoke synthetic environments shaped by sound, a strange future of acoustically enriched ecosystems.

Here, the dying Great Barrier Reef is kept on life support by broadcasting the soundscapes of healthy coral reefs, and cross-species communication between animals and AI is possible, but only without human cognition. Responding to past acoustic histories, Environments 12 augurs the ruins of a future history, a post-human world where Gaia herself has been upgraded.


Machine Listening’s Environments 12 plays daily in the Len Lye Cinema:
4 April – 3 June, 25 June – 26 August, 10 September – 11 October

Book your tickets here

Image:
Machine Listening Environments 12, 2023–25. 8-channel sound installation, 35 minutes, LP record sleeves. courtesy of the artists, Naarm Melbourne.
Researched, written and produced by Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern 
Voices: David Chesworth, Jasper Dockray, Jenny Hickinbotham, Roslyn Orlando, Francis Plagne, Catherine Ryan, and their clones 
Design: Stuart Geddes 
First commissioned for Wild Hope: Conversations for a Planetary Commons, RMIT Design Hub, Naarm Melbourne