Climate Sound & Society: Exploring Intersections of Technology, Research and Practice
In 2024, the Institute for Climate Sound & Society launched with an Exploratory Seminar at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar Program provides funding to scholars, practitioners, and artists for collaboration in an interdisciplinary exploration of early-stage ideas. The program encourages intellectual risk taking as participants gather in an intensive seminar setting to explore new fields of research and inquiry. Hundreds of Harvard faculty members and Radcliffe fellows have benefited from this program, which challenges its participants to reimagine the boundaries of knowledge through multidisciplinary discussion.
About the Climate Sound & Society Seminar
In recent years, new sound recording technologies such as passive acoustic monitoring and underwater sound arrays have become increasingly central to environmental science, offering new ways to gather and analyze data to understand changing ecosystems. At the same time, creative experimentation with sound has been growing in the journalism, storytelling, media arts, and curatorial worlds. With sound as the common medium, increased collaboration across these disciplines presents significant opportunities to expand audiences for research, enhancing impact and creative potential for all.
The seminar leaders envision the exploratory seminar as an opportunity to gather exceptional thinkers and practitioners working with non-human sound and climate. Together, we wish to imagine what an emerging Institute for Climate Sound & Society might look like. Embracing a spirit of experimentation, this gathering presents potential for truly novel ideas and works to emerge.
This seminar is the first step in building an interdisciplinary community of practice that brings together sound-based scientists, technologists, scholars, archivists, storytellers, data journalists, curators, and media artists to expand research impact, build new research tools, and de-center humans in public culture.