Throughout my time recording in nature preserves, I experienced how listening to ecosystems filled wide gaps in my own music education. We can learn a lot about our ecosystem by listening; thus, we can learn a lot about ourselves. My goal in designing this project was to empower my students to listen to their ecosystem, connect with its teachings and their own thoughts and feelings, then integrate this knowledge into their lives through the creative practices of music composition and production.

To get started, we learned about soundscape ecology, listened outdoors to identify the biophony, geophony, and anthropophony, and spent lots of time producing music in the online digital audio workstation Soundtrap. By the time I introduced the project to my fifth graders at Margaret L. Donovan and Elizabeth G. Lyons Elementary Schools in Randolph, Massachusetts, they were comfortable with making beats, recording with their Chromebook microphones, and bringing together loops to compose music. They were also familiar with the sounds around their schools and had questioned the balance of biophonic, geophonic, and anthropohonic sounds they heard.

To help us step back and see a systems view of why our ecosystem sounded the way it did, we utilized maps from the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Using climate and local bird population data, Mass Audubon created maps for many of the local bird species, visualizing their historical coverage in the state and how their population is projected to change by 2050. The maps were stunning and allowed us to clearly understand the data. In the initial research portion of this project, students were given time to review the maps and get to grips with how climate change will impact their state’s bird populations.

I then introduced the soundscape website Xeno-Canto to students and demonstrated how to search for recordings of specific birds that were made in Massachusetts, download those recordings, and upload them into Soundtrap. The students spent a lot of time listening, resourcing, then editing and incorporating these sounds into their compositions. To help guide their creative work, I encouraged them to work towards three optional goals; to teach the public about this specific climate change impact; to convey their feelings about this crisis; or to imagine an alternative future.

This is a collection of some of the projects they created. I provided feedback and assistance throughout the process, but I did not directly edit or co-create any of the sounds on this album. Some students chose not to incorporate soundscapes into their projects—usually with the goal of using their own music to convey their feelings—while others created compositions only using those recordings. The students chose their own artist names and titled the songs themselves. Some students opted to write short descriptions of their project to clarify their intention or how they created it.

We hope you enjoy it. We hope it inspires you to listen and play your part in your ecosystem.

—Nicholas Patrick Quigley