Emergent Sonification: Using Computational Media to Communicate the Anthropocene in ByrdBot

Abstract

This research note describes ByrdBot, a science communication tool that leverages bird songs to communicate data regarding human impacts on the environment. With ByrdBot, listeners can compare simulated soundscapes of 1970, 2017, and 2065 to immediately, and viscerally, experience decades of past or projected future environmental change. The communication tactic of ByrdBot—what we call emergent sonification—is discussed as one that capitalizes on computational media to facilitate attunement to nonhuman voices and, subsequently, to offer an affective grasping of the impacts of such phenomena as habitat destruction and climate change on wildlife displacement and loss.