Ecologies of Sound and Sea is a subversive science communication project about Sound, Listening, Stewardship and Ecology.
Ecologies of Sound and Sea focuses on the discipline of Acoustic Ecology, Composition and Education.
Scientists, Composers and Policy members involved
KERRI SEGER, Ph.D. Scientist, Marine Mammals Acoustics
GARTH PAINE, Ph.D. Acoustic Ecologist and Composer
RICHARD NORRIS, Ph.D. Scientist, Paleobiology
JENNIFER N. PHILLIPS, Ph.D. Ornithologist, Scientist
MICHAEL JASNY, JD, Ph.D. Law and Policy of Marine Acoustics
CAMILLE PAGNIELLO, Ph.D. Student and Scientist, Fish Acoustics
LEI LIANG, Ph.D. Composer
MARIA MORELL YBARZ, Ph.D.
JACK BUTLER, Ph.D. Scientist, Restoration of Marine Habitats
TIMOTHY A.C., Ph.D. Marine Biologist, University of Exeter
JACOB SMITH, Ph.D. Student, Arizona State, Composition
What do the Experts have to say?
Check out their interviews below!
Garth Paine, Ph.D. Acoustic Ecologist and Composer
Dr. Garth Paine is a composer, scholar and acoustic ecologist. As a Professor of Digital Sound and Interactive Media, he crosses art-science boundaries with his community embedded work on environmental listening and creative place-making in addition to his environmental musical works and performances such as the work Presence in the Landscape and Becoming Desert. His research drives toward new approaches to acoustic ecology and the exploration of sound as our lived context including the application of VR in health.
In 2018 he was researcher/artist in residence in Europe at IRCAM (Centre Pompidou) and Center for Arts and Media (ZKM) during which time he produced the 50 minute media opera Future Perfect, examining our future impacted by climate change.
His passion for sound as an exhibitable object has given rise to interactive environments where the sonic landscape is generated through gesture, presence and behavior and several music scores for dance works using realtime video tracking and bio-sensing and musical compositions that have been performed in Australia, Europe, Asia, USA, South America and the UK. Paine's current research centers around the Listen(n) Project, an acoustic ecology project that focuses on field recording and community building. He co-directs the Acoustic Ecology Lab (AELab@ASU) with Professor Sabine Feisst At Arizona State University, which he established in 2016.
He is an active contributor to the International NIME conference where he was keynote speaker in 2016. He is on the editorial board of Organised Sound Journal, which he has also guest-edited on several occasions. Dr. Paine is a Professor of Digital Sound and Interactive Media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and a Professor of Music Composition in the School of Music at Arizona State University. He is affiliate faculty at the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes and a Senior Sustainability Scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU.
Kerri Seger, Ph.D. Scientist, Marine Mammals Acoustics
Dr. Kerri D. Seger began working in bioacoustics as an undergraduate at The Ohio State University with a combined major of music education, zoology, and ecology. Her research there documented frequency shifts in northern cardinals and American robins across four levels of disturbed habitats in central Ohio.
After two years of teaching music in the US and Haiti, she began her biological oceanography PhD program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD. Dr. Seger's dissertation focused on soundscape parameterization in grey and humpback whale habitats from Alaska to Mexico, density estimation of humpback whales using the sound pressure levels of their songs, and she established a global working group for documenting the social sound repertoires of humpback whales. She continued to a post-doc at the University of New Hampshire using ecological modeling to investigate the acoustic presence of odontocete species along the Arctic Corridor and empirical mode decomposition techniques to develop a new detection and classification set of algorithms.
Before joining AOS, Kerri established a passive acoustic monitoring station on the Pacific coast of Colombia and taught at the Universidad Pontificia Javeriana as a Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Seger brings biology and ecology applications and context to AOS's physical oceanography and underwater acoustics expertise.
Jenny Phillips, Ph.D. Ornithologist/Avian Scientist
Jenny is an assistant professor at Texas A&M San Antonio (January 2021) with a broad interest in animal behavior, communication, and the effects of human activity on wildlife. Specifically, she is interested in how sexually selected traits and ultimately reproductive fitness are affected by landscapes and soundscapes, and am currently investigating the effects of sensory pollution on avian communities. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) in the Francis lab. Her dissertation research at Tulane focused on the effects of anthropogenic noise on the evolution of bird song in the Derryberry lab. She has had a variety of research experience, with undergraduate research in the Nieh lab with stingless bees, volunteering in collections of herpetology and entomology at the SDNHM, and working with citizen scientists to better understand species diversity across an urban gradient.
Lei Liang, Ph.D. Composer, Musician, Professor
Heralded as “one of the most exciting voices in New Music” (The Wire), Lei Liang (b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by The New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by The Washington Post.
Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission and a Creative Capital Award. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. He was awarded the 2021 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams.
Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Thailand Philharmonic, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble and Boston Musica Viva. Lei Liang’s music is recorded on Naxos, Mode, New World, Bridge, Innova, and Telarc Records. As a scholar, he is active in the research and preservation of traditional Asian music.
Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships. He taught in China as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi'an; served as Honorary Professor of Composition and Sound Design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College. Lei Liang currently serves as Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. Lei Liang's music is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).
Camille Pagniello, Ph.D. Scientist, Fish Acoustics
Camille Pagniello is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Ocean Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research interest lie at the intersection of acoustics, animals, conservation, data science, oceanography, technology and sustainable management of natural resources. She is currently using passive acoustics and optical imaging to identify the sounds of commercially and recreationally important fish species and to locate their spawning areas within marine protected areas.
Camille completed her BSc Honours, Co-op in Marine Biology and Physics with minors in Mathematics and Ocean Sciences (First Class Honours) at Dalhousie University. During her studies, Camille was an NSERC USRA scholar at Dalhousie and Memorial University of Newfoundland, as well as Summer Student Fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducting research in the fields of computational geometry, atmospheric physics, biological oceanography, avian acoustics and biology, and ocean acoustics. She also completed a semester abroad as part of the SEA Semester Program (S-250) in which she sailed from San Diego, CA to Papeete, Tahiti and conducted marine chemistry research.
Camille has been an active student member of the Marine Technology Society (MTS) since 2010, The Oceanography Society (TOS) since 2015, and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) since 2017 serving in multiple student leadership positions. She also competed on MUN’s Eastern Edge Robotics team at the 2013 MATE International Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition in Federal Way, Washington where she also served as Ocean Career Expo Coordinator. She is AAUS Scientific Diver, and regularly dives for scientific research purposes.
Michael Jasny, Ph.D. Law and Policy Member
Michael Jasny is a leading expert in the law and policy of ocean noise pollution. For more than a decade, he has directed high-profile litigation, lobbying efforts, science-based policy development, and public advocacy to improve the regulation of this emergent global problem. His work also focuses on securing protection for endangered marine mammals and their habitat, opposing development projects that threaten marine mammals off the U.S. and Canadian coastlines, and improving management of fisheries, whale-watching tourism, and other sectors that impact these vulnerable species. Jasny is the author or coauthor of numerous publications in legal, policy, and scientific journals. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School and is based in Vancouver and Santa Monica.
Maria Morell Ybarz, Ph.D. Scientist, Auditory Systems
Dr. Maria Morell is a research associate at the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research (University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Foundation, Germany). Her main research interests are framed in the fields of hearing and effects of anthropogenic noise on marine mammals. More specifically, her expertise focuses on inner ear ultrastructure with the objective to understand high-frequency hearing adaptations in toothed whales and hearing loss in marine mammals due to noise exposure, among other causes. She started working on the auditory system of cetaceans (group formed by whales, dolphins and porpoises) during her Master and PhD at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC-Barcelona tech, Spain). Then, she moved to the University of British Columbia (Canada) for a first post-doc and to the Institute for Neurosciences of Montpellier (INSERM, France) for a second post-doc, to further extend her knowledge on inner ear anatomy and pathology in cetaceans. Her research has implications in the fields of comparative anatomy, conservation of endangered species, convergence evolution, as well as underwater noise management.
Jack Butler, Ph.D. Scientist, Marine Habitat Restoration
Jack Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at Florida International University's Institute of Environment. His research focuses on developing and employing low-cost technology to answer marine ecological questions - particularly methods to aid conservation and restoration of coastal habitats. Some of his current projects include developing trap-deployable, long-term camera systems to monitor deepwater traps off the Florida Keys to help remove invasive lion fish, pairing passive acoustic and imagery datasets to identify and monitor ecologically and economically important fish species within Southern California kelp forests, and developing a underwater speaker system to augment hard-bottom habitat restoration efforts in the Florida Keys.
Jack received his BS in Zoology from the University of Florida, where he worked as a research technician in the salt marshes of coastal Georgia. There he found his love of marine science and decided to pursue his PhD in Ecological Sciences from Old Dominion University. His dissertation research focused on the role that marine soundscapes play in the recruitment of larvae to back-reef hard-bottom habitats of the Florida Keys, and how habitat degradation and restoration alter these processes.
