The Ecological Listening Project
The Ecological Listening Project, an initiative of River Margin, is looking for audio submissions of recordings from around the world capturing how the natural environment sounds where you are — it could be frogs calling, a stream running, birdsong, wind, insects, all specific to your location.
A living, evolving, collaborative online archive of soundscapes from ecosystems around the world: an atlas of auditory ecological memory. The recordings do not need to be high quality — they can be as simple as a phone recording. We are also open to more complex work by seasoned field recordists. The point is: anyone can contribute.
We are also accepting spoken word recordings of observations of the environment around you, and spoken word recordings of your poetry or non-fiction prose extracts detailing your experiences and feelings of being in the natural world.
The aim of The Ecological Listening Project is to compile recordings and spoken word descriptions of ecosystems from around the world in order to make an online living archive of auditory ecological memory. It will reflect not only the different soundscapes of different landscapes on earth, but also how those soundscapes change and evolve — how they sound at dawn or dusk, in winter or summer, or how they might change in years to come.
This is also about how important it is to protect our soundscapes so that they never become memories forever, to keep hearing that same birdsong, insect hum or frog call many years from now.
Send audio submissions to contact@rivermargin.com as an email attachment or via a file sharing service (eg. WeTransfer). It is free to submit and will always be free to listen: this is a collaborative listening project.
Guidelines
— Field recordings must not exceed twenty minutes. Send only one recording from one location.
— Files must be in mp3 format.
— You must include your name (or a moniker) if you want your recording attributed to you, and we also want the following details included in the body of the email:
• Date, geographic location and time of day that the recording was made, eg. ‘Recorded beside the Clackamas River in Mt. Hood National Forest on 23rd June, 2025 at approximately 12pm’, or ‘A recording of how it sounds inside a tree hollow in the Otways, recorded at approximately 5pm on 1st January, 2024’. Please include the country.
— If you would like to be featured as a contributor, please include a short bio as well as your name and any relevant links you wish to include. If you do not include these details in your email, they will not be included online with your contribution.
— We are trialling the idea of creating a podcast. If you’d be interested in having your recording featured in a podcast in the future, please mention this in your email. You always retain all rights to your work and will actively be kept informed and involved.
Featured image credit: Voice for Arran
