Tuning Back In: How Soundscape Ecology and Deep Listening Can Heal Society and the Planet
- Jun 9, 2025
- 7 min read
Photos from Creative Commons. Uploaded by Gower, Jason Hollinger, Mona Hassan Abo-Abda
Growing up in the woods of rural Oregon, I’ve always lived among the chorus of the natural world. Some of my earliest memories of sound are: the wail of a baby mule deer caught in our garden fence, a flock of wild turkeys gobbling from the woods, blue jays waking me up at sunrise from the tree just outside my bedroom window. But as I grew older, those sonic memories began to fade. School schedules, social distractions, and technology dulled my connection to the sensory richness around me. It wasn’t until COVID-19 hit, when life paused, that I rediscovered the present moment through the practice of meditation and deep listening.
Each morning, I would sit on the hillside next to the house where I grew up. Eyes closed, breath steady, I listened. What could I hear? Feel? Smell? Inspired by Ram Dass and open awareness meditation, I realized something profound: deep listening wasn’t just a technique—it was a return to a way of being. It was a portal to empathy, to awareness, to connection. Listening isn’t just about what we hear with our ears, but about signals and communications that our body and our surroundings are sending us through the vehicle of our senses.
This feature explores how listening—especially deep listening—can be a revolutionary force for personal healing, social empathy, and ecological preservation. Through conversations with three pioneers in sound and ecology—John Campbell, Sasha Petrenko, and Hildegard Westerkamp—I’ve learned how soundscape ecology and intentional listening offer a path toward reconnection: with the earth, with others, and with ourselves.
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Music as Ecology: A Conversation with John Campbell
John Campbell is a musician, sound artist, and professor at Oregon State University, where he teaches a class called Illegitimate Music. When I interviewed him via Zoom, he was seated in his studio in Corvallis, Oregon, with drums peeking out behind him. From jazz and blues to contemplative sound art, Campbell’s work spans disciplines, but at the core is a guiding philosophy: sound itself is an ecology.
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"Sound without someone to hear it is just a vibration moving through the air," he told me. "It’s our judgments, personal experience, and emotional reactions that dictate what it becomes". This is a lesson we can not only apply to our sonic inputs, but one we can take into all phenomena in our daily life. What would happen if we consciously chose every day to move from a state of reactivity to receptivity and responsiveness?
Campbell sees listening as a relational act—one that moves beyond sound and into the realm of human connection and environmental awareness. “Listening moves us toward taking things as they are, not as we expect them to be,” he said. "People say unexpected things, nature makes unexpected sounds. The more we are able to accommodate and receive things as they are, the more capable we are to enter conversations with people, even if their experience may be very different from ours."
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Embodiment and Resistance: Sasha Petrenko’s Sonic Rewilding
Artist and soundwalker Sasha Petrenko is based in Bellingham, Washington, where she teaches, performs, and creates community-focused ecological art. When we spoke over Zoom, she had just finished teaching an art class. Petrenko’s work is grounded in embodiment and the idea that returning to the body is a radical act—one that challenges capitalist and colonial paradigms.
“Embodiment is the greatest weapon against capitalism,” she told me. “Because we are nature. Everything we do to nature, all the extraction, we’re just extracting our own life force.”
Her soundwalks invite participants to explore sound beyond language. She encourages non-verbal vocalizations like humming, screaming, and whistling. These primal expressions, she says, reconnect us to our natural impulses and move us out of the intellect and into the body.
Petrenko also shared her current work on the ecology of Lake Tahoe, where invasive crawfish—introduced by humans—are now damaging underwater forests. This, she says, mirrors other human-made disruptions: artificial foods, toxic technology, political ideologies.
Her work insists that listening isn’t passive—it’s active. It’s a return. “People want to feel like they’re returning to someplace we’ve long abandoned,” she said. “Sound helps us do that.”
Her method echoes Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening and soundwalk practices—a meditative approach inviting people to explore full acoustic attention, to include otherwise ignored background sounds .
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Listening to the Uncomfortable: Hildegard Westerkamp and the Legacy of Soundscape Ecology
Hildegard Westerkamp is a pioneer in soundscape ecology, having worked alongside R. Murray Schafer in the World Soundscape Project. Schafer coined the term "soundscape" in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, a foundational text that identified categories like biophony (animal sounds), geophony (non-living natural sounds), and anthrophony (human-made sounds).
When I spoke with Westerkamp, she reflected on how humans have distanced themselves from nature—not just physically, but perceptually. Listening, she believes, can be a bridge back.
“You suddenly realize, oh my God, I have not listened to this voice in society,” she told me. “I have no idea what this person or this animal or this tree has gone through. It’s because we can’t—but we can do our best to attend to the relationship that we have to the environment, to be conscious of a relationship.”
She spoke about the humility that comes from truly listening. “We are just as much part of the environment as the tree is behind you… Listening is by nature unsettling because it brings out truths that are uncomfortable. Are we willing to listen to those uncomfortable truths?”
Westerkamp believes listening reveals a hunger we often ignore—a hunger for relationship, for connection, for healing. “It’s a signal that we have a need that has been neglected,” she said. “Let’s listen to that.”
In another interview, she put it succinctly: “Listening will help us reconnect to the environment. If we can understand what listening can do to reconnect us to our environment, we can understand what’s happening to our environment... we would be enriched, hugely.”
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Further Research In Sound And Society
Bernie Krause, in The Great Animal Orchestra, documented over 5,000 hours of recordings from 15,000 species and 2,000 habitats . He introduced the idea of acoustic niche, showing how each species finds its frequency in the greater sonic community. His findings warn of increasing anthrophony—industrial noise drowning out biophony—and its effects on animals and humans alike .
Research shows natural sounds reduce stress, improve mood, and sharpen attention . In contrast, noise pollution—city ambiance, traffic, industrial sounds—can cause insomnia, hypertension, and even cognitive decline .
Schafer, Krause, and Westerkamp argue that soundscapes are not passive backdrops—they are active sites of health, culture, and democracy . Monitoring soundscapes (like Krause’s decades of forest recordings) provides sensitive indicators of ecological change—even before shifts show up visually.
Relearning How to Hear
The field of eco-sound art and soundscape composition emerged in the late twentieth century as artists and ecologists began to explore how we relate to our sonic environments. Schafer and Westerkamp were at the forefront, urging us to listen—to birds, to machines, to silence. Their work reminds us that sound is a record of our collective behavior and a reflection of our values.
In Western culture, sight has dominated our perception for centuries. Schafer wrote, “God had been perceived as sound or vibration up until the Renaissance, when in the West, the ear gave way to the eye.” In today’s hyper-visual world, deep listening becomes an act of resistance—one that opens us to new ways of knowing.
We are all born with the capacity for deep listening. It’s the constructs of time, language, and distraction that mute it. But it’s never too late to tune back in.
If we begin to listen—truly listen—to one another, to our environments, to the sounds between the sounds, we may find a collective transformation for the good of all life on earth: empathy. Harmony. Awareness.
In a time of climate crisis, cultural division, and personal disconnection, listening might be one of the simplest—and most profound—acts of healing we have left.
Listening Across Scales: Individual, Cultural, Planetary
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From my own practice to Campbell’s relational approach, Petrenko’s embodied methods, and Westerkamp’s humility of listening, we see a framework emerging:
Scale | Practice | Impact |
Individual | Daily sit and listen | Builds presence, self-awareness |
Community | Open listening in dialogue | Fosters empathy and inclusion |
Ecological | Soundwalks, soundscape recordings | Encourages stewardship and rights of place |
Global/Cultural | Acoustic design, policy | Supports healing environments where life thrives |
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Tuning Back In: A Creative Path Forward
Listening, as a radical and necessary act, is accessible. Here’s how it can look on the ground:
Ear-cleaning exercises: Schafer’s classic prompts—close your eyes and notice every sound, from footfalls to passing cars .
Soundwalks: Walk quietly, pausing to notice what shifts when you step into stillness—wind, bird calls, distant human sounds.
Non-verbal vocalization: As Sasha encourages—hum, whistle, chant, scream—in nature or community. Let the bodies speak.
Soundscape documentation: Record and compare natural soundscapes over years—birdlife frequency, wind patterns, human intrusions—mirroring Krause’s forest archive.
Public conversation: Gather to listen together—emerging from silence into spoken reflection, opening the door to shared empathy and care.
A Reminder To Listen
Returning to our bodies, to our sensation is incredibly necessary in the world that we live in today, a world defined by domination, materialism, technology. There is great strength in listening with presence, intuition, interconnection. No distractions. Just here, now, every part of it.
Our bodies, our earth has been telling us what we need, what she needs. But we have forgotten how to listen. What makes a good listener. We do not always have verbal language made of words in common with the beings that we share life on earth with, but they are communicating to us sensually. We can learn so much about a body, an ecosystem, a society, and a planet in the sounds that it makes.
References
Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. Agosto Foundation, 2005,
Krause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little, Brown and Company, 2012.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World: The Soundscape & Our Environment. Knopf, 1977.
Najafi Ghezeljeh, Tahereh, et al. “Effects of Nature Sounds on Sleep Quality Among Patients Hospitalized in Coronary Care Units: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial.” Nursing and Midwifery Studies,
vol. 7, no. 1, July 2018, fabsoor.edu/4310.
“Effects of Nature Sounds on the Attention and Physiological and Psychological Relaxation.” ScienceDirect,
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