Deep Assignments #01
Machine Listening present Environments 12, with live multichannel performances from Kate Carr and Amanda Butterworth & Matt Spendlove.
Excited to announce our first event at Apiary studios on June 12th 2025
head to Eventbrite for tickets
Machine Listening Present Environments 12
"Is it difficult to reproduce the sounds of nature?"
Environments 12 is a new, speculative addition to the once-popular Environments series: a sequence of 11 records released between 1969 and 1979 that anticipated a mass-market in mood-altering nature recordings. The work takes the form of a multi-channel audio work, presenting a world in which the environment itself has been updated. In this world, the reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and planetised. Loudspeakers and microphones are laced through the biosphere, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology.
Unfolding across a series of historical, contemporary, and speculative scenes, the work is narrated by an ensemble of vocal performers and their generative voice clones. Together, this more-than-human chorus tells and retells stories of ‘psychologically ultimate seashores’, reef lullabies, natural symphonies designed for zoo enclosures, and large language models for whales and crows. A collection of songs and fables recovered from the ruins of a future history.
Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern, Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focusing on the politics and aesthetics of sound and speech in the age of AI and big data.
https://machinelistening.exposed/
Kate Carr - Live
“Probably the most significant field recordist of contemporary urban Britain…” - The Quietus
Kate Carr’s practice explores the encounters, textures and technologies entangled with field recording using movement, objects and experimental recording techniques. She creates intimate, delicate and hybrid soundworlds which centre the interactions and collectivity which generate soundscapes. She works across composition, performance and installation.
In her live work she is increasingly examining some of the ambiguities of field recording, pursuing a practice which blurs live foley work with field recording techniques. As such her instruments move from scientific rockers, massage guns, bird horns, frog rattles, watering cans to bug clickers in compositions which aim to trouble the associations of authenticity often attached to field recording, versus the sonic fictions of foley work.
https://www.gleamingsilverribbon.com
Amanda Butterworth and Matt Spendlove - Live
Amanda Butterworth is a sound artist, composer and performer exploring sound, space and deep listening. As a composer she works across spatial sound technologies to create active listening experiences that transform the listener’s relationship to space, using sound as an intervention to enliven everyday spaces and multichannel works that reimagine performance spaces and artist/audience dynamics.
Matt Spendlove is an artist from London who creates immersive installations, audiovisual performances and sonic artefacts. Across these situations he explores spatial ambiguity, structural form, waveform materiality and the illusory contours of psychophysics. He combines a preoccupation with emergent behaviour, rule-based repetition and chaotic systems to generate enlivened visual stimuli and shape dubbed out, cracked and reductive sonics into audible geometric form. Through textured intricate production, his shows bring corporeal presence carved out with a minimalist’s scalpel.
Angela McArthur - Q&A
Angela McArthur is an academic & artist based at UCL whose works centre around the aesthetics and theorisation of spatial and environmental sound.