Conference Agenda

This poster examines how contemporary composition constructs climate urgency through sonic structure. Building on Alexander Rehding’s notion of a “sense of urgency” in ecomusicology, I ask: How is urgency acoustically produced within musical materials? Focusing on Julia Wolfe’s unEarth and my data-driven sonification work The Lost Forest, I argue that contemporary climate compositions sonically stage extractivism and responsibility through text, differing voices, and environmental sonification.

In unEarth, a three-movement piece for orchestra and chorus, Wolfe juxtaposes adult and children’s voices to dramatize ecological responsibility and accountability across generations. The first movement centers on the flood as a planetary phenomenon that defies national borders. The second movement begins with the word “tree” sung in multiple languages, foregrounding ecological universality before introducing Emily Dickinson’s poem “Who Robbed the Woods”. As the soprano articulates the confessional line “I robbed the woods-the trusting woods”, the surrounding choral texture expands this private culpability into a collective action. In the third movement, adult voices articulate terms such as “fragmentation, disintegration, devastation” while a children’s choir sings words of hope “conversation, reforestation, simplification”. The recurring “-ion” suffix produces a rhythmic-linguistic cadence that sonically binds destruction and restoration. Without one, the other cannot. Through vocal layering and registral contrast, Wolfe transforms extractivism into an audible intergenerational tension.

In The Lost Forest, I sonify global deforestation data sourced from GlobalForestWatch.org, mapping forest-loss metrics onto timbral density and harmonic saturation in Ableton Live. Taking recordings of rain, wildfire, and forest ambience construct an immersive ecological soundscape, while excerpts from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” frame the ethical tension between awareness and action. Here, urgency emerges not from narrative alone but from the progressive thickening of sonic texture as data accumulates, rendering extractivism perceptible as an acoustic overload.

Together, these works demonstrate that climate-oriented compositions do more than symbolize crisis: they sonically generate urgency through environmental processes and decomposition itself. By reconfiguring musical voice beyond the solely human—transforming text, data, and soundscape into agents of ecological consciousness—these compositions invite listeners to perceive their environment as dynamically implicated in planetary responsibility.