Leah Barclay

University of the Sunshine Coast | USC · School of Business and Creative Industries

Freshwater ecoacoustics is an emerging field that involves underwater audio recordings to detect the presence, location, and density of species in noninvasive and unbiased ways. Conducted long-term, ecoacoustics provides information on biophysical changes and environmental patterns that can advance freshwater conservation. River Listening is an int...

The catastrophic impacts of climate change, vanishing biodiversity, and the rapid deterioration of our global ecosystems require urgent attention and aggressive political action. This article explores a body of interdisciplinary research through a series of ecological sound projects designed to draw attention and awareness to changing ecosystems. T...

Engaging communities in practices of listening to changing ecosystems is the most powerful ways to inspire a presence and connection to place. Ecological sound artists emerging from the acoustic ecology movement have propelled many of the most significant discoveries that have informed the development of ecoacoustics. This chapter introduces a seri...

The Southeast Coast of Australia is internationally acclaimed for its aquatic biodiversity. The region is home to marine life grappling with the consequences of climate change; however, conservation is constrained by limited public awareness and substantial knowledge gaps. Employing hydrophones for non-invasive monitoring of marine environments has...

What roles can music and sound play in driving and enabling sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond? This media article explores, through projects in Indonesia, Australia, and Vanuatu. Read online at https://theacademic.com/how-music-and-sound-can-help-advance-sdgs/

Acidification is a performance for cello and underwater soundscapes created for “Returning to the Gothic Ocean” symposium in 2021. The work explores the past, present, and possible futures of the Great Barrier Reef and is the first collaboration between interdisciplinary sound scholars Leah Barclay and Briony Luttrell. The work draws on ecoacoustic...

Beeyali is a research project exploring new methods for visualising the calls of wildlife on Kabi Kabi Country, the traditional lands, and waters of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. The project brings together Indigenous knowledge, environmental research, emerging technology, photography and sound to visualise wildlife calls using cymat...

Listening to Country was an arts-led research project where, as an interdisciplinary team of practitioner-researchers, we worked with incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to produce a one-hour immersive audio work based on field recordings of natural environments. The project began with a pilot phase in Brisbane Women’s Correcti...

Monitoring freshwater systems can prove difficult. Sampling regimes can influence outcomes by attracting or scaring target taxa and in extreme circumstances can injure the species. Ecoacoustics—an emerging discipline focusing on the ecological investigation of environmental sound—can overcome these difficulties and provide a continuous data stream...

Research shows that prison programs addressing intergenerational trauma and grief, loss of culture and spiritual healing are necessary for incarcerated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Indigenous-led or culturally focused programs receive little attention and limited resourcing in Australia’s prison system compared with mainstream reh...

Although UNESCO has a stated aim to incorporate culture into all development policies, culturally integrated approaches to realising the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are arguably yet to gain widespread traction. Focusing on cultural practices relating to music and sound, this article explores the role of culture and cul...

'Site & Sound: Sonic art as ecological practice' invites audiences to consider the importance of listening as a means towards a better understanding of the urgent and complex environmental issues facing our planet. Whether it be the roar of bushfires; the creak of fragmenting glaciers; silence where there used to be bird song; or the hum of cicadas...

The achilleas heel of restorative justice rests on a dominant narrative: “What’s said in Circle, stays in Circle”. While there is good reason for this mantra, at the same time, it limits the potential for restorative justice to create a social echo. This paper will draw on Indigenous practices in Canada and Australia that are creating new forms of...

[Soundscape – The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, Volume 17, 2019]. Listening to Country is an arts-led research project exploring the value of acoustic ecology in promoting cultural connection, maintenance and wellbeing among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and groups who experience separation from family, culture and Country. The...

Volume 17 of ‘Soundscape - The Journal of Acoustic Ecology’ celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology and profiles the incredible diversity of acoustic ecology practice and research happening across Australia. The journal opens with an editorial from Dr Leah Barclay followed by three feature articles which showcas...

Climate change is no longer just a scientific issue—the world’s leading scientists have clearly outlined the facts and necessary actions for decades. This is a cultural crisis that requires interdisciplinary action to mobilise communities and inspire collective action. This chapter seeks to examine two creative works resulting from the author’s res...

The key to this provocation is the spectrogram with its beautiful bands of colours. This image represents 44 days of recorded acoustic data which has been subject to falsecolour imagery in the same way that satellite images are represented. The soundscape was captured to help ecologists understand the migration patterns of the endangered North Atla...

Listening to our surrounding acoustic environment reveals the social, cultural and ecological layers of a place and time. Our soundscape is constant, immersive and dynamic – it reveals embodied information impossible to discover with other senses. The act of environmental field recording in the wilderness has been a long fasciation of both artists...

Knowledge that can be gained from acoustic data collection in tropical ecosystems is low‐hanging fruit. There is every reason to record and with every day, there are fewer excuses not to do it. In recent years, the cost of acoustic recorders has decreased substantially (some can be purchased for under US$50, e.g., Hill et al. 2018) and the technolo...

Climate change is arguably the most critical issue of the 21st century. The evidence is clear, with 97% of scientists agreeing that human influence is the dominant cause of global warming (Cook et al. 2013). However climate change is not simply a scientific concern, it is a cultural crisis that requires interdisciplinary action and integration with...

This book is about music here in the world and now at this time. It is a lively and informative pleasure, a diversity of wonderful ideas and observations, a pointer to the ways that sound and music let us interact with the world. It is required reading for every composer, every student, everyone who is interested in music today. It is not a single...

As locative media and augmented reality swell into mainstream culture, this article traces my creative explorations with locative sound, stretching across a decade of practice. The featured projects are all embedded into larger research initiatives, which are designed to explore the value of acoustic ecology as a socially engaged, accessible and in...

Biosphere Soundscapes is a large-scale interdisciplinary project working with local communities to explore the value of acoustic ecology in understanding rapidly changing environments. The project is delivered through immersive residencies with artists and scientists, research laboratories, and a diversity of creative projects spanning four contine...

This article is an intergenerational dialogue between two Australian sound artists, Ros Bandt and Leah Barclay. Bandt and Barclay have collaborated in various capacities over the last decade. Bandt mentored Barclay through her early work in acoustic ecology and the pair have since conceived and developed multiple projects ranging from large-scale o...

The recent emergence of the interdisciplinary fields of ecoacoustics and sound studies has resulted in a dramatic increase in both artists and scientists engaged in the practice of audio field recording for a diversity of purposes. The recording techniques used vary substantially reflecting differing loci of interest. We argue that both fields coul...

River Listening is an interdisciplinary research project exploring the cultural and biological diversity of global river systems through sound. The project examines the creative possibilities of accessible and noninvasive recording technologies to monitor river health and engage local communities in the conservation of global river systems. River L...

Zameen is a Hindi word meaning ‘land’. It is a word that has become synonymous with the damming of the Narmada River in North India. To date over 30 million people have been internally displaced, and the resulting Indigenous activist movement – the Narmada Bachao Andolan – has become one of the most successful and sophisticated in contemporary hist...

Acoustic ecology is a dynamic interdisciplinary field that studies the social, cultural, and ecological aspects of our environment through sound. In the context of UNESCO biosphere reserves that seek to reconcile the conservation of cultural and biological diversity, acoustic ecology offers valuable tools to understand environmental and cultural ch...

Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the...

The Listen n project 1 is an interdisciplinary media arts project, investigating the pristine acoustic ecologies of Southwest deserts of America. Establishing the largest database of ambisonic and stereo field recordings of the Southwestern landscapes of the United States, the Listen n project is designed to not only archive sound, but to explore h...

Biosphere Soundscapes (BioScapes) is a large-scale interdisciplinary art project underpinned by the creative possibilities of soundscape ecology, a rapidly evolving field of biology used to record environmental patterns and changes. This project is designed to inspire communities across the world to listen to the environment and re-imagine the pote...

The hosting of the Balance-Unbalance 2013 International Conference in a UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserve was seen as a strategic opportunity to align the objectives and activities of Biosphere Reserves to the aspirations of Balance-Unbalance.

River Listening is a practice-led research collaboration between independent artist Dr. Leah Barclay and the Australian Rivers Institute to explore new methods for acoustically monitoring three Queensland river systems: the Brisbane River, the Mary River and the Noosa River. The project involves the establishment of site-specific listening labs to...

The Listen(n) Project explores remote embodied experiences of natural environments through sound. It focuses on community awareness, and sustainability, studying how rich digital media environments and acoustic ecology practices can be used to broaden discussion about the value of precious, yet fragile environments. It explores how virtual ecologic...

Biosphere Soundscapes is a new interdisciplinary research project based in Australia underpinned by the creative possibilities of acoustic ecology. Acoustic ecology is concerned with the ecological, social and cultural contexts of our sonic environments. This project is designed to inspire communities across the world to listen to the environment a...