A living, evolving, collaborative online archive of soundscapes from ecosystems around the world: an atlas of auditory ecological memory.

The Ecological Listening Project 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.  

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 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.

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 be a kind of collaborative ecological radio that can be accessed by everyone and updated on an ongoing basis to 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@river-margin.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. When the project officially launches, it will become available online, and we will continue to accept submissions on an ongoing basis. Submissions are open now.

Guidelines

— Spoken word recordings must not exceed ten minutes.

— Field recordings must not exceed twenty minutes.

— 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, 2o24’. Please include the country.

— If you would like to be featured as a contributor on the atlas/radio homepage for the project, please include a short bio as well as your name/moniker and any relevant links you wish to include.