Acoustic Ecology & Bioacoustics
Alongside his work as a composer and media artist, Garth Paine is an acoustic ecologist whose research applies field recording, sound analysis and machine listening to understand and protect natural habitats. His research crosses art–science boundaries, repurposing scientific recording techniques into musical works and bringing artistic listening practices into ecological monitoring.
Paine contributed field recordings of biophony, geophony and anthrophony to the Community Environmental Listening Project, an initiative that trains people in three modes of listening — Passive, Directed and Active — to build deeper connections with their local ecosystems. The project's goal is to foster environmental stewardship and climate awareness through community-based listening practices, with an ambition of reaching one billion people listening to their local environment by 2050.
Paine co-directs the Acoustic Ecology Lab in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, alongside Professor Sabine Feisst of the School of Music, Dance and Theatre. The lab explores environmental listening, soundscape ecology and creative place-making — combining field recording, data sonification and community engagement to study how sound reveals the health and character of an ecosystem.
Paine was a key contributor to Team Limelight, which won the top award in the $10M XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The team developed bioacoustic recording devices — dropped onto the forest canopy by drone — that capture sound, imagery, and environmental samples to measure biodiversity. Paine's expertise in acoustic ecology shaped the bioacoustic recorders used to analyse species density from the resulting soundscapes, turning raw recordings into actionable measures of rainforest health.
Listen(n) is an ongoing body of research focused on acoustic ecology through field recording and community building. It draws on Paine's long history of composing musical works directly from field recordings, treating the recordist's relationship to place as both a scientific dataset and a compositional resource.
Paine's broader practice includes cataloguing and classifying endangered soundscapes and soundmarks — sounds at risk of disappearing due to habitat loss, urbanisation or species decline — often with volunteer participation from the communities who live alongside them. This work connects to wider initiatives such as Ear to the Earth, combining artistic and environmental approaches to sound through exhibitions, recordings and symposia.
Recordings and analysis from this research have also been repurposed into public-facing immersive listening experiences — including sessions presented in ASU's Wellness Dome — bringing the sounds of remote ecosystems to general audiences as both relaxation and environmental awareness.