Brady Marks is a digital media artist whose fascination with sound and concern for our relationship with technology has led her to explore media art and generative soundscape composition. As a graduate of the Interactive Arts program at Simon Fraser University, she was exposed to the World Soundscape Project, Acoustic Ecology and a communication-based framework for sound art. In 2005, she joined the Soundscape Collective at Vancouver Co-operative Radio. In the summer of 2014, Marks developed her interest in slow media embarking on a slow TV-style internet broadcast in collaboration with fellow artist Danielle Gotell.

In 2013, multidisciplinary artist Mark Timmings began to focus his attention on the wetland beside his home on Saturna Island, British Columbia. The initial impetus for the Wetland Project was to heighten his awareness of this environment. It occurred to him that the marsh was a metaphor for the primordial soup constituting the origins of life. He made connections between the activities and vocalizations of the wetland creatures and of his own.

In 2015, Brady Marks and Mark Timmings joined forces to collaborate on the Wetland Project. They realized that the rich soundscape emanating from the marsh is the original form of “background listening.” Soundscapes have the power to “key” our daily routine. Radio, television and internet streams now “bracket the day” with segmented media cycles. They have replaced the natural acoustic environments that once connected us to nature. At a time of growing environmental degradation and estrangement from nature, Marks and Timmings determined that the experience of listening to the wetland soundscape needed to be shared, now more than ever, in the form of an intervention upon the mass medias of radio and internet.

Commenting on the Wetland Project, environmental activist David Suzuki reminds us that, “In cities, we are increasingly isolated from the natural world on which we, as animals, remain utterly dependent for our health and wellbeing. Listening to nature is a necessary part of acknowledging the world around us.”

In Earth Week 2016, recording engineer Eric Lamontagne travelled to Saturna Island to help Marks and Timmings capture the sounds of the wetland. Equipment to make a field recording was set up on a fallen tree at the centre of the marsh. They collected thirty-two continuous hours of data. A twenty-four-hour segment of the recording was selected and processed into a sound loop for broadcast.

The Wetland broadcast premiered on Earth Day 2017 when Vancouver Co-operative Radio dedicated twenty-seven continuous hours of airtime to the soundscape of the Saturna Island marsh recorded in the previous year. It became the longest continuous radio transmission in Canadian history. Co-op Radio listeners embraced the ambient format which layered their experience of time with the circadian rhythm of the wetland wilderness. The broadcast went global for over a thousand more online listeners. The soundscape was superimposed on vernacular spaces—city buses, hair salons and pubs. Listener feedback was unanimous, positive and enthusiastic.

Stream the twenty-four-hour soundscape online, in sync with your local time

The Wetland broadcast commemorates the 50-year anniversary of the founding of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) by Canadian writer and composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University. With Schafer, WSP members Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp initiated the discipline of Acoustic Ecology by studying, through active listening, the relationship between humans and their environment. In the words of composer, radio artist and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp, “learning how to listen and what kind of listener we are in the world … is an environmental question.” She asks us, “How deeply are we engaged with the world through our ears?”

In his 1975 article “FM Radio as Observational Access to Wilderness Environments,” composer, researcher and WSP associate Bruce Davis proposed “wilderness radio” that would broadcast sounds from a remote natural environment to the city. This project would have impacted our relationship to Nature and our conceptualization of radio.

For years man has been pumping his affairs out across the wilderness environment. For once the natural soundscape would be allowed, in its wisdom, to speak back to us.

Four decades after it was first proposed, Brady Marks and Mark Timmings are realizing Bruce Davis’s vision. In sharp contrast to the distractive experience of mainstream commercial radio, the Wetland broadcast transforms listeners’ interaction into one of acute perception. It is, to quote Davis, “a radio service which ‘listens in’ rather than ‘broadcasts out.’” Since most natural life forms operate on a twenty-four-hour cycle, or circadian rhythm, the real time aspect of slow radio allows the listener to be engaged in the full spectrum of the soundscape as it occurs. Apperceptions of time are also transformed, from measured time—the tick-tock of clocks—to a lived, fluid time, a “becoming” of time. An incessant enfolding of time upon itself emerges, time upon time upon time, ad infinitum, without interveners that abstract or represent the experience. It is not the measure of time but the “in-between” in time that matters. One could say that, in the Wetland broadcast, clocks are relinquished altogether, that they are replaced by a richer experience of duration. The broadcast slips into a realm of innate knowledge of the shared biological time between the wild marsh beings and ourselves.

The broadcast has the potential to expose interconnections between the creatures in the wetland and people in their homes, vehicles and workplaces as they go about their everyday activities. It operates as an art-intervention upon the medium of radio that promotes environmental awareness, self-reflexivity and activism. Questions arise: When does sound become noise? When does noise become music? How do airplanes and human activities resonate with the natural soundscape? How do I fit into the sonic environment and how does it affect my daily activities? How can I affect change? While tuning into the Wetland broadcast, listeners’ daily routines are re-enchanted by the rich, holistic, unpredictable sounds issuing from the radio.

The Wetland Project is a beautiful, quietly amazing work of micro-post-geographical art that allows us to be wherever we are and somewhere wonderfully natural and real, simultaneously. It’s an experience I wish everyone could have, and I wish there were more experiences like it.

Listening to the Wetland broadcast is to embark on three layers of experience: “percept,” “affect” and “concept” which strictly correspond to “sensorium,” “body,” and “mind.” In the first instance, the preconscious “percept” engages the subject viscerally; this is followed spontaneously by an “affective” state imprinted on the body; “concepts” are then distilled by the mind. This process is instantaneous. Following this model, applied to the experience of the marsh soundscape, “percepts” transmit via the senses the complexity of wetland life. Here, the “affects” range from relaxation, enchantment and wonder to extremes of fear and astonishment. The sublime power of nature disarms. Immediately, cognition is engaged and “concepts” grip the mind: Bird! Frog! Airplane! Water! Wind!

In this way, art has an inherent potential to emit complex life forces; it has “perceptual,” “affective,” and “conceptual” layers which, in the aesthetic experience of the broadcast, interact with each other intensely. Additionally, two different auditory streams are heard at once: the sounds of the wetland delivered through the radio speakers and the sounds originating in the listener’s immediate physical environment. The result is a concurrently overlapping bipartite soundscape integrated into a single sustained listening experience—a work of art. Radio speakers deliver an augmented reality and become virtual windows opening onto the wetland soundscape. This transformation—from speaker to window—and the primordial, emotional and cultural forces it summons, also shape the piece as art. Following philosopher Martin Heidegger: “the work of art holds open the Open of the world.”