Liz K. Miller: Listening to Trees

The common terminologies used by soundscape ecologists to describe different types of sound are (broadly speaking) animal sounds, human sounds and elemental earth sounds. Liz K. Miller presents her key findings from her thesis to show how these categories fail to capture the soundscape of trees, asking where the sounds made by trees fit into this lexicon and study of sound. Trees are an essential part of the ecosystem but, as yet, have no place in our classification system. Liz presents beautiful soundscapes and field recordings from Blackheath Forest in the Surrey hills and Clocaenog Forest in North Wales, leaving us with the rustling of leaves and creaking of bark alongside birdsong and soaring aeroplanes overhead. Presenting a new category for these familiar yet often overlooked sounds, Liz asks what can we learn from listening to trees. ***Liz K Miller (b. 1983, Hexham) is a London-based audio-visual artist and researcher. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art (BA), Camberwell College of Art (MA), and was a print fellow at the Royal Academy Schools (2013 to 2016). In 2018 she was awarded an AHRC TECHNE scholarship to undertake a practice-based PhD at the Royal College of Art in the School of Arts and Humanities.