3rd Advisory Board Meeting
Photo: From left-right top-down, Danielle Grimsey, Anna Xambó, Peter Batchelor, Leigh Landy, Luigi Marino, and Louise Fedotov-Clements.
We had our 3rd Advisory Board (AB) Meeting on 27th November 2024. This meeting aimed to present the updates of the project to the AB and seek their feedback. We discussed the three work packages and where we are at the moment.
WP1: Artistic audio ecology intervention concerning forests and climate data
We started with WP1 giving updates on the streamers, customised data logger, multichannel sound installation, and summer school.
Streamers: Luigi presented an overview and status of the two audio streamers. In his last field trip this past week, Luigi changed the angle of the solar panel of Streamer I (natural soundscape) as per George’s recommendation to accommodate the winter’s sun - this is a common practice among the Forest Research scientists. Streamer I has been generally working fine due to being in a meadow with no trees’ shades and facing south. For Streamer II, Luigi presented all the difficulties of making it work under the canopy 24/7/365. Luigi has faced several challenges including the corrosion of the microphones due to the environmental humidity, and the perils of the kids when the streamer was at their hand’s reach. We all agreed that we should recognise that these systems might not work due to being solar-powered. Another novelty is that Luigi has been polishing the streamers’ log received once a day by email, and now the battery voltage value is also sent. The AB praised Luigi’s work and wondered about the transferability of these systems to other environments and by other users. Luigi is planning to release 3D models, code and tutorials soon to allow others to adapt it to their needs.
Customised data logger/Featured sound installation: Pete started summarising the customised data logger led by Mike to read the environmental data to understand the carbon balance of the forest. This data logger measures air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, photosynthetically active radiation, net radiation and carbon dioxide concentration. We created a web server to collect and transmit these values via JSON files and a PureData web client to make it easier to map it to sounds. This has allowed Pete to develop his sound installation.
Pete then presented the updates of his solar-powered sound installation, a 16-channel installation using suspended speakers that was premiered in June 2024 during the summer school and is live for one year in the Alice Holt Forest reading real-time values and mapping them to sounds. The system is solar-powered using a model of solar panels recommended by Luigi and a 12V leisure battery. Pete described how the system works with a timer switch that schedules the system to work from 11am until 5pm as a tradeoff for making the system work autonomously and the visitor centre’s opening times. Pete also described all the work to make the system waterproof using a wooden box for the electronics built by Max and the Forestry England team and covered with waterproof material as well as using a waterproof junction box designed as an outdoor electrical box. The mappings include relative humidity mapped to multichannel soundscapes suggestive of forest ‘dryness’ vs ‘wetness’; net radiation mapped to drones which suggest ‘energy’; and CO2 mapped to ‘breathing’ sound — slower breathing = greater CO2 uptake.
The AB congratulated Pete for this achievement. Louise asked questions related to how we communicate to the visitors about the processes involved e.g. mappings, and liveness of the data. Pete outlined our plans to improve the signage in collaboration with Forestry England and the use of QR codes to point to online web pages with further information. The elephant in the room of how the sound installation maps to climate change was also discussed if it only reads real-time data. Pete recognised the challenge but is in his plans to incorporate historical data since 2,000 provided by Mike, which were recorded in a nearby place. To distinguish the differences within the piece according to the weather, Louise suggested getting access to several recordings. This should be possible once we get Paula’s audio streamer working with stability. Leigh commented on the great value of the PureData patch and questioned how we are capturing the visitors’ engagement and reactions. The broader picture (and elephant in the room) of communicating how the artistic work connects with the political agenda of climate change is something that we are trying to get our heads around. Pete recognised that there is a limit to what can be conveyed in the installation on its own and that the website should give follow-up/complementary information. Danielle suggested having a promotional leaflet for the visitors and Nick was in favour of adding QR codes.
Summer school: Pete summarised how the summer school went. The last time we met with the AB we were in the middle of the online seminars and organising the summer school and exhibition. This time, we could reflect on how it went. The summer school and exhibition were successful from our perspective because we achieved the challenging goal of working together towards a site-specific exhibition where different voices manifested artistically on how sound and the arts can communicate about climate change. The 2-day summer school was intense, included a keynote by Luigi on Arts, the forest, and tangential relationships and culminated with the opening of the ephemeral 4-hour exhibition curated by Pete and Hazel with the help of the Sensing the Forest Summer School Team and the Sensing the Forest Summer School Participants. Pete gave a brief of the feedback gathered on the day, with appraisal from the visitors but with only 29% reporting an increase in their knowledge on climate change after visiting the exhibition. This is food for thought for us. Shuouang is producing a video as an output of the exhibition that can be used as a tool for reflecting on this connection and inviting viewers to visit Alice Holt. We have also identified some common themes across the installations that we would like to promote on the online version of the website.
The AB posed questions related to the artists’ work processes and artistic documentation. Louise was curious about the process of working with the artists from proposals to reality. Pete mentioned the high quality of all the works, and we described the efforts made by the team to get the artists to be familiar with the site from afar. During our team’s field trips, we created an Exploration of the Willows Green Trail for the summer school art exhibition that was handy, and we allocated the installations in advance considering the artists’ expectations and needs. Forestry England offered constant and invaluable help to make the projects a reality. The summer school seminars were also designed to provide different perspectives on designing a sound installation to be displayed in the Alice Holt Forest. Leigh was impressed by the pitches from the participants and is looking forward to Shuoyang’s video. Leigh also commented on the importance of documenting, and how we are making it relevant to the artists. Pete commented that it is a learning process, we are still learning how to communicate.
WP2: Community science intervention with forests and climate data
We then moved to present the status of WP2, which has officially started in August 2024. We gave updates on the DIY tree talker, the hackathon, and what’s next.
DIY tree talker: Mahmoud summarised the work that Krishna, himself and Subhash are doing on the hardware side of the prototype. They are working on the first DIY tree talker hardware unit that will then be replicated 4-6 times, depending on the costs. The prototype is based on Raspberry Pi, is solar-powered to a certain extent, and it incorporates air temperature, humidity and soil moisture sensors. Adding a sap flow sensor is under evaluation due to the high costs and complexity of setting it up.
Hackathon: Mahmoud highlighted the key points of the hackathon that was held in Edinburgh on 12-13 November at the headquarters of the Forest Research Northern Research station. We have published two blog posts about it: Day 1 and Day 2. These two days were important to secure a think-tank space to discuss the development of the prototype. The audiovisual mappings will be another challenge that will be key to the success of communicating the connection of the audiovisual data with climate change. We shared the unanimous conclusion from the hackathon that representing what a happy/sad tree is can convey this connection.
The AB had questions on the interdisciplinarity of the project and the nature of this WP. Louise asked about the type of conversations with Forest Research. Mahmoud replied that George gave very important advice on how to implement certain aspects of the tree talker. Leigh was surprised about this WP and wondered how this got integrated into WP1 and into the broader narrative. Although WP1 and WP2 explore differently the same problem, we should make sure that we share the results using a cohesive narrative.
User study: I gave a summary of the forthcoming user study once we get the units built. We hope to recruit 6 participants in the UK to test the custom-made tree-talker prototype from home. The study is expected to last for 3 months (likely February-April 2025). We will meet online four times (1h/session) via a Zoom call with the group of participants. We hope to gain essential insights that could shape the future
implementation of the tree talker.
WP3: Public conversations and debate
We had also time to discuss the status of WP3, which lasts for the entire 24 months of the project related to the website, public engagement and publications output.
Website & Media: The website is at the core of this project. We try to share all that we do through blogging, videos, etc. We started to track visitors on 29.10.2023. Since April we have tripled the visits from 1.4K visitors from 60 different countries and 385 different cities to 4.1K visitors from 71 different countries and 673 different cities.
Public engagement: so far we have done 3 external (CHIME, ADC, Aix-Marseille University) and 2 internal presentations at QMUL about the project. We have published 17 videos so far (9 seminar series videos, 7 summer school videos, 2 StF presentations and 1 demo) plus other videos related to documentation of the summer school. We have 47 blog posts published so far. We expect more content to be published on the developments of the different technologies. We also hope to start releasing relevant code soon. We have a mailing list with 13 members, our YouTube channel has 12 subscribers, and our Instagram account has 46 followers.
Publications output: We are a bit behind the original schedule. We discuss the difficulty of developing technologies and so the publications get delayed for this reason. The AB acknowledges that this pattern is common. There are 3 undergraduate students working on their final projects on Sensing the Forest-related topics, Alex, Ning, and Stanley, which is fantastic. We have recently announced four topics at a master level as well. Xinyue will be working on mappings from weather sensors to sound.
Final general feedback & discussion
We had a final discussion with the AB about how to measure/demonstrate a successful AHRC-funded research project and when it ends.
Leigh commented that academic outputs tend to get delayed, but he is more worried about the artistic outputs and the website material. Leigh insisted that WP3 has a key role in putting it all together and that documenting well the work should be prioritised always connecting to the project’s vision of raising public awareness of climate change. The effort now should be on putting things together holistically. The AB can help devise a strategy keeping in mind that we need to be practical and realistic. Beyond the academic outputs, we should not forget about the societal aspects. The AB can help with any worries we may have.
Louise commented that we should showcase the work for external visibility review and recognition. The questions that we should consider include how to increase the visibility and what are the burning elements that we want to achieve in the proposed framework. Louise suggested finding different narratives. For example, the participatory design component of WP2 can bring a new, complementary narrative.
We all agreed that the development phase is transitioning to the narrative/documentation phase and this should be reflected on where we put our efforts now. The project should be transferable, as well. The final words of the AB were very positive, congratulating the team for all the great work.
This was the last “programmed” AB meeting. However, we discussed with the AB that we might meet again, and we could prepare an interim report in the next 1-2 months to share with the AB to discuss and one more meeting might be useful. Thank you to Louise, Leigh and Mark for your time, help and valuable feedback!
We had our ABM#3 in a very busy time of the year. Thanks to those who attended!