Presentation at Freesound Day - October 28, 2025
The Freesound Day brought together members of the Freesound community for a full day of talks, listening, and exchange around sound practices connected to Freesound. The event was hybrid: hosted at the Campus Poblenou of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and online.
It was great to see all the different projects around Freeound, which is outlined in the links below (programme and video recordings of the presentations):
Our contribution was a presentation about the two streamers and datasets of automatic recordings. You can find below the abstract of the talk as well as the video.
Sensing the Forest: Exploring Climate Change Through Soundscape Datasets from DIY Streamers at Alice Holt Forest
In this talk, I will present the Sensing the Forest (StF) project, funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, which aims to raise awareness among forest visitors, artists, scientists, and the general public about the vital connection between forests and climate change. Specifically, I will discuss the deployment of two DIY, solar-powered, off-grid audio streamers in Alice Holt Forest, which captured year-long soundscapes as part of an effort to document environmental change. Although the streamers have now completed their mission, their legacy continues through two archived datasets on Freesound—the Natural Soundscape Dataset (12 months) and the Installation Dataset (6 months). These recordings prompt important questions: What can we learn about climate change from a year of forest soundscapes? Is this timespan sufficient to detect long-term environmental shifts? By exploring these questions, the project opens up new avenues for interdisciplinary research and public engagement.
Further reading
- Marino, Luigi (2026) Building DIY Solar-Powered Audio Streamers: A Three-Phase Tutorial Series. Edited by Anna Xambó. Queen Mary University of London. https://doi.org/10.17636/101124743
- Marino, Luigi and Xambó, Anna (2024). Developing DIY Solar-Powered, Off-Grid Audio Streamers for Forest Soundscapes: Progress and Challenges, Proceedings of the CHIME Annual One-day Music and HCI Conference 2024, Milton Keynes, UK.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Frederic Font and the Freesound Team for their constant support to the project, and for the opportunity to give a talk about the streamers. Thanks to the Sensing the Forest Team, especially Luigi Marino (lead of the streamers design and development), Peter Batchelor (lead of the Dendrostream), Mike Bell (lead of the data logger) and the Alice Holt Forest local team for their amazing contributions to the realisation of the two streamers and related datasets.