Lecture: Deep Listening: Acoustic Sensing in Natural Habitats

What can be learned through deep sensing of seismic vibrations and elemental disturbances to the interruptions and murmurs of toxic noise embedded in the ambient background, that stem from anthropogenic pressures such as rapid urbanisation, technological acceleration and extractivism? By using sound as an ecological indicator, how might we identify natural ecosystems in states of transformation and modification? Through site-specific field recordings and compositions, The Observatory, STAR Artists-in-Residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, will chart the more-than-human sound worlds, resonating with their rhythms and registering sounds to make visible the acoustic and material properties of specific nature-culture habitats extending into biological and geological realms. Associate Professor Benoit Taisne, NTU Asian School of Environment, will elaborate on infrasound research as a method for detecting volcanic eruptions in the Southeast Asia region through the deployment of infrasound array in Singapore. This setup captures low-frequency atmospheric sounds below the threshold of human hearing, enabling the detection, analysis, and characterisation of infrasound waves caused by natural events with potential to affect Singapore and society in general. This lecture will be moderated by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, with response by Dr Hari Vishnu, Senior Research Fellow at the Acoustic Research Laboratory, NUS.

Tuesday Lecture

9 December 2025, 6:30pm – 8:30pm

The Hall, NTU CCA, Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934

The Climate Transformation: Sustainable Societies Series is organised by members of the Climate Transformation Programme (CTP) Cross-Cutting Theme 1: Sustainable Societies research team, Principal Investigator Professor Ute Meta Bauer, research fellow Joshua Gebert, research associate Ng Mei Jia and research assistant Angela Ricasio Hoten.

Sustainable Societies

Principal Investigator, Professor Ute Meta Bauer (NTU ADM)

Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Laura Miotto (NTU ADM)

Principal Investigator, Professor Dr Thomas Schroepfer (SUTD)

This Lecture Series is supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 3 grant [MOE-MOET32022-0006] for the Climate Transformation Programme.

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Speakers

The Observatory is a band whose music and cultural ethos responds and speaks back to the contemporary afflictions in Singapore and the global milieu. Its current constellation comprises multi-instrumentalists Cheryl Ong, Dharma and Yuen Chee Wai who tread on improvisation, intermedia, experimentation and noise-adjacent territories. In confronting new forms of disorders, The Observatory restlessly turns upon itself to agitate, to comfort and to resist. Drawing on old and new lexicons, The Observatory seeks to bridge artists and expressions. Two decades on, the band’s polymath practice encompasses music and performance; in-person festivals and online radio shows; touring gigs and interdisciplinary exhibitions.

Benoit Taisne is an Associate Professor at the Asian School of Environment and Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU. His current research focuses on the early anticipation of the style and size of volcanic eruptions and utilising infrasound for volcano monitoring. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Geosciences from the Ecole Normal Superieure de Paris, France and obtained his PhD at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France.

Respondent

Hari Vishnu is a Senior Research Fellow at NUS working on underwater acoustic signal processing and machine learning. These are used in a range of applications ranging from bio-acoustics based biodiversity characterization and defense-related scenarios in shallow tropical waters, to polar glaciers where melt-induced cryo-acoustic noise dominates the soundscape. From 2019, he is focusing on the acoustics of melting ice, and undertook field campaigns to Svalbard in the Arctic, and to the Antarctic to study this problem. He also studies distributed acoustic sensing, and acoustics based marine-mammal and reef health monitoring. He obtained his PhD from NTU in 2014 and was a Visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography during 2019-2021.

Moderator

Ute Meta Bauer is a Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU), and Acting Director and Principal Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore). Having served as the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore for over a decade, her work as educator and curator over the past years has focused on Climates. Habitats. Environments. Her current research projects include Climate Transformation Programme: Sustainable Societies Research Cluster (2024–Present), Developing and Evaluating Digital Tools for Participatory Climate Change Mitigation (2025–Present) and previously, Climate Crisis and Cultural Loss (2021–2024).