1 Sensing the Alice Holt Forest Anna Xambó Sedó (
[email protected]) – Senior Lecturer in Sound and Music Computing / Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London Description This data-driven live coding performance explores natural soundscape recordings from the Alice Holt Forest, UK, captured continuously over the course of a year via a custom-built audio streamer and uploaded to the Freesound database. The central enquiry is whether patterns in forest soundscapes can be linked to climate change, using acoustic ecology and live coding to highlight their interconnection. Are species' sounds diminishing? Do environmental noises dominate? Are there other acoustic markers tied to climate shifts? The performance uses MIRLCa, a self-developed SuperCollider extension that combines AI and music information retrieval (MIR) techniques to retrieve and manipulate sounds from Freesound in real time. This performance is part of the broader project, “Sensing the Forest: Let the Forest Speak using the Internet of Things, Acoustic Ecology, and Creative AI,” (sensingtheforest.github.io) funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Our vision is to emphasise listening as a method to engage with the forest ecosystem. Connecting people to the forests through soundscapes has the potential to foster emotional and intellectual engagement with environmental issues. The use of off-grid technologies to record the source sounds also makes a point as a model of sustainability for data-driven artistic interventions. From this performance, we hope that the live-coding community and audience will be curious about the *Sensing the Forest* project and explore their resources and artistic outcomes for potential inspiration. Both audio recordings and the DIY audio streamers technology are openly accessible for others to adapt and use. Technical requirements • Projection needs : HDMI (1 screen). • Audio output: XLR stereo. • One table (2 metres x 1 metre aprox) and depending on the height of the table, one chair. • A strong Wi-Fi network if possible. The performance cannot work without internet. • A power strip next to the table. Links to audio/video This solo performance was presented at the International Conference of Live Coding 2025 (May 2025) and a video will be released soon. Below is a list of three relevant live-coding solo
2 performances by the same performer using the self-built tool MIRLCa with links to their documentation webpages: • (un)pack. I2MT Inaugural Concert, University of Nottingham, UK. November 30, 2023. Video: https://vimeo.com/896211202 • Ceci n’est pas une usine. +RAIN Film Fest, Universitat Pompeu Fabra/Sonar+D, Barcelona, Spain. June 14, 2023. Video: https://youtu.be/IQHcSbkJK5k • 4 boxes. Peforming Critical AI I: feedback, noise, corpus, code*. MusAI conference, Cafe OTO, London, UK. November 27, 2022. Video: https://youtu.be/eGSjD-K3bg4 Acknowledgments This research is part of the Sensing the Forest project, which has received funding from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/X011585/1, AH/X011585/2). The MIRLCa project was funded by the EPSRC HDI Network Plus Grant (EP/R045178/1). Biographies Anna Xambó is an experimental electronic music producer and researcher. Biased for being passionate about extreme digital minimalism and a past performer on bass guitar, she likes to explore the boundaries of digital sound focusing on low frequencies, compulsive rhythms, and noisy textures. Her research and practice concentrate on creating sound and music computing systems. To date, she has released four solo albums: "init" (Carpal Tunnel, 2010), "On the Go" (Carpal Tunnel, 2013), "H2RI" (Pan y Rosas, 2018) and "detuning a tuning" (Carpal Tunnel, 2023). She is a Senior Lecturer in Sound and Music Computing at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. She is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project “Sensing the Forest: Let the Forest Speak using the Internet of Things, Acoustic Ecology and Creative AI" (2023-2025) and has also led the EPSRC HDI Network Plus funded project “MIRLCAuto: A Virtual Agent for Music Information Retrieval in Live Coding” (2020-2021). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: owner/author(s). Web Audio Conference WAC-2025, November 19–21, 2025, Paris, France. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
