Rainforest Reconnect • The Eden Project x Sound and Music
2022 | Creator, Composer & Performer
Rainforest Reconnect - 18th Jan 2022
A live streamed immersive digital experience with the aim of connecting audiences with natural world.
The event focussed on new music created by Alice Boyd that she created after an artist residency at the Eden Project as part of her work on Sound and Music’s New Voices programme.
Rainforest Reconnect was brought to you as part of the Eden Universe – a Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) testbed that has enabled the Eden Project to test whether 5G technologies can enhance the Eden Project customer experience digitally.
Alice’s artist residency at the Eden Project
In August 2021, Alice completed an artist residency at the Eden Project, Cornwall. With help from her mentors and some self-led research, Alice built an Arduino device that detects changes in the electrical current across a plant’s leaves. She then spent time in the Rainforest Biome, collecting musical data from the plants. These changes were translated into musical notes that are played by synthesisers and musical software.
She has used this as the basis of a new EP and interactive educational website as part of her project with Sound and Music’s New Voices programme.
The performance
Alice was joined by five other singers to perform her new music at Rainforest Reconnect. Along with the electronic sound score created with the device above, Alice wrote lyrics, instrumental parts and used archive field recordings, which together tell a story about our relationship with other living things.
The music begins by exploring our disconnect with the natural world, and the imbalance that has arisen from the resource-heavy ways of living we have created. However, it finishes on a note of hope, depicting our interconnectedness with the ecosystems we live in. The lyrics offer that we are not external to the natural world, but in fact another organism within the web of organic and inorganic material flowing around the world. We do not act outside of our environment, but entirely within it.
Credits:
Original music - Alice Boyd
Singers - Alice Boyd, Dazey, Emily Izen Row, Issa, Michelle Karlsson, zha
Project Manager for music - Tom Bevan
Clothing - Lucy & Yak
Guitarist and Cellist on ‘Growth’- James Lloyd Smith
With thanks to Laonikos Psimikakis Chalkokondylis, Will Dutta, Gawain Hewitt, Petia Tzanova, Hanna Tuulikki, Jason Singh, Anne Langford, Luisa Gerstein, Nicole Rochman, Darren Hoare, Tamsyn Lewis, Céline Holman, Sarah Peake and Kate Francis.
Alice Boyd’s music was made possible thanks to Sound and Music’s New Voices programme. New Voices is supported by Arts Council England, Garfield Weston Foundation and PRS Foundation. Thank you also to The Eden Project and Arts Council England’s DYCP programme.
About Sound and Music’s New Voices programme:
Towards the end of 2020, Alice was selected as one of Sound and Music’s New Voices composers for 2020. New Voices is new music organisation Sound and Music’s artist development programme, which supports composers at pivotal stages of their careers to explore new ideas, new sounds and new music. As an artist-first programme, each project is unique from composer to composer and year to year.
Sound and Music support composers over 18 months with coaching, mentoring and a financial grant to create a new piece of work and share it with the world.
