The Isle of Arden • The Eden Project x Sound and Music
2022 | Creator & Composer
The forest is in danger. Its lands have been stripped bare of the trees, plants, animals and humans that once lived there. Can you help restore the balance?
What is The Isle of Arden?
The Isle of Arden is an interactive online experience, which invites audiences to restore a virtual forest to health by creating a balanced ecosystem.
The player is confronted with a deforested land without humans, plants or animals. By adding seeds, they start to see the landscape change. Too many of one type of seed and we see the effects of monoculture: fire, pests and deforestation. Too little of one plant and we hear the whistling winds and effects of erosion. A balance must be reached to bring the humans and animals back to the land, and to restore the all important weather systems we rely on.
About the project
The Isle of Arden was created as part of Alice Boyd’s work on Sound and Music’s New Voices programme. Alice was granted Sound and Music’s Dimensions Award, which allowed her to collaborate with web and game developer-extraordinaire Tom Halliwell.
Support The Isle of Arden by donating here. 10% of profits will go towards EarthPercent, a charity providing a simple way for the music industry to support the most impactful organisations addressing the climate emergency.
How the music was made
In August 2021, Alice carried out 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, which provides the soundscape for The Isle of Arden.
You can read more about her residency here.
How the web experience was developed
Tom became fascinated with the project brief after initial discussions with Alice, and set to work looking for creative ways to combine the audio data with visual feedback and accessible controls in a web environment. Multiple modern and performant JavaScript frameworks, OpenGL shader language and an experimental and fluid R&D process allowed for creation of a unique and interactive web application, built from the ground up. The final product allows visual assets to respond to frequency data gathered from the project audio in realtime, and game-ified functionality attenuates the multi-layered audio files.
The nerdy jargon part
ThreeJS was used to handle implementation of 3D assets. React and modern React framework NextJS were used to create a performant website that builds static pages for fast delivery to visitors. Tom used Blender 3D to prototype, produce and animate 3D assets.
Listen to the music
In 2022, Alice is releasing an EP of music created on the New Voices programme and inspired by her residency at the Eden Project. It explores our relationship with the natural world and our interconnectedness with everything in it. Follow this link to find out how to listen to it.
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.
