Bailey Hilgren is a master’s student in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She holds a master’s degree in Historical Musicology from Florida State University and a B.A. in Music and Biology from Gustavus Adolphus College. Bailey’s primary engagement with NMCC has been related to her ongoing research project focused on activist data sonifications and data-driven art pieces that engage with climate science. Her thesis research at FSU explored several case studies including densely layered data-driven multimedia projects, interactive sonification tools housed online, and creative science communication sonifications that are short, easily digestible, and shareable on social media. Bailey is still grappling with questions about the usefulness of the climate sonifications in activating public action, their typical focus on totalizing Anthropocene narratives, and their unusually clear presentation of slow environmental violence within just a few minutes of sound. Though she thought this project was finished when she defended her last thesis, she’s finding that it continues to unfurl in exciting and unexpected ways.
Her current research at UO explores white supremacy as embedded in the construction of the soundscape of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. The project traces the ways that popular environmental conservation discourse, scientific publications, and state and national legislation have constructed and upheld the exclusionary idea of the Boundary Waters as a distinctly silent place. Bailey plans to reformulate this research into a collaborative multimedia project that explores sounds in the Boundary Waters that disrupt the dominant narrative of silent wilderness. She also hopes to extend the thesis into a larger study of sound/music, space, and power.
Her ongoing interests in new materialism and digital humanities continue to delight (and distract!) her. She has been sustained through these several unusual academic terms by going for soundwalks (an excellent Covid-19-specific soundwalk is here: https://newmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Soundwalk-from-Home_Covid19-version.pdf), sewing clothes from thrifted sheets and curtains, and watching cute animal videos.
A rather disjointed smorgasbord of Bailey’s current recommendations for new media or digital resources:
-Brian Foo’s “The Sound of Movement” (and his many other data-driven projects)
-Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
-UO Professor Jon Bellona’s music and media projects
-Milla Tiainen’s body of research on new materialism and (musical) performance studies
-Anahid Kassabian’s Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity
-Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s art (and generally, Forensic Architecture projects)
-The richly sampled collage-style music of The Books