Melissa Pons: Sound Series Episode I

What happens when we tune into sound to make sense of our world? How might noticing sounds and silences tell us more about place?

In this episode, Charlotte and I speak with Melissa Pons. Melissa is a field recordist and award-winning sound designer based in Portugal. Throughout her years of practice, she has independently released field recording albums, music compositions upon commission and her work has been streamed and featured in several media, like the BBC, NPR, The Guardian and Bandcamp Daily. Her personal work orbits around the more-than-human world and our complex relationship with it, and wild animals are a big source of inspiration for thinking, listening, writing, making music and the landscapes she seeks. Currently she’s working as a curator and podcast producer at the streaming platform earth.fm and works seasonally with sound design for audio dramas at Hemlock Creek Productions. We discuss:

🥥 How sound forces us to slow down, to take time to notice, in ways that photos cannot, creating a different kind of embodied experience;

🥥 How sounds tell stories of what is there and what is no longer there, which provides data that we aren't used to noticing;

🥥 The relationship between people and place to sound, and the stories these tell.

This is the first episode in our two-part series on sound. We hope that educators will consider sound over written text as means of learning, feeling, and expression.

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