creativity / sustainability

Experimental sound art and environmental preservation meet through the actions and publications of EcoSono. We create conduits for the expression of free imagination through new media, pursuing commonalities between innovative musical creation and ecological awareness.

EcoSono challenges social assumptions about music by encouraging sonic nonconformity. We embrace a creative philosophy of human expression in symbiosis with the spaces that surround us -- imaginative multimedia sound art for a sustainable future.

Projects include interactive ecologies, human-computer-environment interaction, ecoacoustics, and experimental multimedia.

upcoming and recent actions

Tibet audio mapping project
Collaboration with UVA Tibet Center, July/August 2011

Mexico's Citlaltepetl Volcano Guitar/Mountaineering adventure
Colin McAllister "Albus/Ater"
December 2010-May, 2011

EcoSono Institute, Caribbean Sea and in Puerto Rico, St. Kitts, Barbados, Grenada, Curacao, Bonaire, and Aruba
May 27-June 10, 2010

Oceans/Elements concert at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, USA as part of the "Realizing our Sustainable Future" Common Theme
March 24, 2010, 7:30pm Ford Howard Hall, UW-Green Bay Campus.

EcoSono works with the World Wildlife Fund to protect polar bears!
15% of our income goes to WWF to help this important organization protect the Arctic polar bear and WWF's other causes.
Contribute directly to WWF here.

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EcoSono T-shirts

click here for a close-up

available now

agents against agency DVD

This is a compelling selection of art that is both engaging to the ears and to the eyes.”
Alexandra Gardner,
New Music Box

Agents Against Agency explores the power of emergent systems and human group improvisation in dialog with nature. Each piece on this DVD decenters human individualist expression -- i.e. "agency" -- in an interesting way. The collection opens artistic perception to phenomena of emergence and improvisation, exposing us to dynamic and spontaneous forms of beauty, in collaboration with nature.

featuring 12-dog Cycle, Christopher Burns, Matthew Burtner, Ted Coffey, David Dinnell, Emergence Collective, EMMI, Rosalind Hall, IMRG, MICE, Pinko Communoids and Yuri Spitsyn

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Agents Against Agency at Technosonics XII --"Light"
Ted Coffey and Aaron Henderson's "Parabolic Fountain Music" and Christopher Burns/David Dinnell's "Before the Seiche" will be featured at the Technsonics XII Festival, September 23, 2011

Ted Coffey's "Parabolic Fountain Music" installed in Pittsburg as part of "On a Lucky Day a Surprising Balance of Forms and Spaces Will Appear" at the University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery, September 8-October 21.

Agents Against Agency at Black Mountain College: Michael Straus and Matthew Burtner perform music by Burtner, Christopher Burns and Ted Coffey
October 8, 2011

EcoSono Institute Caribbean Sea -- click here to see pictures from our recent adventure!

Trinidad Pitch Lake recording (Kiran, Vanessa)

EcoAcoustics: The World Song: Matthew Burtner featured on "Here On Earth, Radio Without Borders"
"Lava, wind, sand, ice, snow and occasional radio frequencies: this is the stuff out of which Matthew Burtner creates his soundscapes. A native of Alaska, Burtner makes wildly evocative compositions inspired by the natural environment." - Jean Feraca

order now and download free ringtone

MICE World Tour CD

EcoSono presents the global circumnavigation tour of the Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble (MICE). Traveling 30,000 miles by ship around the world, MICE performed an ambitious series of concerts engaging with diverse environments and cultures of the world. MICE employs interactive acoustics and a networked human/computer ensemble to create deep collaborations between ecologies, human musicians and computer systems. This album features select compositions from the tour.

2/10/10: Sandprints reached #19 on the Indie Music.com Electronica Charts!

Sandprints featured in The WIRE, Adventures in Modern Music, U.K.
listen to the radio show here:
http://thewire.co.uk/articles/3050/

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EcoSono in The WIRE, U.K.

Susanna Glaser of The WIRE lists the MICE World Tour album among her top 10 albums of 2009.

Reviews of "MICE World Tour"

"Curious and striking…could serve as a healing music, so relaxing, soothing, yet elevated and artistically sounding a playful note. It is inspired and exhilarating. The use of natural sounds is not cliche and nothing is “dance/ambient", despite the computer drones or percussion rhythms. The sounds push and push and swing slowly and relax there. Folk and jazz weave themselves among the sensitive natural soundscapes, and folklore yields to sounds, voices and samples. Yet no music in the traditional sense can be heard here. Rather, an impressive audio noise builds, one that casts its spell and displaces any crisis, any stress. There is no kitsch harmony, no release, and no commonplace chumming. MICE plays real, real music for the mind and body."
- Volkmar Mantei, Ragazzi Magazine, Germany

“MICE have played all around the world, using their laptops and a variety of instruments and sound sources… sand sources even. Sandprints has a nice, poppy touch to it… an electro-dance piece with great childlike rhythms. Great. 'World Strings' processes all sorts of string instruments together in a nice piece. Quite a varied album."
- FdW, Vital Weekly in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Reviews of "Signal Ruins"
" Matthew Burtner plays with beauty, coolness and space. Halfway between chamber music and sound sculpture! Dialogues, modulations, swirl, noise, dissonance, metallic roar, crackle: nothing can break the expressive unity."
-Sonhors e-Zine, Rennes, France, April 2009

"there is a strong sense of circular causality, the players and instruments, now strewn with tin foil, colluding or at least co-constituting each other in the seemingly blind surge into a dissonant, almost ecstatic anti-chorus of metallic shrieking, stresses, and crackle...a most trenchant experience in ritual."
- Max Schaefer, Further Noise, London, UK
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