Listening to the More-than-Human into the Night

An immersive day and evening of deep listening, ecological attunement, and expanded perception in the woodlands and river systems of Dartmoor.

This collaborative walkshop with Dr Laura Denning and Jamie House invites participants to experience the landscape as a living field of vibration, rhythm, and communication. Moving through river edges, forest paths, and granite valleys around Shaugh Bridge, we will explore how listening can shift our relationship with the more-than-human world. Laura will guide a series of attunement and deep listening exercises focused on presence, sensory awareness, embodied listening, and ecological relation. Through stillness, movement, and collective listening practices, participants will tune into subtle environmental textures often overlooked within everyday perception.

Jamie will introduce a range of field recording and listening technologies that extend the ear beyond normal human hearing, revealing hidden layers of the landscape. Participants will experience:

• Hydrophones listening beneath the river surface

• Geophones and soil probes revealing subterranean vibrations, root systems, insects, and underground movement

• Contact microphones amplifying arboreal textures, bark resonance, and ant activity within deadwood

• Listening directly in real time to southern wood ant colonies as living subterranean superorganisms, sensing their movement, communication, stridulation and collective vibration within the forest floor

• VLF receivers capturing atmospheric electromagnetic activity and sferics from distant lightning storms

• Ambisonic microphones spatially listening to wind, water, and surrounding soundscapes in three dimensions

• Long-pole canopy listening exploring the movement and resonance of treetops high above the forest floor

• Ultrasonic detectors to listen to bats echolocating at dusk

Together, the workshop explores ecosystems as active sonic communities: where insects, soil, weather, vegetation, electromagnetic fields, and human presence exist as interwoven signal. The day encourages forms of listening that decentralise the human perspective and cultivate ecological sensitivity, curiosity, and environmental empathy.

No prior experience is necessary. Open to artists, walkers, ecologists, sound enthusiasts, and anyone curious about experiencing the living world through expanded modes of listening.

Shaugh Bridge, located on the south-west edge of Dartmoor, Devon, is a key site of temperate Atlantic rainforest (often referred to as Celtic rainforest) in the UK. The ancient oak woodland around the confluence of the Rivers Plym and Meavy is characterised by high humidity, shaded microclimates, and relatively stable, low temperature variation. These conditions support an exceptionally rich epiphytic ecosystem, including abundant rare mosses, liverworts, and lichens, particularly within the steep-sided valley of Dewerstone Wood. This fragmented rainforest habitat forms part of a globally rare biome, where oceanic climate, geology, and ancient woodland continuity combine to produce a deeply layered ecological system. The site offers an ideal context for listening practices that attend not only to audible sound, but to vibration, moisture, growth, decay, and the slow temporal rhythms of a living forest system.

A picnic and refreshment will be provided for all participants, please advise us before of any dietary conditions.

The site has adequate car parking and transport links by bus.

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