Project Statement

Sound interactions are vital for animal communication, mating, and navigation, but are increasingly masked by anthropogenic noise. Traditional environmental mitigation often ignores the ecological role of sound. This project focuses on Jamaica Bay, New York, a fragmented habitat disrupted by transit networks, to explore a landscape approach that amplifies and protects acoustic cues. Inspired by contemporary composers, the design treats landscape as composition, linking musical harmony with ecological rhythms. Acoustic dissonance is addressed through buffers, topography, and zoning. This project reframes soundscape design as an essential ecological practice, supporting more inclusive, multispecies futures.

Project Narrative

Bioacoustics, the set of natural interactions between species and their sonic environments, is fundamental to healthy ecosystems. These acoustic exchanges shape habitats and support key behaviors in birds, insects, and amphibians, including territorial signaling, mate attraction, pollination, and migratory navigation. Yet anthropogenic noise from roads, aircraft, and other forms of transit disrupts these subtle cues, interfering with communication, foraging, and reproduction. Noise abatement strategies focused on human comfort often fail to address these ecological disruptions.

This project centers on Floyd Bennett Field, a 1,300-acre former airfield in Jamaica Bay, New York. The overall wildlife refuge is increasingly fragmented by infrastructure and impacted by overlapping noise from aviation corridors, highways, and urban development. In the context of Floyd Bennett Field, a landscape-based approach to soundscape design moves beyond mitigation, seeking to amplify and protect ecological sound cues such as songs, calls, rustlings, and tonal patterns that sustain interspecies interaction. While biogenic acoustic disruption in this environment cannot be fully eliminated, it can be strategically reduced through thoughtful design.

Inspired by contemporary composers, the study explores links between harmonic balance in minimalist music and the layered rhythms of bioacoustics systems. By treating landscape design as a form of composition, dissonance is understood not merely as loudness but as ecological conflict arising from frequency clashes, masking, and imbalance. Through spatial interventions such as vegetative buffers, topographic modulation, and zoning, the project works to restore acoustic harmony and reinforce supportive sonic conditions through contextualizing the existing dissonance. Sculpted berms shaped by the airfield's recycled remains create pockets of acoustic refuge, sheltering pollinators and insects from the steady drone of transit noise. Planting zones unfold in a deliberate sequence from woodland to shrubland to wetland, mirroring the site’s shifting soundscape. Species are distributed according to their tolerance for acoustic disturbance, with more sensitive organisms placed in low-exposure zones and more adaptable species situated closer to areas with higher ambient noise. In doing so, the project redefines soundscape design as an ecologically grounded practice, one that actively shapes multispecies urban futures through sound, with Jamaica Bay serving as both site and soundstage.