I'm giving a talk next week as part of the excellent-sounding Hearing Connections, an evening of lectures on sonification and networks. It's part of a series of events at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the 200-year-old establishment that Faraday and Medawar once called home. So, no pressure then.

I'll be discussing the relationships between sound and ecosystems, giving a whistle-stop tour of emergence, nested hierarchies and complexity, via Wolfram and Stockhausen, and hopefully culminating in a demo of some exciting new multi-level simulation work that I've been developing.

Here's the abstract:

What does a concerto have in common with a coral reef? The answer is that both are made up of nested hierarchies, in which an individual on one layer contains a population of the one below. An ecosystem comprises of multiple species, each of which contains multiple communities, made up of multiple individuals -- and an individual is itself an ecosystem of organs, cells and microbes. Likewise, a concerto comprises of movements, which comprise of parts, which comprise of notes and harmonies.

This talk is a brief tour around the relationships between music and ecology, and how their similarity can be used as a fruitful way to illuminate both our scientific and artistic practices.

• Can translating a real ecosystem into sound reveal hidden properties to us?
• Can the dynamics of an ecosystem be thought of as creative, or teach us about creativity?
• Can there be a single set of simple rules that unify all of these levels collectively?

Hearing Connections runs from 7pm on Tuesday 15 November.
More information and tickets on the Royal Institution's website.

In a couple of weeks' time, I'll be talking about AtomSwarm at the SpACE-Net International Spatial Audio workshop (University of York, Wednesday 23rd January) and its usage within a 5.1 surround environment, featuring a 5.1 performance with the latest version of the software.

One of the keynote addresses is by Chris Watson, who's been putting soundfield microphones and 5.1 technologies to extraordinary use in his field recordings. I was lucky enough to catch Chris giving a recording workshop as part of FACT's New Tools series, which has since turned out to be invaluable - so expect good things.