Deep Listening: Acoustic Sensing in Natural Habitats 

The Observatory is a band whose music and cultural ethos responds and speaks back to the contemporary afflictions in Singapore and the global milieu. Its current constellation comprises multi-instrumentalists Cheryl Ong, Dharma and Yuen Chee Wai who tread on improvisation, intermedia, experimentation and noise-adjacent territories. In confronting new forms of disorders, The Observatory restlessly turns upon itself to agitate, to comfort and to resist. Drawing on old and new lexicons, The Observatory seeks to bridge artists and expressions. Two decades on, the band’s polymath practice encompasses music and performance; in-person festivals and online radio shows; touring gigs and interdisciplinary exhibitions.

Benoit Taisne is an Associate Professor at the Asian School of Environment and Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, NTU. His current research focuses on the early anticipation of the style and size of volcanic eruptions and utilising infrasound for volcano monitoring. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Geosciences from the Ecole Normal Superieure de Paris, France and obtained his PhD at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France. 

Hari is a Senior Research Fellow at NUS working on underwater acoustic signal processing and machine learning. These are used in a range of applications ranging from bio-acoustics based biodiversity characterization and defense-related scenarios in shallow tropical waters, to polar glaciers where melt-induced cryo-acoustic noise dominates the soundscape. From 2019, he is focusing on the acoustics of melting ice, and undertook field campaigns to Svalbard in the Arctic, and to the Antarctic to study this problem. He also studies distributed acoustic sensing, and acoustics based marine-mammal and reef health monitoring. He obtained his PhD from NTU in 2014 and was a Visiting researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography during 2019-2021.

Ute Meta Bauer is a Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU). She is currently the Acting Director and Principal Research Fellow at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA Singapore); and is the Chair of the Masters in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices (MA MSCP) programme. Having served as the Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore for over a decade, her work as educator and curator over the past years has focused on Climates. Habitats. Environments. At the Centre, she curated and co-curated The Oceanic (2017/2018), Trees of Life. Knowledge in Material (2018), and The Posthuman City (2020). In 2022, she served as curator for the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, featuring artist Shubigi Rao. Her recent large scale projects include the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), co-curated alongside David Teh and Amar Kanwar, and the artistic direction of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024. She is a Trustee of the Art Foundation TBA21 and a member of the Governing Council of n.b.k. Berlin. Bauer was recently conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Art and Design by Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki, Finland.