This year’s theme for World Listening Day is FUTURE LISTENING created by Filipino sound artist Teresa Barrozo. –

The theme calls for reimagining a personal and universal future through listening, where participants examine their hopes, dreams, ambitions and fears for the future and reflect on the question,
“What does your future sound like?

The World Listening Project asked us to imagine sonic possible worlds and the future of acoustic ecology through soundwalks, field recordings, site-specific performances, and curated events and concerts on the theme, as well as in virtual worlds by listening and sharing endangered sounds and identifying sounds they want to render obsolete in their future.

As WLP says – “Future Listening ultimately aims to engage the world in opening its ears to the present and in acknowledging the immense capacity of the act of listening in shaping our collective future.”

There were some general guide questions –
What does your past sound like? What does your present sound like?
Which sounds do you wish to retain? Which sounds do you wish never to hear again?
Which sounds do you consider as toxic waste?
How does silence and noise sound in your future?
Which sounds have gone silent?
Can you still hear?

I wanted to try and create something that had the essence of both past and future. I found a recording of children moving from one classroom to another in a large school. This was the basis of the whole track.
The children’s voices, messing around and shouting, represents both the future and my past (and yours, as we were all children once). I then processed clips to create a digital cacophony. This all builds to a future speak, where the essence of the human voices become digital noise. Every so often the human voice breaks through, fading in and out, like a radio signal. We are lost in a digital age where noise drowns us out, and like a radio dial, not quite fixed on a channel, it is all slightly off kilter.

Released July 18, 2018
Written, recorded and produced by Museleon

Original field recording School ambience by Vetter Balin – licensed under the Creative Commons 0 License.