Exhibit combines sound art and ecology at Venice Biennale
University of Melbourne researchers will unveil the ‘Song of the Cricket’ at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, opening in Venice Saturday 10 May. The exhibit blends ecological conservation and interactive sound art in the heart of the Venice lagoon.
Designed by a team led by the University of Melbourne’s Urban Ecology and Design Lab with Professor Alex Felson, the exhibit is part ecological research and part living artwork, created to raise awareness of the crickets’ plight and offer tangible solutions for habitat rehabilitation. “This is not just a temporary installation — it’s a step toward reconstructing vital cricket populations in the Venice lagoon,” Professor Felson said.
The installation features floating, mobile habitats for the critically endangered Adriatic Marbled Bush-Cricket that once thrived in Venice. Alongside these mobile cricket-breeding ecosystems, an original sound installation combines science and sound art into a seamless experience.
Associate Professor Miriama Young from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music led the sound team to bring the crickets’ song to life using a blend of natural, interactive, and synthesized elements, including a ‘sound garden’ which creates the sonic ambience of a healthy wetland environment, and an interactive global cricket choir superimposed onto a magnified arrangement of Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’, which creates a space for reflection and imagination on the site of a 16th century Venetian shipyard.
Speaking from Venice, Associate Professor Young said: “It’s significant that this sound installation should be part of the Biennale for Architecture. Goethe profoundly observed that architecture is frozen music, and it follows that music is liquid architecture. We’ve noticed that sound has established a significant presence at this year’s Architecture Biennale – it’s as if sound is finally having its moment, recognised for its important contribution to our experience of place. Sound has the unique ability to both enliven and transform a space.”
Sound installation elements have been developed in collaboration with sound technologist Monica Lim (recently awarded her PhD in Interactive Composition at the University of Melbourne). The user interface for interactive elements of the global cricket choir was built by Bin Liang (University of Melbourne School of Computing and Information Systems). The global cricket choir invites the public to locate their place of origin, and project that cricket’s song into the shipyard space, highlighting notions of place, belonging, global travel and globalisation, and the imminent threat of species extinction.
The ‘sound garden’ features a translocated soundscape drawn from wetlands of Northern Italy, home to the Zeuneriana marmorata, the Adriatic bush-cricket. Their song plays periodically throughout the day, augmenting the sound of the live crickets, and supplying a gentle lullaby for newly laid cricket eggs.
“Sound is typically utilised in ecology as a critical bioindicator of species health,” said Associate Professor Young, who is cross-Faculty collaborator with Melbourne University’s Biodiversity Institute. “The soundscape forms part of a broader artificial habitat strategy — one that blends ecology and technology in support of interspecies care.”
Complementing the ‘sound garden’, the shipyard music is somewhat nostalgic — drawn from a re-imagining and dramatically slow and magnified unfolding of Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons, 1723), bridging a sonic past with a contemporary imagined future — one in which ecosystems might once again thrive.
“Antonio Vivaldi’s Venice was once alive with the sounds of nature. This project re-imagines a healthy bioacoustic environment, and develops synergies in ecological art practice through architectures of sound and sustainability,” Associate Professor Young said.
“Venice is already a city that provokes nostalgia, where history pervades at every turn. The premise behind the sound installation asks: What if we were to create a sonic space where the audience could reflect on our ecological past and imagine a more hopeful future?”
Professor Richard Kurth, Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, said: “The creative composition and sound design work by Miriama Young and Monica Lim demonstrates their multifaceted agility to interweave sound, music, environment, ecology, design, and awareness in complementary layers of experience and meaning. I’m thrilled that they are participating in the Venice Biennale in this wonderfully collaborative and significant project!”