Breathing with the Forest

Toby Gifford

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

As I travelled and camped down the East coast of Australia this summer, a standout feature of the experience was the sheer volume of cicada stridulations. The spatio-temporal pulsations of this sonic mass seemed musical in its phrasing, and felt to me like the sound of the forest breathing. In a literal sense our breath is entangled with the forest as we inhale oxygen that the forest has exhaled. This interactive sound installation is inspired by the notion of breathing with the forest, and aims to emulate that feeling through a breath controlled synthetic sound mass reminiscent of a forest full of cicadas.

Citation

Toby Gifford. 2025. Breathing with the Forest. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17801095 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2025_music_19,
 abstract = {As I travelled and camped down the East coast of Australia this summer, a standout feature of the experience was the sheer volume of cicada stridulations. The spatio-temporal pulsations of this sonic mass seemed musical in its phrasing, and felt to me like the sound of the forest breathing. In a literal sense our breath is entangled with the forest as we inhale oxygen that the forest has exhaled. This interactive sound installation is inspired by the notion of breathing with the forest, and aims to emulate that feeling through a breath controlled synthetic sound mass reminiscent of a forest full of cicadas.},
 address = {Canberra, Australia},
 articleno = {19},
 author = {Toby Gifford},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.17801095},
 editor = {Sophie Rose and Jos Mulder and Nicole Carroll},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {Installation},
 numpages = {2},
 pages = {68--69},
 title = {Breathing with the Forest},
 track = {Music},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2025/nime2025_music_19.pdf},
 urlsuppl1 = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2025/nime2025_music_19_file01.mp3},
 year = {2025}
}