Kathy Hinde invites people to join her on ‘Deep Listening Walks’, to tune in the sounds around us in new ways, using hydrophones, geophones, highly sensitive and directional microphones and more. She aims to amplify the sounds we may not usually notice, and make audible sounds that are usually inaccessible to human hearing. Walks often focus on a specific location or ecosystem, including amplifying the minuscule sounds emitted by small organisms living underwater and underground, listening from the perspective of a tree, and tuning in to the shifting of the solar winds in the stratosphere.

Kathy is motivated to share her passion for deep and focused listening, in order to encourage a wider interest in audio ecology. Her reference to the act of ‘Deep Listening’ intentionally references the valuable work of late composer Pauline Oliveros and her development of, and advocacy of the practice of ‘Deep Listening‘.

Kathy has been inviting people on ‘Listening Walks’ for many years, the earliest being connected to her online, interactive and participatory birdsong sound map Twitchr, (2009), often accompanied by someone with deeper knowledge about birdsong and the surrounding habitat and ecology. Further walks have focussed on underwater listening, by following the under-explored ‘burns’ of Glasgow for ‘Submerge‘ (2015); a series of walks to focus on the hidden sounds of Europe’s largest blanket bog in The Flow Country in the far north of Scotland (2019) as part of Cryptic‘s show ‘Below the Blanket’ at the Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh, (2019). In 2021, Kathy followed the river Frome on a series of Deep Listening Walks for ‘River Echoes‘ commissioned by Ginkgo, and has led walks at SPOR Festival in Aarhus, around Bristol Harbour for ‘Control Shift‘; broadcast an online listening walk for ‘The Joyous Thing 2′ and is currently focussing on a series of Deep Listening Walks at Wicken Fen Nature Reserve as part of the wider project Listen to the Voices of the Fen.

Below – Kathy Hinde ‘Bog Listening’ filmed and edited by Chas Ross for BBC Scotland, May 2019.
Followed by a compilation of sound recordings from the bog, and photos by Murdo MacLeod (also header photo), and James Cook. Blanket bog is a very special ecosystem, and the idea of ‘Deep Listening’ in this context was to listen into the peat at different depths, and to think about listening ‘back in time’ as these deep layers of peat have taken centuries to form, preserving organisms within its layers. What is it like to listen to these layers and different depths that hold deep time?