Noorderzon performance with Listen Here Now and Prins Claus Conservatorium Jazz Musicians

15:00 Sound walk with Kristin McGee
16:00 Performance Listen Here Now Ensemble, VRIJDAG Prinsentheater: https://bijvrijdag.nl/contact/noorderbuitensingel

Speakers

Cecil Konijnendijk
From his home city of Zeist, The Netherlands, Cecil Konijnendijk co-leads the Nature Based Solutions Institute, an international think tank which supports the evidence-based greening of cities. He is also an Honorary Professor of urban forestry at the University of British Columbia and holds visiting professorship and researcher positions at universities in China, Malaysia, and The Netherlands. Cecil has authored various seminal textbooks on urban forestry and urban greening and is currently a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Email: cecil.konijnendijk@ubc.ca

Hao Zezhou obtained his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Forestry in 2021. From 2019 to 2020, he was supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) to pursue a joint doctoral training at the Faculty of Forestry, in the University of British Columbia, Canada. He began working at the Institute of Tropical Forestry, at the Chinese Academy of Forestry in 2021. In recent years, his research has engaged the fields of urban wildlife passive acoustic monitoring technology, soundscape classification technology, and the relationship between biophony and human activities. Currently, he is the principal investigator of a national Natural Science Foundation of China project and another one funded by the Guangzhou Basic and Applied Basic Research. He has published papers related to urban forest soundscapes widely in forestry, biodiversity, and soundscape journals.
Email: zezhouhao@foxmail.com

Angelica Caiza is a biologist who has received a Ph.D. Scholarship at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on how humans and bats coexist in urban environments. She is interested in studying the relationship between humans and bats in urban areas. She explores, through qualitative methods, the stories of people that enjoy looking for bats or that share space with them. Angelica is driven to understand how humans and wildlife coexist in urban areas and hopes her research will shed light on this crucial issue.

Jasper Koster is an ecologist with a great passion for nature. His experience includes participating as a field research assistant in various projects in the Arctic, where he engaged in activities such as geese radiotracking and searching for bird nests in the tundra. Currently, Jasper works for AT-KB, an ecological advice company, where he focuses on bat research. His specialization is locating bat colonies, analyzing sounds, and identifying different species. Jasper strongly believes that bats, like other animals, should be acknowledged and appreciated in urban spaces.

Merel Ursem is a Sonic Sociologist, with a BA in Sociology and MA in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she wrote her Master Thesis on the experience of urban sound and quietness in Amsterdam. She is currently working as a Soundscape Adviser at SoundAppraisal, a Groningen-based research company that develops software that visualises and analyses sonic environments. Together with her colleagues, she does soundscape research that aims to improve the quality of the sound experience, and by extension, the overall quality of living.

Kristin McGee is Associate Professor in Popular Music in the Arts, Culture and Media Department at the University of Groningen. She teaches on various subjects including popular music and jazz, ecomusicology, soundscapes, audiovisual arts, and film music. She has written especially on the intersections of jazz and popular music within European and American contexts and in relation to audiovisual media within a variety of articles and books, including her monograph Some Liked it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television (Wesleyan University Press 2009) and Remixing European Jazz Culture published by Routledge’s Transnational Studies in Jazz Series. For this project, she employs forms of musical improvisation and composition as a means to explore urban soundscapes. Through these explorations, she hopes to stimulate greater action to reverse the loss of urban green spaces and to replenish our neighborhoods with sonically rich environments which are both sustainable and uplifting for urban dwellers (both human and more than human).