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The Listening Field: Earth’s Music in Real Time
Brian Eno, Tarun Nayar, and the Rise of Ambient Ecology
By Sam Grayson & Grace Frye| Earth Day 2025 | Go Cybernaut
There’s music that you play, and then there’s music that plays itself. This Earth Day, ambient pioneers Brian Eno and Tarun Nayar invite us to listen not just to melodies—but to the planet itself. With Eno’s generative installation The Listening Field and Nayar’s bio-sonic experiments as Modern Biology, both artists are making a new kind of soundscape: one shaped by moisture in the soil, the heartbeat of tree sap, and the quiet shimmer of fungal intelligence. This isn’t escapism. It’s reconnection.
The Planet as Composer
There’s music that you play, and then there’s music that plays itself.
This Earth Day, ambient music pioneers Brian Eno and Tarun Nayar invite us to listen not just to melodies—but to the planet itself. Their work is not about escape. It’s about reconnection. It asks a deceptively simple question: what if we stopped trying to make the world speak our language, and instead listened to the one it already speaks?
Brian Eno’s The Listening Field transforms green spaces into generative sound installations that evolve with every flicker of sunlight and shift of breeze. Tarun Nayar, under the name Modern Biology, collaborates with plants and fungi to create soundscapes directly from biodata. Together, they are shaping a new form of ambient ecology—one that tunes us back into place, presence, and the living systems we’re part of.
Every Tree Is a Synth
Eno has spent decades creating music that resists fixed form. From Music for Airports to Ambient 1, his work turns background sound into foreground revelation. But with The Listening Field, he takes it a step further. Instead of composing music that sounds like nature, he lets nature compose itself.
In public parks and natural reserves, Eno uses sensors to read environmental data: light levels, humidity, CO2 from trees, even soil chemistry. That data drives generative software, which produces evolving music that mirrors the moment. No two experiences are the same.
“You’re not just listening to music,” Eno says. “You’re listening to place.”
Each location becomes its own composer, with the weather as its rhythm section and the trees as ambient synthesizers. The result is ephemeral, meditative, and alive—a true collaboration between technology and terrain.
Brian Eno: “I wanted to hear the planet think.”
Fungi as Collaborators
Where Eno works at the level of landscape, Tarun Nayar goes deeper—into the micro-worlds of moss and mycelium.
A biologist and musician, Nayar clips electrodes to plants and fungi, capturing their electrical impulses. These signals are then run through modular synths, translating the biodata into sound. The music isn’t imposed on nature. It’s drawn out of it.
His tracks pulse gently, sometimes shifting unexpectedly, reflecting the hidden fluctuations in a mushroom’s metabolism or a plant’s reaction to sunlight. It’s a sonic portrait of life most of us never perceive.
“The mushroom sings when it wants to,” Nayar jokes.
But underneath the humor is something profound: a recognition that the living world is not mute. We just haven’t been listening.
Tarun Nayar: “The plant world is constantly talking—we’ve just finally figured out how to listen.”
Ambient as Attention
This isn’t music for background. It’s music that rewards slowing down. In a time of climate anxiety and digital noise, ambient ecology invites a shift in tempo. To sit. To walk. To breathe. And to really hear what the Earth might be saying.
Eno and Nayar are part of a growing wave of artists, scientists, and listeners exploring this intersection—where art meets awareness, and where beauty might spark a new kind of care.
To celebrate Earth Day through sound is to shift from spectacle to sensitivity. These projects aren’t about turning nature into art. They’re about reawakening our capacity to relate to it with reverence, attention, and awe.
This isn’t ambient music as escapism. It’s ambient music as invitation: to slow down, to feel again, to notice the difference between a sunny morning and a rainy one. The difference between silence and shimmer.
Listening becomes an ecological act. A spiritual one. A political one.
Because in a world built on noise, choosing to listen is revolutionary.
Field Notes – A Playlist by Sam Grayson
A companion playlist inspired by The Listening Field and Modern Biology’s sonic experiments.
Tracks include:
Brian Eno – “An Ending (Ascent)”
Modern Biology – “Mushroom Dance”
Pauline Oliveros – “Horse Sings from Cloud”
Laraaji – “Being Here”
Ryoji Ikeda – “Data.Simplex
Suzanne Ciani – “Eighth Wave”
Jlin – “Black Origami
Adham Shaikh – “Water Prayer”
William Basinski – “dlp 1.1”
Lucrecia Dalt – “Tar”
Terry Riley – “A Rainbow in Curved Air”
Claire Rousay – “Peak Chroma”
Fennesz – “Endless Summer”
Noveller – “Gathering the Elements”
Tim Hecker – “Borderlands”
Loscil – “Stave Peak”
- Brian Eno & Jon Hopkins – “Small Craft on a Milk Sea”
‘Field Notes’ is the result of 2 years of experimenting and composing in nature, with nature.
The planet doesn’t need us to speak for it. It needs us to listen. On this Earth Day, Eno and Nayar remind us that every leaf, every gust of wind, every shimmer of silence is already singing. The question is: are we tuned in?
🌍🎶 Earth Day Listening Prompt
Inspired by Brian Eno’s The Listening Field and Tarun Nayar’s plant-generated soundscapes, we’re asking:
What does the Earth sound like to you?
Is it the hum of wind through trees? The slow rhythm of waves? The crackle of dry soil underfoot? Or maybe it’s a feeling—a frequency—you can’t quite put into words.
Drop your thoughts, poems, voice memos, or favorite ambient tracks in the comments. Let’s build a shared field of listening.
We’ll be listening on our Go Cybernaut Facebook Music Page
#TheListeningField #ModernBiology #GoCybernaut #EarthDay2025 #AmbientEcology #WhatDoYouHear
Discover More
Brian Eno – Musician, producer, visual artist and activist first came to international prominence in the early seventies as a founding member of British band, Roxy Music, followed by a series of solo albums and collaborations.
enoweb – Your source for Brian Eno News.
Tarun Nayar – This electronic musician and former biologist unites his love of music and the natural world with Modern Biology.
Modern Biology – Keep up-to-date with earthly projects and events via the Instagram account.
Modern Biology – The official website.
On the Bookshelf
Brian Eno: Visual Music – Featuring more than 300 images of Eno’s installation, light, and video artwork, this exquisite volume is the definitive monograph of a contemporary master. In addition to page after page of full-color art, Visual Music features Eno’s personal notebook pages, his essay “Perfume, Defense, and David Bowie’s Wedding,” an interview with the artist, scholarly essays, and an original-for-the-book piece of free downloadable music.
More to Explore
Earth Day – Fun ideas for getting the younger generation involved with Earth Day.
Celebrate the Planet – From hand-harvested wild rice to offerings made in silence, from reindeer migrations to moon-planted crops, Earth care has always been culture-deep.
World Music Therapy Day – World Music Therapy Day on March 1 every year is a day for people all around the world to celebrate the healing power of music
International Day of Forests – The United Nations proclaimed March 21 to celebrate and raise awareness of our planet’s forests.
How 10 Cultures Celebrate May – May isn’t just flowers and graduation caps — it’s a month full of heritage, renewal, and celebration across cultures. From lantern festivals to ancestral rituals, these global traditions are rooted in joy, reflection, and connection.
