Terminology

Created: Sun Aug 17 2025 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

Technological Ecologist Encountered in Ways of Being by James Bridle. This is the term he describes himself in the context of not hearing "Internet of Animals" before. From what I gathered, a technological ecologist is someone who studies ecology and technology and see how they influence each other. It can be from using technology to understand nature or looking at nature to inform technology.

More-than-Human-Design (MtHD) First saw this term in Giving Voice to Nature: Digitally Enabled Human-Nature Interaction to Support Restoration Practices in the Shannon River by Chidi S. Usanga. Used as a framework to decentre ourselves from design systems and acknlowedge, embrace and incorporate non-humans into the process.

Terrestial Bias A term I learned from Melody Jue in her article Scuba Divind Praxis: A Field Guide for Underwater Orientation. The bias describes our dependency on land, breathing air and gravity. This is in relation to being submerged in water and how we relate to water and the inhabitants of this environment.

Soundscape Fisher states that R. Murray Schafer coined the term in his paper "Notes on What the Hills Are Alive with: In Defense of the Sounds of Nature" to describe the sonic environment and since Schafer is a composer, he was using it to describe the music of a place. Here it could be a combination of human and non-human sounds. However, most will associate it with the natural. Bernie Krause has coined biophony (living sounds), anthropony (human sounds) and geophony (non-biological sounds) to describe a soundscape. A natural soundscape is biophony + geophony according to Krause. After reading Sing Like a Fish by Amorina Kingdon, I learned that the term was used in a paper by Buckminister Fuller in 1966 titled "The Music of Life" (need to read the paper to understand the context).

Universal Category System An initiative to standardize metadata for sound recordings. The goal is to make it easier to maintain sound libraries for personal and professional use. Similar to how books in libraries use the Dewey Decimal System to easily locate a book, this is instead for sounds but through labeling and keywords.