Sylvian Harmony

A practice-based R&D project developing ethical models for choral performance with nature in response to displacement, solastalgia, and ecological loss.

Sylvian Harmony Research & Development

Sylvan Harmony is an R&D project exploring how choirs can perform in duet with trees through bio-sonification and AI-assisted improvisation.

Three community choirs sing with living trees whose species carry cultural and spiritual resonance. The project explores ecological grief, displacement, and belonging, asking how collective voice can respond to environmental loss.

Through prototyping, short residencies, and spatial sound experiments, the research develops ethical, non-extractive models for performing with nature. The final form remains open, emerging through dialogue between singers, artists, nature, and technology.

Collective Voice

Julian Evans

Julian Evans is a choral facilitator and ensemble founder whose practice centres on collective voice, improvisation and relational listening. He works with community and multi-heritage choirs to develop inclusive vocal spaces where singers of varied experience can participate meaningfully in shared musical exploration.

His facilitation draws on improvisation, call-and-response structures and site-responsive listening practices, enabling ensembles to co-create work that responds to place, memory and lived experience. Julian’s approach prioritises trust, attentiveness and emotional intelligence, supporting groups to engage with complex themes while maintaining accessibility and care.

Alongside sustained community choir leadership, he collaborates with interdisciplinary artists and researchers on research-led projects that explore voice as a method of inquiry. His work brings together artistic rigour, ethical sensitivity and a commitment to collective practice.

Choirs

Syrian Women’s Choir

Community Arts by Zanb Khan is initiating a 12-week singing and music project bringing together twelve Syrian refugee women. The group approached Julian Evans to shape and facilitate the vocal work as a community-led arts process.

The project is designed to provide a safe, collective space for expression through song, strengthening connection, wellbeing and cultural continuity. Alongside the choral development, plans are in place to produce a short film and audio recordings documenting the process. The choir centres lived experience, displacement and rebuilding belonging through shared vocal practice.

Sacred Harmony

Farah Imtiaz and Nazia Sultana approached Julian Evans in November 2025 to support the development of a new British Asian Women’s Choir. The initiative emerged from conversations with parents seeking culturally appropriate, women-specific spaces for public singing and collective expression. This was based on Jules previous work with co-creating the school-based nasheed choirs, which cultivating vocal confidence, cultural identity, collective discipline and inclusive spaces for young performers.

The choir currently comprises nine members who are developing vocal technique and learning nasheeds, working towards the aspiration of performing at Cambridge Mosque in 2027. Inspired by Evans’ choral facilitation practice, the ensemble creates a supportive environment where women can explore voice, confidence and shared cultural heritage within a structured yet nurturing framework.

The choir responds directly to the limited public singing opportunities available to women within some community contexts, positioning choral practice as both artistic development and cultural presence.

Artistic Research

Ice Pipe Installation (Antarctica)

In an earlier site-responsive work, Julian Evans constructed a field of hollow ice pipes embedded within the Antarctic landscape. The pipes functioned as aeolian instruments, activated solely by polar wind. Human intervention established the structure; climate and atmosphere composed the sound.

The installation operated as a distributed memorial. Each ice column marked historical presence while remaining materially temporary. As temperatures shifted and wind altered, the tonal field changed. The work foregrounded fragility, exposure, and environmental agency. Sound emerged not from mastery, but from surrender to conditions.

This project initiated a sustained investigation into how voice, breath, and environment co-produce one another. It also opened questions around ecological loss: how do we listen to places already under erasure? What does it mean to make work that is structurally vulnerable to disappearance?

Sylvan Harmony extends this enquiry from polar ice to living trees. Where the Antarctic installation translated wind into tone, Sylvan Harmony explores human choral breath entering into resonance with arboreal bodies.

Both projects are structured around:

more-than-human collaboration
distributed authorship
ethical attunement to place
sound as a carrier of memory and ecological grief

In the context of ecological grief and solastalgia, the ice pipes functioned as instruments of listening to a vanishing environment. Sylvan Harmony shifts this from witnessing loss to practising relational belonging. Rather than sounding absence, the choir cultivates reciprocal presence.

Across both works, Evans’ practice positions sound not as aesthetic output alone, but as an ethical method for re-negotiating human participation within fragile ecosystems.

Bio-responsive R&D

ThoughtForms

ThoughtForms is an ongoing interactive research project that investigates how our conscious intentions and unconscious processes shape experience through dynamic interaction with complex biological systems. Participants wear an EEG headset; their brainwave activity (across delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma bands) drives a generative audio-visual field of swarming behaviours. The system is deliberately designed so that control is indirect — conscious effort influences the experience only partially, and emergent patterns arise from the interplay between mind, body and system behaviour rather than from deliberate will.

The project’s conceptual frame asks: where does agency reside when cognition, embodied attention and environmental complexity co-produce perceptual form? ThoughtForms embodies this question in real time, allowing participants to feel their own thinking shifting into sound and image through a system that both mirrors and exceeds their conscious control.

When we fold ThoughtForms into Sylvan Harmony, several core threads align:

1. Distributed Agency and Emergence
Just as ThoughtForms displaces centralised conscious control into a field co-shaped by system and participant, Sylvan Harmony explores how voice, tree physiology and environment co-author a shared sonic experience.

2. Listening Beyond Intention
Both practices move away from intentional “performance” alone — they are about attunement to processes that exceed human will. In ThoughtForms, this is brainwave-driven swarming; in Sylvan Harmony, it is the more-than-human resonance between choir and living trees.

3. Embodied Feedback Loops
EEG in ThoughtForms becomes a real-time feedback loop between body and system. In Sylvan Harmony, choral breath and tree responses form a bio-sonic feedback ecology, where listening and sounding are inseparable.

4. Ethical Re-orientation
Both works shift emphasis from control to relationship. ThoughtForms questions illusion of free will in biological systems; Sylvan Harmony questions human dominance in ecological soundscapes.

Artistic & Research Continuity

ThoughtForms provides a conceptual and methodological antecedent for Sylvan Harmony’s exploration of relational perception, feedback systems and participatory ecology. Its interrogation of agency, emergence and embodied attention directly informs your ongoing work interrogating how humans can listen with rather than project upon the living world.

Research-Led Collaboration & R&D

AIAI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity

AIAI brought artists and researchers together to explore how artificial intelligence intersects with Indigenous epistemologies and land-based knowledge systems. The project examined how technological development can either reinforce extractive logics or support more relational, accountable forms of practice.

Through dialogue, artistic experimentation and critical inquiry, AIAI considered voice, agency and cultural memory within digital systems. This engagement with knowledge sovereignty and relational ethics informs our current exploration of collective voice, ensuring that ecological practice remains attentive to power, context and responsibility.