Presented by the UEDLAB for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti, Song of the Cricket offers an immersive ecological and sensory experience focused on the endangered Zeuneriana marmorata, or Marbled Adriatic Bush Cricket.
Combining music, wetland sound, and ecological engineering, the project includes a living sound garden, insect enclosures for breeding, and mobile “life raft” habitats designed to support the species' conservation and public awareness. The enclosures house crickets sourced from a nearby sub-population. Once they breed, eggs and habitat materials are transferred onto the floating habitats for translocation to selected sites in the Venice Lagoon.
Developed as a Designed Experiment with research and public engagement goals, the project blends low-tech aesthetics with advanced ecological modeling. In collaboration with CSDILA, ARUP, and the UEDLAB, a predictive model was created to identify viable release sites. Since the cricket’s native habitat overlaps with the MoSE flood defence zone, the species may serve as a bioindicator of environmental health and resilience.
The exhibition features a multi-channel composition using amplified cricket song and wetland soundscapes, highlighting the insect’s role as both sentinel and singer. Created by a team of designers, researchers, engineers, and musicians from The University of Melbourne alongside Italian entomologists and partners, Song of the Cricket explores how sound, science, and spatial design can converge to reimagine large scale translocation of species and the aesthetics of experimentation.
Dr Alexander Felson
Dr. Felson is the Elisabeth Murdoch Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne. He integrates research and practice to design climate-resilient urban environments. His work spans applied ecology, hydrology, and environmental planning, with a focus on biodiversity and community engagement. Through the UEDLAB, he blends conservation and constructed ecosystems with low-impact development, creating urban spaces resilient to climate change and biodiversity loss. Felson’s expertise includes landscape biotechnologies and geo-spatial planning, and he champions cross-disciplinary collaboration in both his teaching and large-scale public space projects.
Miriama Young
Miriama Young is a composer and sound artist who uses music to blend unique sound worlds and create new sonic colours. Her work draws on an eclectic array of art forms and contexts, leading her to be described by The Herald Scotland as a Renaissance woman'. Miriama's music spans vocal, instrumental, and orchestral concert works, film scores, interactive sound for dance, electro-acoustic and radiophonic work, and installations. Her sound world is grounded in themes of place, time, and ecology, and the act of composing driven by a desire to reach for the mysterious and sublime.Miriama's scholarly work explores the intricate relationship between the human voice and recording technology. Her monograph Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology, was listed in the Times Higher Education Best Books 2015, while chapters and articles on a similar theme are published in the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, Leonardo Music Journal, and Contemporary Music Review.
Ary Hoffmann
Ary Hoffmann completed his undergraduate education at the University of Queensland and Monash Universities, graduating with a BSc(Hons) in 1980. He then undertook PhD at La Trobe with Peter Parsons, graduating in 1984. Ary completed a postdoc at UC Davis with Michael Turelli before returning to La Trobe where he started as a Lecturer and attained a personal Chair in 1998. Ary received a Federation Fellowship in 2005 to conduct research at the University of Melbourne.
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
Michael-Shawn Fletcher is interested in the long-term interactions between humans, climate, disturbance and vegetation at local, regional and global scales. My current work involves developing and integrating high-resolution palaeoenvironmental records from across the Southern Hemisphere using multiple proxies, including microfossil, charcoal, geochemical and isotopic analyses to provide comprehensive reconstructions of environmental change.
Presented by the UEDLAB for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti, Song of the Cricket offers an immersive ecological and sensory experience focused on the endangered Zeuneriana marmorata, or Marbled Adriatic Bush Cricket.
Combining music, wetland sound, and ecological engineering, the project includes a living sound garden, insect enclosures for breeding, and mobile “life raft” habitats designed to support the species' conservation and public awareness. The enclosures house crickets sourced from a nearby sub-population. Once they breed, eggs and habitat materials are transferred onto the floating habitats for translocation to selected sites in the Venice Lagoon.
Developed as a Designed Experiment with research and public engagement goals, the project blends low-tech aesthetics with advanced ecological modeling. In collaboration with CSDILA, ARUP, and the UEDLAB, a predictive model was created to identify viable release sites. Since the cricket’s native habitat overlaps with the MoSE flood defence zone, the species may serve as a bioindicator of environmental health and resilience.
The exhibition features a multi-channel composition using amplified cricket song and wetland soundscapes, highlighting the insect’s role as both sentinel and singer. Created by a team of designers, researchers, engineers, and musicians from The University of Melbourne alongside Italian entomologists and partners, Song of the Cricket explores how sound, science, and spatial design can converge to reimagine large scale translocation of species and the aesthetics of experimentation.
