Recently, we've been interviewing sound practitioners about futures and futures practitioners about sound. 3 Notes is an ongoing series exploring the ways people engage with sound and the future.

Sound reveals cultural filters

​"To me, when we think about soundscapes and what sounds evoke to different people is that's immediately a call for invoking a very rich set of cultural filters. What would the soundscape for Blade Runner be like if rather than interpreting the soundtrack via some giant Western orchestra it was interpreted through, say, you know by Indonesian gamelan or Japanese koto? The sound landscape and the soundtrack part of anything that you'd build out as a fever dream is a really interesting space to explore that."

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Sound opens us up to other senses

"What's interesting to me is that sound and touch, the textures of the future, are kind of interrelated and that some futures to me seem like they would be filled with sharp things and scratchy things and rough things."

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Sound is communal

"Sound is something that multiple people can experience at the same time and sort of respond to as a group. It strikes me that embedding people in a soundscape enables much more immediate emergent responses than sitting them down and having everybody read a scenario at the same time."

Dr. Wendy Schultz is an academically trained futurist with over thirty-five years of global foresight practice and specializes in participatory futures workshops.