10 Good Years

10 Good Years is an imaginative soundwalk drawing on bioacoustics and listening to the inner life of trees. Their narrative gives the illusion of time and space slipping, extending or contracting through its soundscape composition.

Mary Edwards and Kristine Diekman

Mary Edwards. Ten Good Years: Every Time You Are Near, 2025
A concertina book depicts the magnificent in the miniature of an imaginative sound walk that overlays time and space. It is accompanied by a text score and soundscape that invites the listener to take pleasure in getting lost in reverie along a wooded path that runs toward or parallel to a shoreline, each from the composer’s past and recent memory.

Listen here: https://maryedwardsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/ten-good-years-every-time-you-are-near

Bio: https://www.maryedwardsmusic.com

10 Good Years is a collaborative project shared by Mary Edwards and Kristine Diekman, originally produced for the 2025 CENSE Beyond Listening Walking-with changes (Cross European Network for Sonic Ecologies) in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

“By walking-with and listening to the “cultural turn” toward posthumanism we contribute to a shift in understanding humanity’s place within the world, challenging human exceptionalism and dominance. By walking-with and listening we engage in embodied practices that stimulate awareness of limited planetary resources and humanity’s destructive impact, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Such practices urge us to rethink the relationships with non-human life, technology, and ecosystems, advocating for an ethical shift and interdependent approach, to inspire coexistence for more sustainable futures.”

Kristine Diekman. 10 hours: Listening to All the Trees in My Forest, 2025
This sound art work is part of an ongoing series that incorporates listening to the inner life of trees in various time bases. The drawing below represents encountering and drawing various tree and plant forms over 10 years to create a time-based composite tree that continues to grow over the next decade. The accompanying soundscape is a sonic companion that collapses listening to all the trees in Diekman’s forest outside of her house in 10 hours.