PolyFutures
In April 2026 we were invited to present and exhibit our sound futures work at the inaugural PolyFutures event run by the EU Policy Lab in Brussels. As part of our exhibit we distributed cards with prompts drawn from the Verge framework, a tool developed by futurists Richard Lum and Michele Bowman. Verge is used to map change in six areas of human activity, the ways we create, consume, connect, define, relate and destroy things. We asked participants to think of a future scenario that was on their mind and then invited them to describe the sounds of each of the six categories in their future scenario. We collected their ideas and used them to create a PolyFutures library of sounds.
Plague Futures
The second MPC3000AD library is based on a project by Dr Caitlin MacDonald, a digital anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh. This project explored future plagues on the five year anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. Through a series of workshops participants picked three potential natural and societal disasters: erupting volcanos, the monopolisation of resources by elites, and the rise of mysticism to structure a world dissolving into chaos. Participants came up with details to flesh out the general scenarios and chose items that they would need to survive the different plague scenarios. The sounds for this library were drawn from all the ideas captured in the workshops.
Bio Age Futures
The first MPC3000AD library of future sounds stems from a project Hyphae conducted with the Law Society of England and Wales - "Law in the Emerging Bio Age". We explored emerging changes across areas such as: rights for non-humans, biotechnology, bioscience regulation, and the evolving relationship between humans and living systems. As part of this work we mapped the potential impacts of emerging changes in these areas on the legal profession. We created a collection of imagined future scenarios, such as the legal risks of using CRISPR editing on invasive animal species and the conflicts of interest when an elephant takes a river to court. We invited the researchers involved in this project to participate in an exercise where we asked them to imagine and describe the sounds they might hear in the scenarios they had written. The prompts they generated were then used as composing notes when designing the sounds.