August 12, 2026
The Biophilia Summit is Living Future Europe’s annual international conference dedicated to advancing the theory, practice and future of biophilia. Moodsonic's Evan Benway is delivering a speech as part of the summit's agenda: Biophilic Soundscaping at Scale: From Research to Responsive Buildings
Now in its fourth edition, the Summit brings together researchers, designers, architects, developers, manufacturers, educators, artists, policymakers and innovators who share a common ambition: strengthening the relationship between people and nature to create healthier, more resilient and regenerative futures.
Taking place online on 24 September 2026, the Summit explores biophilia not simply as a design approach, but as a way of understanding how the living world shapes our health, our communities and the places we create.
This year’s theme, Biophilia in Practice: Sensing, Belonging, Regenerating, reflects the growing evolution of biophilia from a set of design principles towards a broader framework for regenerative thinking and practice. The programme explores how biophilia can influence human experience, professional practice and the future relationship between people and nature.
The programme is structured around three interconnected themes: Experiencing nature, designing with nature, and regenerating relationships. It is designed for anyone interested in the intersection of nature, design, health, culture and the built environment.
Noise is an underestimated environmental health challenge, affecting stress, sleep, cognition and quality of life. Yet biophilic design often remains visual, despite non-visual connection with nature being an established biophilic pattern. A multisensory strategy should consider sound alongside light, planting, materials and space, reducing unwanted noise while creating positive, restorative sensory experiences.
This presentation brings together science and biophilic design with a new generation of responsive building technology. Evan Benway will show how advances in real-time generative sound, environmental sensing and building data are moving biophilic soundscaping beyond static audio into systems that adapt to place, activity and time, can be evaluated over the long term, and scale across global portfolios. Evan will use sound itself to demonstrate how different soundscapes shape experience. This draws on more than a decade of research, development and implementation.
The contribution will share findings from long-term workplace studies into cognition, stress, physiological response and neurodiversity, alongside lessons from deployments across global workplace portfolios, WELL Platinum buildings and healthcare environments. It will explore how varied natural sound and local or cultural context can strengthen a sense of place, how technology can support a multisensory strategy, and what has been learned from deploying these systems at different scales.
Participants will understand sound’s role in strengthening connections between people and nature and the new possibilities created by adaptive technology. They will leave with an evidence-informed framework for bringing sound into the biophilic design process and implementing it responsibly to create healthier, more responsive and restorative places.
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