Editorial

In this edition of Seismograf Peer, you're invited to listen to the world – or maybe, as some of our contributors suggest, it's more about listening with the world. Either way, get ready to explore the wide range of interactions encountered through this series of audio papers engaging with how sound mediates relations between the »human« and the »more-than-human« worlds, while also problematizing these categories. 

The idea of the more-than-human has gained traction alongside movements in new materialist, posthuman, and multispecies ethnographic research, all of which push back against the notion that humans are somehow separate or superior. These perspectives challenge the rigid categories that have long shaped Western European ways of thinking and aim to move beyond the anthropocentric focus of traditional scholarship. By blurring the boundaries between humans and everything else – living or non-living – we open up new ways of seeing agency in the world around us.

The audio papers featured in this issue engage with more-than-human worlds through diverse perspectives, from animist worldviews to notions of alien sociality, and incorporating a broad spectrum of artistic practices and research methodologies. They all approach sound as a source for knowledge, exploring novel perspectives on the interplay between the human and the more-than-human through sound. Hence, this edition assembles a multiplicity of anthropophonic, biophonic and geophonic soundings. In many of the papers, this also entails explorations of the affordances of novel technologies for the capture and representation of the more-than-human worlds through sound. Therefore, this issue provides a plethora of approaches, and ways of listening, to sound and vibration, captured in the oceans, within tree trunks, with aeolian harps, but also drawn from the inner workings of technologies for digital signal processing. 

To a great extent, these are sonic practices that seek to attune humans to more-than-human temporalities and spatialities. This attunement can often demand our powers of imagination and poetics to engage. Indeed, we might not know if we are heard when we interact with the world, but believing that we are heard affords degrees of connection and empathy unavailable inside of a scientistic Western epistemology that sees matter as inert. Since Max Weber we’ve been able to name the »disenchantment« of the world as a dominant trope in Western (and now global) modernity, a sort of philosophical ‘common sense’ that excludes the phenomenological, the spiritual, and the imaginary. The supplanting of an animistic outlook of earthly ensoulment with one that sees the world as inert matter is something that most of the authors in this issue work with/through/against. There is a glorious irony in how technologies, for so long an integral part of the objectifying and reductionist ideologies of modernity, now afford, through the extension of the human sensorium, the potential to re-soul the material world. Through bringing otherwise inaccessible vibrations within the range of our perception technologies return to us our sense of wonder, one of the potential grounds on which ethical co-existences can be built for the future. Whether through cultural critique, empathetic mimicry, or deep environmental awareness, these works challenge us to listen differently – and more attentively – to the voices that surround us.

Inevitably common concerns arise, starting with three audio papers that invite us to rethink listening as a multispecies, ecological, and deeply relational act. In their audio paper Love unto death, Sanne Krogh Groth and Nils Bubandt explore Javanese songbird competitions, which are central to the Indonesian kicau-mania pushing numerous native species toward extinction. Through an investigation into the »non-innocent care« of the culture, they reveal how the Romantic aesthetics present in Western environmentalism fall short when battling extinction, necessitating further investigation into the multiplicity of multispecies aesthetics. 

Nele Möller takes a different approach by turning her attention to game-calling instruments – tools traditionally used by hunters to mimic animal sounds and lure them in. In her audio paper Alarming calls and whispering winds – On game-calling instruments, mimicry and intersubjectivity, she presents her work wherein she reverses the instrument’s intended use, and rather explores their possibility of creating empathetic listening situations. 

Listening is also at the heart of Kirsten Reese’s Sonic animism? – »deep« listening into field recordings and scientific audio collections. The paper draws on examples of the author’s recent sound works and research, exploring the idea of listening to biophonic and geophonic voices as a form of technologically aided sonic animism. Field recording is employed as deep listening into scientific audio collections and archival sound. The researchers also placed contact mikes onto different tree species and recorded the sound of wind, mediated through the physical body of the tree, and found themselves transported into a state of animistic listening, described as a spiritual form of insight and realisation.

Two papers explore participatory sense-making with instruments; musical instruments and materials in the case of Christopher A. Williams and Joshua Bergamia, and puppets in the paper by Matt Smith and Paul J. Rogers. In Real-Time Norms: Grooves, drones, and sense-making in experimental improvised music Williams and Bergamia combine verbal dialogue, recordings of a live performance of the Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, to address questions related to human and more-than-human agencies in experimental improvised music (EIM). If what musicians play is not determined in advance, what holds a performance together? Drawing on theories of participatory sense-making in enactive philosophy, the paper shows that while musical phenomena such as drones and grooves emerge from human interaction, they take on a life of their own as more-than-human agents, thus illustrating the real-time emergence and transformation of norms in EIM.

Along similar lines, What Do Puppets Hear? is an audio paper by Smith and Rogers, exploring the uncanny world of puppetry, examining the relationship between humans and puppets through sound. It investigates the puppet’s perspective, exploring non-dialogue sounds, non-words, and noise and they ask: How does the puppeteer talk to the puppet, how do they talk for the puppet, how does the puppet talk to others and what internal voice does the puppet have?

The next four papers widen the perspectives in a series of different directions, providing examples of how technologies, and sometimes their failure to comply with the wishes and intentions of human users, shape identity formation and may lay the ground for novel discoveries and invention. In Paulus van Horne’s Embracing unnaturalness: Computer voices & trans sound studies, the author uses their own digitally altered voice to highlight how unnaturalness in sound can be a powerful tool for rethinking identity. The paper introduces the emerging field of trans sound studies, exploring how sound and voice can challenge fixed ideas of identity, gender, and the body. Using examples from historical speech synthesis, and through theories of the »acousmatic question«, trans operations, and trans*formative sonic thinking, the paper shows how technologies of vocal modulation can create new ways of expressing gender. 

Debashis Sinha’s Algorithmic mythologies: Failure as a cultural tool provides examples of the failures and messiness that often occurs when approaching the multimodal knowledge held in sound and human experience with data tools such as machine learning. By presenting some of his own work in theatre and machine learning-based audio research-creation, Sinha argues that algorithmic failure can serve as a deliberate strategy of discovery, to uplift the exploration of cultural possibilities and engage alternative models of community building and connection.

Julian Weaver’s Being-at-work in the field explores how energy production and energy ethics may affect practices of field recording. Through the lens of Michael Marder’s philosophical work – whose rethinking of energy’s ontology challenges extractive paradigms and evokes the dream of sustainable existence – the author’s own fieldwork, engaging with more-than-human worlds in experimental nuclear fusion, and isostatic uplift in the Baltic, serves as an element of study. Hereby, Weaver formulates a critique, pointing out how field recordists of today still operate within paradigms from the past century, and through Marder’s alternative energy paradigm, proposes novel directions in the field. 

Alberto Ricca’s Whose voice is your voice? builds on the observation how, in the era of streaming and virtual meetings, bandwidth has become a scarce commodity. He argues that artificial intelligence is helpful, but current mainstream codecs reconstruct sound on the basis of their reference corpora, which are fine-tuned for speech. This might lead to a homogenisation of the soundscape and the elimination of non-human sounds. Ricca explores the consequences of a widespread acceptance of models trained to separate background noise from human voices and rebuild a synthetic simulacrum of the latter, neutering context. When this happens, the paper asks: »Whose voice is your voice? Whose ears are your ears?«

The remainder of the edition explores how human relationships with the more-than-human world can be enhanced through attentive listening and participatory sense-making, and how such interplay may be mediated through the use of different technologies for the capture of sound and vibration. In Ambient tremology Kosmas Ðinh, Mae Lubetkin and Michal Mitro explore the vibratory nature of the Romanian Danube Delta, by using contact-accelerometer recordings and haptic experiences to trace granular memories and waterways in transition. The audio paper, drawing from ecotremology and sound studies, interrogates sonic fieldwork as a process of »making with« and amplifies vibratory linkages in the Delta landscape. 

Radio Amnion, an audio platform submerged at 2.6 kilometres below the surface of the Northeast Pacific Ocean, is part of a neutrino experiment and oceanographic monitoring station. It has commissioned and relayed over 25 artists’ compositions since 2021, exploring the ocean through sonic meditation, fiction, and materiality. The audio-paper How ocean dreams by Jol Thoms and Konstantinos Damianakis combines Amnion compositions and excerpts from Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris to explore the Quantum Ecologies project. It advocates for re-enchantment in scientific knowledge production, emphasising pluriversality and a cosmopolitical perspective.

Infrasound, inaudible to humans, is constantly present in the atmosphere and can travel enormous distances. The artist Brian House has developed infrasonic »macrophones« to make infrasound audible, allowing people to experience the planet’s atmospheric changes and connect with larger forces. His paper Infrasound and the planetary imaginary features ambient atmospheric infrasound recorded with macrophones installed in the woods near Amherst, Massachusetts. The recordings were subsequently played back to residents of Amherst and excerpts of their verbal responses to their listening experience are integrated into the audio paper.

Invisible Sounds is an ongoing ecological urban sound art project which explores how interactions between humans and their environment are mediated through technologies like sensors, hydrophones, and surround sound recording. The project collaborated with ensemble Norrbotten NEO on creating a site-specific composition. In their audio paper, entitled Sounds by water and trees Anders Hultqvist, Stefan Östersjö, Jan Berg and Robert Ek, explore how a performative engagement with sound influences musicians’ experience of place. Through a display of the multi-modal audio recordings, as well as through interviews and stimulated recall analysis, the paper highlights the personal experiences of the musicians and illustrates how complex patterns of meaning emerge from the interplay between sound, technology, and environment.

A reduction in physical mobility for mother and daughter Cathy and Maya Lane impacts upon their experience of time, and this is explored through processes of listening they call »sound sitting« as opposed to »sound walking«. This reveals the intricacies of the tiny mundane soundscapes of the garden, inviting us to adapt our senses of temporality through listening to creatures, and ourselves, at more-than-human time scales. Their audio paper Listening in slug time draws close and intimate attention to creatures we might otherwise ignore, and the positioning of ourselves in relation to them, exposing how listening draws us close to environmental ethics.

Diana Chester and Damien Ricketson's audio paper has emerged out of their spatial audio installation Listening to earth but in their audio paper they change the title, and invite the listener to reorient their listening, from Listening to to listening with. Material for the installation was generated through an exploration of intertidal zones in Southeast Australia using a range of technologies that afford ways to attend to sounds and vibrations beyond our usual range of perception. Sound affords us a particularly effective medium through which to imagine a dialogue with the Earth, especially where unfamiliar or unsensed vibrations bring us into confrontation with its otherness. The authors describe feeling as though they had antennae without tuners as they interacted with Earth's enormous range of vibrational energies.

Myths, legends, and local stories uncannily co-exist with the mundane activities of city life in Listening for mermaids where Deptford Creek, a minor watercourse, runs almost anonymously through part of south-east London. In this audio paper, by Konstantinos Damianakis, Louise Rondel and Emma Jackson, the authors explore not just the legends of The Necker, a sinister mer-creature said to live in the creek, but the ways in which water itself flows, how it mixes in confluences, and echoes how stories and everyday experiences combine and separate. Everyday activities like birdwatching, picknicking, and graffiti writing are part of the processes of place making, but so are the stories that adhere to places.

Glacial withness: Listening at the edge of planetary boundaries is a collaborative audio paper created by Dr. Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings, Daniela Amado, Santiago Rueda-García, Konstantine Vlasis, Adam Świtała, Rike Scheffler and Linnéa Ida-Maria Falck. The artistic activist campaign Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta [Snæfellsjökul for President] in 2024 challenged the idea that entities designated »inanimate« in Western scientistic epistemology are nothing more than inert matter. The glacier, which is seriously threatened with extinction in the escalating climate crisis, in being nominated as a presidential candidate, acquires a public presence beyond an apparently inert landform. Like Chester and Ricketson elsewhere in this issue, the Snæfellsjökul team advocates listening with the glacier, not simply to it, exploring how such an orientation affects our relationship with this colossal listening companion. Listening, importantly, does not just engage with the more-than-human but serves as a site of identification from which to speculate on possible futures. At the heart of the paper lies the scientific prediction that the great Snæfellsjökul glacier will soon disappear from the Earth.

The two final papers engage with whale song, albeit from slightly different perspectives. Bringing together expertise in marine biology and field recording, Ocean senses: Listening, technology and the sonic researcher by Mark Peter Wright and Denise Risch advocates a deep listening of underwater soundscapes in the interests of building a stronger sense of connection with the marine ecosystem, and in particular the sounds of cetacean species within it. Though the often injurious activities of human cultures make any encounters with the more-than-human fraught with ethical issues, Wright and Risch advocate for an enhanced awareness of cetacean presence evidenced by their »song«. Listening through hydrophones can enhance our sense of these creatures who, for most of us, exist in a world so distant, in all respects, from our everyday experience. Finally, the authors use spectrogram visualisation, and AI analysis tools to further explore the cetacean soundscape. 

Alex South, in Sounding migrations: Deep listening and the acoustic phenology of whale song proposes that wider public access to underwater acoustic data, would encourage deep listening and foster a stronger connection to marine life. In the audio paper, the author simulates the yearly pattern of cetacean song, using underwater recordings from the North Atlantic to demonstrate how these vocalizations have the potential to connect urban citizens of industrial societies to the seasonal flows of the more-than-human world, and extend their sense of dwelling in a world always already experienced by other sentient beings. 

The more-than-human is, by definition, almost limitless. Indeed, generalising about it would be, in a sense, to do violence against it. This presents a challenge to an editorial team attempting to summarise this issue of Seismograf, but we hope that the range of audio papers presented will individually afford specific insights and provoke further thinking, and more importantly, open up the diverse and complex world still to be explored.

To conclude, we would like to thank all authors for their dedicated work on creating the audio papers of this edition. We would also wish to extend our sincere gratitude to the colleagues, artists, and scholars whose thoughtful reviews, expert insights, and generous support in publishing and mentoring have played a vital role in the realization of this special issue. Last but not least, many thanks to the entire production team at Seismograf. Through the combined efforts of all involved, this edition opens windows through which we can bend our ears to the multiplicities that surround us in the more-than-human-world.