Abstract

Ambient Tremology reorients the act of listening from the sonic to the vibrant by gaining contact with the trembling matter of amphibious worlds. Situated within the soaked and brackish Romanian Danube Delta, our contact-accelerometer recordings and haptic experiences trace granular memories, waterways in transition, and other-than-human transmission. Drawing on perspectives from the fields of ecotremology, sound studies, new materialism and posthuman phenomenology, the audio paper opens up questions on sonic and vibratory fieldwork as a process of »making with«. Vibration is observed as a shadowy ambient force that not only relates agents within the Delta but also shakes up submerged histories and configures contact zones with spatio-temporal rhythms and scales beyond human perception. Concerned also with the materiality of the voice and recording themselves, the audio paper unfolds through spills and glitches between its layers while amplifying the vibratory linkages in the Danube’s deltaic landscape. By means of sonic translation, our dialogue with recorded vibrations offers a glimpse of the amphibious burrows enmeshing matter and the other-than-human.

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