Alarming calls and whispering winds

On game-calling instruments, mimicry and intersubjectivity

Nele Möller

18. september 2025

Fokus: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Abstract

This audio paper explores so-called »game-calling instruments« as vessels for mimetic practices and intersubjective experiences. Game-calling instruments have a millennia-old tradition in various cultures of luring animals closer to the respective hunter’s hideout spot and are considered to be the first instruments built by humans.

Starting from an encounter with a hunter in the Thuringian Forest in the east of Germany, while listening into the forest’s decline due to monoculture plantings, climate crisis and a correlated bark beetle infestation, the audio paper explores how to use these instruments and practices beyond tricking animals to tune into the resonances of animal voices, hushing leaves, whispering winds, and, inevitably, environmental collapse.

Drawing from environmental semiotics and the onomatopoeic echoes of flowing rivers and rustling leaves, the audio paper urges a release from rigid human perspectives and explores the possibilities of attuning to the subtleties of more-than-human communication. It proposes mimesis and empathetic listening as tools to engage with our surroundings beyond extractivism and as an ambiguous practice that embraces failure to develop intersubjective experience and sonic fictions, while reconnecting with the rhythms and patterns of the more-than-human world.

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