Abstract

Why is it that in experimental improvised music (EIM) anything can happen but hardly ever does? And if what musicians play is not determined in advance, what holds performances of EIM together? We address these twin questions through a combination of verbal dialog, recordings of a live performance of the Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, and comments on both. Drawing on theories of »participatory sense-making« in enactive philosophy, we show 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. By enabling and constraining what »makes sense« in particular situations, these »emergent autonomous organizations« shape the (inter)action that gave rise to them, obtaining normative force. By the same token, however, they can also change according to musicians’ subsequent (inter)actions. EIM thus stages the emergence and transformation of norms in real time and illustrates how human action more broadly interacts with the more-than-human.

Abstract

Drawing from examples of recent sound works and research the audiopaper explores the idea of listening to biophonic and geophonic »voices« as a form of technologically aided sonic animism. Field recording is understood as a practice of listening seeking heightened awareness and environmental connectedness and sonic research as 'deep' listening into scientific audio collections and archival sound. The audio paper features examples from the author’s recent compositions, radiophonic works and installations, and reflects on perceived sonic animism through the sound material. The compositions are contextualised as works relating to climate change and ecological crises and encompassing broader narratives: Rediviva intermixta, a sound installation/radiophonic work for Oscillations, a collaboration between University of the Western Cape and Akademie der Künste Berlin, includes sounds of wind, water and ocean, plants and animals, wooden constructions and metal fences at places with historical and current political and  societal significance; Homeostasis, an audiovisual installation presented in two natural history museums asks questions about anthropocentric perspectives on bioacoustic voices. By acknowledging that the voices of animals communicating underwater, and therefore in a medium of sound strange to human ears, will always be alien to humans, the work – composed with scientific research recordings – aims to appreciate otherness in these voices. Future Forest, a currently ongoing project, in collaboration with ecoacoustic researchers from Freiburg University, relates to the ecosystem forest: the Black Forest and old-growth forest in Brandenburg. The paper describes how, in making the first recordings of wind, sounding through different tree species with contact mikes connected to the trunk of a tree, transported us into a state of »animistic listening«, even a spiritual form of insight and realisation (»everything is connected«). 

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 bark beetle outbreak, 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.

Abstract

This audio paper examines listening practices, technologies and cultures within the scientific study of marine ecosystems. It mixes recordings of whale song and ocean sounds with the voices of its co-authors, marine mammal ecologist Dr Denise Risch and artist researcher Dr Mark Peter Wright. Moving across three phases of argumentation and reflection, the paper questions how underwater knowledge emerges  through tools such as hydrophones, spectrograms and Artificial Intelligence. It situates the ears, bodies and imaginations of researchers to ask what constitutes sonic data when listening to worlds beyond the human.

Abstract

Along and in the rivers of Lewisham in south-east London, we hear stories of mermaids, treasure chests, crocodiles and, dwelling in a dark corner of Deptford Creek, the Necker, some say a merperson or a serpent.

In this audio paper, we explore these ethereal and slippery stories through listening to the landscape, examining the role of sound in the ongoing process of producing places (Massey, 1994). We consider how sound conjures the imagined mermaids and other watery creatures and foregrounds the pluralities and possibilities of places (Voegelin, 2021). In a reciprocal feedback loop, sounds give rise to certain imaginings and, once imagined, these sounds confirm the existence of what we think or know we heard. 

The imaginings are intimately tied in with everyday forms of place-making along Lewisham’s rivers – picnicking, graffiti-writing, playing and birdwatching. They are also a response to the liminality of such spaces; concerns about safety after dark or uncertainty about what is in or under the water equally giving rise to mythical creatures. 

In turn, the imaginings layer onto the multiplicity of trajectories and practices intersecting to create places (Massey, 2012). Entwined in this are the landscape’s sounds - field recordings, interviews, and music that the rivers recalled to us. Sounds which are not echoes of places but active in their production. 

Through the sonic personae of mermaids, we suggest listening confluently to grasp sound’s role in texturing the rivers’ ambiguous and otherworldly qualities. Like the confluence of two streams of a river, listening confluently opens a crack in any notion of place, allowing other stories to issue forth. 

Along and in Lewisham’s rivers we invite (in fact, impel) you to listen confluently; to listen for mermaids and the places in which they dwell.

Abstract

This work takes place in the garden, a space of refuge and multispecies co-dependence, from the perspective of two people living with disabling conditions.  

We are a sound artist and an anthropologist, also mother and daughter. We are both adjusting to alternative temporalities, reduced mobilities and ways of living by our chronically unwell bodies. Our paper meditates on how multispecies listening can help us to live slower and maybe better, embrace new temporalities and sustain practices of care within the garden and beyond.  

We have been developing sound sitting, as opposed to sound walking, as an accessible listening practice. Sound sitting invites slow listening, »in every possible way to everything possible to hear« (Oliveros, 1998). attending to the small, mundane, and everyday sonic worlds within and between bodies – our own and the critters of the garden that we ignore or treat carelessly under capitalism. Inspired by crip time (Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2017), anthropology (Tsing, 2021) and expanded listening practices (Oliveros,1995; Shah, 2021), we become participants in a sonic network that extends to the semantic and the ethical allowing us to listen and learn from more than human temporalities – »slug time« or the amorphous, sticky instances of slow knowledge production. 

Abstract

This audio paper seeks to understand the agency of sounds and instruments in designing intra-actions between humans and their environment. It further explores how different mediating technologies influence the ways professional musicians experience place through sound. In addition to the core research group, members of the contemporary music ensemble Norrbotten NEO participated in these site-specific explorations, which were devised as part of the ecological urban sound art project Invisible Sounds. Through a long-term collaborative artistic process, described in the audio paper, an hour-long composition titled Sounds by Water and Trees was produced (Hultqvist et al., 2024). 

The mediation between humans and the environment was driven by audio technologies on site, utilising sensors, hydrophones, and surround sound microphone arrays, along with their deep entanglement with musical instruments. The interview materials and the original audio recordings have been further analysed by revisiting the multi-modal recordings and exploring the individual experiences of each participant through stimulated recall analysis (Östersjö et al., 2023). The audio paper expresses all these layers of signification while emphasising the individual experience expressed by the participating musicians. The project is characterised by recursive loops that flow continuously between subject and object, self and world, order and chaos in rhythmically cohering and complexifying patterns. We provide examples of how such complexifying patterns may emerge through a participatory and multidimensional engagement with sound in tandem with the mediation enabled by the technologies used.

Abstract

Even though you can’t hear it, infrasound fills the air. And because the atmosphere doesn’t absorb it as readily as regular sound, infrasound comes from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. If humans could perceive frequencies lower than 20 Hz, then changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic entanglements taking place across the globe would shape our imagination of the planet’s very nature.  

In my research, I’ve developed infrasonic »macrophones« to make infrasound audible. Comprising wind-noise reduction arrays leading to microbarometers and using custom signal processing, I’ve appropriated the basic technique from what the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect distant warhead tests. In this case, however, we’re listening to a planet in transition. Unlike with a scientific endeavor, it’s not a matter of extending the horizon of human knowledge. Instead, it’s about encountering agencies greater than our own that connect us through the atmosphere, an experience that is both poetic and political.

This paper features ambient atmospheric infrasound recorded with Macrophones installed in the woods near Amherst, Massachusetts. I sped up the recording by a factor of 60, raising the pitch by ~6 octaves into a range perceptible by humans. I played this audio to residents of Amherst in a controlled listening environment; excerpts of their reactions are also included.

With support from Creative Capital, Amherst College, and the J & K Altman Foundation. Thanks to Ethan Clotfelter, Ben Holtzman, Leif Karlstrom, Theun Karelse, Lucia Monge, the art department at Lewis & Clark, and the Columbia Center for Spatial Research.