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

How can we (re)learn to receive vibrational information from Earth, and would this be considered an act of listening? Framed as a conversation with Earth, this audio paper weaves spoken word with field recordings of intertidal zones from Southeast Australia using listening instruments (hydrophones, geophones, custom-built aeolian harps) that foreground sounds beyond our usual thresholds of perception. Funded by the Sydney Environment Institute, our research was the basis for Listening to Earth (2024), a spatial sound installation, and inspires our audio paper that explores how we listen to the more-than-human and what sonic stories Earth tells.

Drawing on methodologies in deep listening practices, sound ecologies and non-extractivist discourse, we explore ways sound enables a dialogic exchange with Earth as collaborator and co-author. That our ears and eyes perceive only a small fraction of an infinite spectrum of vibrational energy raises the prospect that our bodies are soaked in a constant din of inaudible vibrations that bypass our brains to act directly on our organs. This embodied approach to listening through vibration is at the heart of our research and guides our listening practice. Vibration itself is a form of earth story and our dialogue and compositional practice, an attempt to understand them. In dialogue with Earth, through extended deep listening and recorded documentation, this audio paper will weave our argument of sound’s capacity to reveal stored vibrational earth stories through our research findings and reflections. 

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.

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.