Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice 9781501354519, 9781501354540, 9781501354533

Citation preview

Listening After Nature

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Listening After Nature Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice Mark Peter Wright

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Mark Peter Wright, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. vi–viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover photo: Mark Peter Wright All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wright, Mark Peter, author. Title: Listening after nature : field recording, ecology, critical practice / Mark Peter Wright. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Listening After Nature questions the reality of auditory natures. It argues that the line between wilderness and industrial culture is dull, and the natural world is presently a critical construct that entangles humans, animals, sites and technologies. Bringing new insights to the field of environmental sound arts in areas such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, Wright examines contemporary and archival audio works and calls for a ‘post-natural’ approach to sound. The book propels sounds arts discourse into critical relationship with the environmental humanities and contemporary approaches dealing with the consequences of Anthropogenic change. Critical and imaginative, this is a book that forges urgent debate between sound, ethics, aesthetics and ecology”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021055067 (print) | LCCN 2021055068 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501354519 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392863 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501354526 (epub) | ISBN 9781501354533 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501354540 Subjects: LCSH: Field recordings–Philosophy. | Field recordings–Environmental aspects. | Field recordings–Moral and ethical aspects. | Soundscapes (Music)–Philosophy and aesthetics. | Sound (Philosophy) | Ecomusicology. Classification: LCC ML3877 .W75 2022 (print) | LCC ML3877 (ebook) | DDC 780.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055067 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055068 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5451-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5453-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-5452-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments 

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Introduction  1 Recoding the Field  2 Constructing Nature  3 Stretching Site  4 Following the Flow  Conclusion: Pressing Record and Pressing Play: On Suspicious Listening and Affirmative Ethics 

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Notes  Bibliography  Index 

11 43 79 115 147 159 191 209

Acknowledgments It is difficult to pin down the beginning of any creative process, but it was at an altitude of approximately 35,000 feet that the questions and themes for this book emerged. I was on a flight from Helsinki to London, listening back to a field recording I had just made from the departure lounge bathroom. Among the bustle of people and hand dryers, I heard recorded birdsong filtering into the space. I barely noticed nature’s Muzak at the time but was reminded of it upon playback. Listening to the recording, as I looked out the plane’s frosted window, I asked myself where the field was in this audio document. Was it the washroom, the airplane, my phone? When did it begin? Was it the moment I walked into the bathroom, or when I pressed record? Was it when I pressed stop, or when I pressed play? Where was I in these multi-scalar movements, between the signal and noise, field and its elsewhere audition? And what of broadcasting birdsong within the bathroom of an international airport? Avian sonic agency was deployed alongside detergents like a cleaning product, used to erase any evidence that our waste exists, that it is managed and moved. Nature is the perfect auditory commodity: calming, restorative, cleansing. It is extracted, packaged, and sold with limitless ease. I am sure no bird gave consent for its song to mask the sound of a toilet flush. My own movement was perhaps the most ironic of all. I was flown in and out over two evenings to examine a student work made in the context of ecology and performance studies. My energy-intensive footprint could not have been more trodden. Space, time, and events therefore matter. Although porous, they have to be acknowledged as influences that set this book in motion. More personal inspirations are found in those who have helped steer its journey. Angus Carlyle and Salomé Voegelin are two people who have had an immeasurable influence on my creative and critical trajectory over the years. They have pushed and pulled at my practice, inspired interventions, and, not least, encouraged a belief in me that what I do matters. Both are allies and collaborators, and now, perhaps most important of all, I simply call them friends.

Acknowledgments

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This book has germinated over time, across various spaces and discussions, both formal and informal. I am grateful to Cathy Lane, Director of CRiSAP at the London College of Communication (LCC) along with the center’s members and research students. It is a community that nurtures expansive thinking and practice: I am fortunate to be part of it. I want to thank students across undergraduate and postgraduate levels including my PhD students at LCC, who at various points along the way have helped test, push, and refine many of the concepts developed in this book. Above all, the arena of learning reminds me that critical intervention must be coupled with hopeful alternatives. I have taken this lesson into my writing as a constant note to self. Thanks to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, Amy Martin, Rachel Moore, and the Bloomsbury publishing team for giving me the opportunity to put these ideas into the public domain. Like any process, the chapters of this book have been through various stages of tuning. I owe a debt of gratitude to my early readers, those who have questioned, prompted, and reminded me of things I could not see along the way: Rui Chaves, Christopher DeLaurenti, Sasha Engelmann, Sally Ann McIntyre, Marina Peterson, Leandro Pisano, and Andrea Polli. Friends and critical allies include Chiara Ambrosio, Andrew Brumwell, Daniela Cascella, Michael Gallagher, Jennifer Gabrys, Lisa Hall, Laura Harrington, Ernst Karel, Mikey Kirkpatrick, Kevin Logan, Robert Pacitti, Jussi Parikka, Colin Potter, Andrew Ray, Autumn Richardson, Wood Roberdeau, Susan Schuppli, Richard Skelton, Cheryl Tipp, David Toop, Susan Trangmar, and Lynn Turner. There have been crucial journal contributions along the way. The early seeds of this book were planted in peer-reviewed publications including Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia, Evental Aesthetics, Journal of Sonic Studies, Leonardo Music Journal, and Sensate Journal. Exhibitions and paper presentations helped cast the written word into the air. I am grateful to institutes and art spaces that include University College London, University of Edinburgh, Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of the Arts Helsinki, Harvard University, Critical Media Lab Basel, University of Stavanger, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Copenhagen, Arts Catalyst, Auxiliary Warehouse, Catalyst Arts, IMT Gallery (Mark Jackson and Lindsay Friend), Parasol Unit, Platform A Gallery, GV Art, Another Space, Centre for Possible Studies, Corbel Stone Press, and MIMA. My family has provided support throughout. Thanks to the outlaws, Tim senior, Tim junior, and Jan Hunter. To my good friends Alex, Greg, and Tal. To

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my mum, Dee, and brother, Chris, for the openness and generosity they have always encouraged. To Helena, for her love and for pushing me to do this. The contract for this book arrived via email early one December morning. Around the same time my Dad suddenly passed away, the two events almost overlapped. I never got to tell you I was writing a book, Dad, but I know you have been with me for every comma, sentence, and full stop. Thank you for all that you gave me. This is dedicated to you.

Introduction

Induced by the crisis of the Anthropocene, the proposition of a new epoch in which humans have become a geological force, we listen after Nature.1 From colonization to nonrenewable resource extraction, industrial farming to nuclear waste, humans have wreaked havoc on planet earth and produced irrevocable damage in terms of biodiversity loss and escalating geopolitical conflict: no visual or acoustic stone has been left unturned. Of course, some are more culpable than others, some more at risk, some live with extinction as part of ongoing histories of erasure and subjugation. There is no universal subject or position.2 In the midst of a sixth mass extinction event, what constitutes “the human” has been simultaneously destabilized and reaffirmed. In the context of field recording, the position of the Anthropos, the recordist-listener, must therefore be reconfigured and reimagined. The practice of field recording is vast and varied but can be summarized as an exploration of the acoustic worlds of humans and nonhumans through the capture, construction, and mediation of sound. This sentence does little to justify the plethora of methods, contexts, and sites that shape a discipline situated primarily within sound arts and cultural sound studies. Nonhuman field recording strives toward matters of environmental curiosity and care, toward the liveliness of animals, atmospheres, and architectures. It is a practice enamored by nature’s musical associations and affects. The great outdoors, so the myth goes, is a composition, and its sounds, be they human or nonhuman, are prime material for capture and repurpose, for hobby, archives, science, art, healing, activism, or music. Historically, fields such as acoustic ecology and soundscape studies have investigated sound and the environment in relation to anthropogenic impact. The tendency to represent such topics is elegiac, framed through silence, in the case of species loss, or polemic, as highlighted by industrial noise. This book is not a close reading of such contexts, nor does it operate critiques and deconstructions already available. Furthermore, it is not a technical guide to

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Listening After Nature

field recording and does not examine thematic tropes such as sense of place or memory.3 Indigenous and postcolonial scholarship teaches us that friction-free wilderness, devoid of human intervention, never existed in the first place, nor the division of nature and culture.4 Likewise, the position of a neutral recordist, or recording, is no longer a tenable position for contemporary practice and has never been. Listening After Nature pushes artists to be accountable to the entangled demands of the historic present. The consequences shift across the pages of this book as I audition water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists. Ecology intersects these issues and is webbed through cultural contexts and practice; neither one nor the other can be separated. Artistic methods, perspectives, and tools must be part of a critical inquiry that fuses the meshwork that we call “ecology.” The tremors of the Anthropocene accentuate this point, its effects inscribing every inch of the planet. Field recordists are embroiled in its epochal footprint and are analyzed here as an integral part of a post-natural setting.5 It would be pointless to write a book on field recording by standing on the sidelines and listening at a distance. This is not a plausible position in the Field6 and it is not a recommended perspective when auditioning works elsewhere. Instead, I have endeavored to listen and write with the intersections of practice and research. The investigations that guide my “ear view” are by necessity both placed and displaced. Archival documents and contemporary publications are interpreted as a process of recoding. It is a sensibility led by an understanding that sound capture captures more than sound, that listening enacts power and that field recordings mutate meaning rather than ossify it. The ensuing chapters engage with the shifting terrain of practice as a form of field recording itself. It is a process that webs historic and contemporary works, cultural contexts, and critical debate. Within this mix, my practice, as an artist and researcher, participates through situated present tense audition, anecdotal field notes, and pedagogical reflections. The term “critical practice” houses concerns intrinsic to pointing a microphone toward animals, infrastructures, or atmospheres. It affords a close inspection of the hows and whys of fieldcraft, matters that become troubled when we shift a critical lens over the recorded interactions of humans and nonhumans. What is really being captured? What exists beyond the so-called signal? How is agency performed and negotiated? How does power function? What am I not hearing? The latter question recurs throughout the pages of

Introduction

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this book. It is a prompt for hearing more than sound and writing more than I can hear. Critical practice takes the inaudible seriously: culturally, technically, somatically, and conceptually. The thresholds of listening matter and always connect to the privilege of holding a microphone. When we talk of the Ear,7 whose ear exactly do we mean? Who has the historical right to press record, to be silent rather than be silenced? The field, nature, and the sounds of modernity have been constructed by a white Western-centric ear. Cultural theorist Édouard Glissant reminds us, “The West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place.”8 So, too, can we say that the ear that has built the field is not benign; it is manufactured from the ruptures of violence, separation, and subjugation across all species. Troubling a de facto culture of benevolence and inconsequentiality entails recoding the foundational myths and erasures that permit sound capture to be deemed neutral, the field to be presumed natural, and sound to be practiced as inexhaustible. In doing so, I offer parallels and counter versions, both scholarly and practice-based, to tell new stories and provide friction-based impetus. Postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo advocates a delinking from Western structures in order to shake down the universalisms that underpin claims of knowledge and truth.9 Pragmatically, this involves a certain amount of disruption or, as Mignolo calls it, “epistemic disobedience.”10 To interrupt the norms of field recording, I undertake a similar process in an effort to unpick “truths” propagated by a Western field and to open new possibilities in practice. Listening After Nature is a time to probe the “whiteness of sound studies,”11 the cultural root in which field recording sits along with related disciplines that include ethnomusicology and ethnography. As someone situated within the context of Western-European scholarship, I believe there is a duty to examine this position, its actors, histories, and technologies as part of a political and ecological project.12 Universalisms spun from systemic racism and social inequalities are infrastructural; they are scaffolded and built. Cultures and practices, which stem from Western institutes and disciplines, must therefore be recognized and reassembled. The challenge is to simultaneously question all that is assumed natural or neutral while offering vibrant and hopeful interventions. I will unpack these shortly, but to restate my responsibility here, it is to unsettle the silences and erasures in which universal norms grow. These lacunas are found primarily through the figure of reticent author-recordists, innocuous technologies of capture, as well as the historical traces that stalk sonic signals. In other words,

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Listening After Nature

I hope to trouble the illusion of friction-free sound capture by bending the ear back toward itself, as a glitch-making intervention. To do so demands an inquiry of sites, plural: the exhausted landscapes of the Anthropocene and the bodies of field recordists themselves. Stretched across the sonic encounter and final published form, authors must be brought into earshot. This is not a straightforward task due to the evasive traits of those who point the microphone. It requires an ethical and aesthetic search riddled with uncanny hauntings and constant attention toward that which we cannot hear. I recode authorial presence through a conceptual figuration called the “Noisy-Nonself,” a hybrid doppelgänger that emerges out of taciturn recordist histories. It is a chimerical identity that iterates throughout the chapters of this book. Tangled in the ghosts of colonization, the Noisy-Nonself is comprehended with the aid of specific auditory phenomena including white noise and feedback.13 Technology must also be held accountable as part of an ecologically valid practice. Microphones and recording kits, made from minerals extracted from the earth through precarious and dangerous labor, imply that neither sound capture nor its consequent representations can ever be separate from the geopolitical resources and networks that allow signals to be captured in the first place. Gripping a microphone confirms there is no impartial position, no benign technology, no objective recording. Once more, the critical ecology of field recording practice is my task, not necessarily the sonic signifiers of the Anthropocene. Critical practice is also found in the connective elsewhere spaces of audition, analysis, and learning. I interpret historic and contemporary soundworks from archives, publications, and broadcasts. This is not a book about gallery installations, expanded works, and the aesthetic canons such contexts bring. It is a deliberate and sustained engagement with recordings that lean toward the documentary side of practice, not in disavowal of composition or postproduction, both of which are part of this book, but to generatively constrain my own critical audition. I focus less on field recording as a genre and more on field recordings as material documents. To put it another way, I am interested in what recordings do. In stress testing the basic units of field recording, what it is and what it does, my critical audition happens among the everyday. On the bus, in the library, sitting at a desk, in the classroom, alone, or together: listening and learning happen everywhere. I have accepted the multiple scenes of audition into the pages of this book as a vital part of my analysis. My engagement with sonic works;

Introduction

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the playback and interrogation of audio documents in time and space, along with writing and research, amplifies an interpretive grapple with sound and its affects. Consequently, my writing is a process of recoding built from a listening full of overlaps, contradictions, and gaps. Within this mesh of perforations, of knowledge lost and found, I have come to think of my listening analysis as a speculative search for metadata, hearing above, below, and around the sound object, reaching for the sensory, cultural, and technological “data” that remain otherwise absent. To frame the interlinked settings of the recorded site and my situated context of audition, I posit a conceptual model called “contact zones and elsewhere fields.” These two terms are distinct yet merged hypothetical spaces. They locate the immediate encounter of recording—contact zone—and the postproduction spaces—elsewhere fields—of critical audition, be they in the studio, armchair, or classroom. The two are pulled apart yet held in relation to give specific focus on each in terms of power, agency, and decision making. Drawing a gestural line between the recorded encounter and its elsewhere audition helps recognize that recordists do not emerge and dissolve from within the field. Rather, they enter and leave as a constant process of movement and transgression. In doing so, Noisy-Nonself recordists tremble the thresholds of the field’s nebulous sphere. Contact zones and elsewhere fields reiterate one of the main arguments in this book: the field is not a separate space, but more a cross-hatching of relations and affects over time and space. The result is that no definitive or site-specific field recording can ever exist. Two words recur throughout the chapters in relation to critical practice and the interlocking arenas of contact zones and elsewhere fields: “listening-with” and “low frequencies.” Both interlace each other. Listening-with is a mode in which I situate the audition and interpretation of soundworks. It is a method that seeks to foster critical alliance toward the sounds I hear, or do not hear, rather than approach them as something to listen to or for. It encourages a listening practice that strives for meaning as a process of construction as opposed to identifying sonic signs. Listening-with asserts that there is no singular subject but instead a plethora of ears, bodies, perspectives, recordings, and mediations at stake: stretched across site and species, scaled over thresholds of audibility and equity. Listening-with is not a celebration of such entanglements. It acknowledges complexity and the consequent demand placed on the ear of the recordist as much as the elsewhere listener, to disentangle and reassemble meaning as an ongoing process. It is a mode that accommodates my own

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Listening After Nature

present-tense descriptions of the blended sites and soundworks I listen-with, along with an appreciation that all signals, lost and found, enact responsibility in the process of audition. Whether listening-with the field or studio, I tune attention toward the “low frequencies” of sound capture and audition. This is postcolonial scholar Tina Campt’s phrase that describes her engagement with photographic archives from the African Diaspora. Campt’s interpretative strategy focuses on a series of identification images taken by photographer Obal Denis, owner of Gulu Real Art Studio, Uganda. The images feature a blank rectangle area where the subject’s face would have been. For Campt, encountering backgrounds devoid of a literal face opens up the possibility for a counterintuitive approach, a method of paying attention to that which is not there: “In that absence, other forms of individuality are transferred from background to foreground as studium shifts to punctum.”14 Focusing on the overlooked and underheard, Campt seeks to listen for what she calls low frequencies. It is not silence Campt is paying attention to but the quietude of presence, one that “registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention.”15 Campt’s reading invites analysis beyond representation and tunes into matters more than the visible or frameable. In searching for the sonic frequency of images, Campt asserts an affective politics of noticing in which listening becomes a primary method that can reveal new knowledge through speculative and felt engagement. Operating Campt’s low frequency strategy onto sonic documents enables an examination of audible thresholds and the subjects, sites, and sounds often occluded within the capture and presentation of field recordings. Low frequencies help designate an area to notice, discuss, and gather all that is more than audible, identifiable, or semantic sound. Along with drawing attention to infra- and ultrasound, below and above the mechanical range of human hearing, the term helps shifts awareness to the hiss of tape or shuffle of bodies, sleeve notes, and the space of audition. It inverts canonized histories and tunes into cultural erasures that haunt all recorded signals. It is a speculative focus, rigorous and integral to a researching sonic sensibility that is never absolute, never either-or. In short, low frequencies permit sustained attention toward the noise in the signal. The ironic consequence of listening-with low frequencies is that we are often left without definitive conclusions. Critical audition, therefore, emerges as a process full of vulnerabilities in terms of veracity and knowledge. These interleaved methods and interpretative strategies are iterated and refined over the following four chapters. I have attempted to unfold questions,

Introduction

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concepts, and debates. The gradual release of sustained multiple inquiries means those chapters are not isolated from one another. Instead, they mesh a process of thinking and rethinking. Questions repeat and rewrite, responses are remade and reopened as an invitation to you, the elsewhere reader. Chapter 1 aims to dredge the appetites and erasures that shape the field. By necessity, it upturns the historical roots of field recording and draws its context from colonial and technological coordinates. Tracing connections between ethnomusicology and nonhuman field recording, matters of salvage, savior, and preservation are explored as ongoing myths wired into the field’s amplification. Ironically, electrical recording provides a marker for noticing when recordists began to slip into the recesses of aesthetic representation. Animating the NoisyNonself figuration in response, I listen-with the low frequencies of what is heard and what is not. Blending cultural sound studies with practice, archives, and artworks, analysis includes Ludwig Koch’s recording of a common shama bird in 1889, Michael Rockefeller’s field recordings from Netherlands New Guinea in 1961, and the ivory-billed woodpecker from the Cornell Lab in 1935. Contemporary soundworks by David Michael, Antye Greie, and Christopher DeLaurenti intersect. Chapter 2 explores how sonic naturalisms have been constructed across cultural contexts. It attends to the logic of extraction and mastery that supports the capture, consumption, and representation of animal sounds, and the mediated contexts of their circulation. Investigating tensions between recording nature for creative and cultural purposes, I propose the “conservation–composition complex” as a way of framing the paradoxical bind in which recordists negotiate issues of appropriation, preservation, and rights. Hunting and predation shadow an ongoing discussion of agency and consent, between humans, microphones, and nonhumans. Linking three historically significant publications that heralded a new era of animal sound capture and composition, the chapter draws together cultures, reportage, and contemporary soundworks that deal with the promise and threat of mimicry in the context of extinction and biodiversity loss. Archival examples include listening-with a fawn-breasted bowerbird as it mimics the sound of its environment, as well as auditioning human bird mimicry from the Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Archive of New Zealand. Contemporary artistic analysis draws on the work of Raven Chacon, Sally Ann McIntyre, Helen Mirra and Ernst Karel, among others. The chapter examines the potential of nonhuman field recordists through the lens of verbatim technique. I claim animals also record and broadcast the

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sounds of anthropogenic change: matters of extinction and mourning are galvanized by the destabilization of what constitutes a natural voice. I fold mimicry back onto the human through a critical examination of postproduction Foley art. Exploring strategies of sonic fabrication, as creative flint for anxious and unsettled listening, I suggest that fictive methods contribute new knowledge toward the relations and responsibilities embroiled in sound capture and its representation. Both Chapters 1 and 2 perform an archeological dig of the field and nature. They uncover histories, cultures, and relations that often go unheard within the epistemes of field recording, and reroute findings back into contemporary practice and debate. Chapter 3 listens-with oil, ice, shrimp, stars, and data. I ask how field recording can participate, document, and communicate sensitive sites and sounds in critical and creative complicity. What knowledge is foreclosed from the human along the way, and how does technology allow brief leaps into radical alterity? I begin by reassessing methods of observation within the linked contexts of field recording, journalism, and ethnography. Exploring the promise of sonic knowledge, derived from the sound of environments rather than traditions of voice, I reflect on pedagogical and practice-based scenarios in which the notion of site specificity becomes untethered. These subjects are underpinned by discussions on participation, veracity, and fieldcraft, and the possibilities therein. Microphonic technologies that allow access into vibratory worlds above and below the human range of hearing are related to their histories and aesthetic challenges. This analysis includes works by Peter Cusack, Mikel R. Nieto, Jana Winderen, and Joyce Hinterding. In Chapter 3, low-frequency technocultures of listening agitate and trouble what it is I think I am listening-with. Utilizing discourse from the critical posthumanities enables theoretical framing and debate and allows for the possibility of listening-without: a legitimate position for practice and research that is not based on representational knowledge. With site and sound stretched to its audible and geographical limits, I deploy the conceptual framework “contact zones and elsewhere fields” to hold the demanding oscillations of critical practice. This is a hypothetical schema drawn from ethnographic literature and tuned to the nuances of sonic practice. It is a way in which I demarcate the site of recorded encounter and its future audition, in gestural relation rather than a hard dichotomy. This helps to rupture the myth of immersive, friction-free field recording while allowing for a bespoke understanding of each connected, yet distinct, space. To conclude the chapter, I operate the concept within a

Introduction

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soundwork by Andrea Polli that attends to climate change in Antarctica, taking on board the nuances of data sonification and cross-disciplinary research. Chapter 4 situates the pervasive logic of extraction that flows through field recording by way of its prime material actor: the microphone. Taking the word “footprint” as a start point, I examine the relationship between natural resources, technology, and critical practice. Rare earth minerals allow electric microphones to record; plastics protect their inner workings; mining, labor, waste, and environmental degradation make holding a microphone possible. The first section of the chapter draws such topics into a discussion with a contemporary soundwork by Fernando Godoy that explores copper mining in Chile, South America. Within this correlation, my own footprint falls. Digital and remote, it complicates and agitates the field. I perform microphonic research from my desk, striving to find the geological actors of its creation in yet another low-frequency attempt at listening to that which I cannot hear. It is a task that mixes histories, geographies, sounds, and sites at the margins of audibility and comprehension. As critical practice must account for its authors in an ecologically valid manner, so too it must draw technology into its net: where do field recordists end up when they follow the energetic flows of technoculture? The chapter concludes with a practice-based discussion on the imprints of air and infrastructure. I move toward sustainable green sites of audition such as wind turbines, as complex zones in which the potential for a new, circular economy of practice may or may not be propelled. Any book is fueled by hope and despair. Mine is a story of years spent wrapped in cables, sounds, sites, and studios. Over time, teaching and experimental pedagogy have become intrinsic to what I think of as my practice and research. It is a collective arena from which I derive hope. Not in the utopian sense of promise but through an operative application of the word: by doing and practicing field recording together. In this context, I have come to understand field recordings as vulnerable conduits for learning. They are documents that begin even before a microphone is positioned and continue long after being released into the public domain, they invite recoding and reconstruction, debate, and disentanglement; they trouble rational scholarship based on textual and linguistic cultures. The multi-scalar impacts of climate change, layered and obfuscated by abstract data, scientific language, and business-as-usual rhetoric, is said to produce a “hope gap.”16 This is a disjunction caused by the enormity of crisis versus a perception that no meaningful response has galvanized. I have witnessed this gap, although it would be more apt to call it a chasm, in the university.

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Listening After Nature

Pessimism, exhaustion, and grief fill the void and can engulf the well-being and mental health of students and lecturers alike. Field recording, never mind art more broadly, cannot plug the gap. Listening and sound are full of complex erasures and violations that leave field recording in no better position than any other creative modality. Listening After Nature, I am transposing the environmental crisis onto the discipline of creative field recording. What I hope critical practice can do in response, if anything, is carve new possibilities from the ethical and aesthetic implications of itself. In this sense, affirmation resides in responsibilities surfaced as well as the vibrant practices that emerge from disinterring the field.

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Recoding the Field

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.1 As I search for the field in this opening chapter I am troubled and compelled by the time-stamping work of geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin.2 To prove the validity of the Anthropocene, Lewis and Maslin pinpoint moments in which we can categorically declare humans began to have an impact on the planet. Such proposals mix colonization, fossil fuel burning, and nuclear acceleration as key factors that have propelled the earth into a new epoch, defined by global warming and mass extinctions.3 The authors offer coordinates of contact and debate for what is a daunting project. They identify material evidence that helps route this new era and the consequences of its long reach.4 Transposing a similar insistence on moments that matter, I aim to establish a window from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, in which we might begin to acknowledge how and why the field of field recording emerged. Contrary to Lewis and Maslin, this is not done in the pursuit of a definitive origin of practice, of which there are undoubtedly many. Rather, I wish to unpick the historical fabrication of the field to surface cultures and contexts often occluded within the production of knowledge and to think with their consequences. To encourage critical practice, with and from field recording, we must attend to a set of epistemological markers and questions: rationales for recording, how and why sound became valued as collectible, who was entitled to point the microphone, and what conditions made that seemingly benign act possible. We must delve into the context of production to impart causality and consequence

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Listening After Nature

into the field. Hence, the circumstances that surround sound capture have to be noticed and upturned if vibrant critical practices are to grow. To build this contextual scene, I intersect postcolonial and sound studies literature, archival and contemporary field recordings, to ask what constitutes the field, who defines its parameters and edges, what is included and excluded. The historic coordinates I offer are directed toward a set of specific drivers that embroil humans, animals, and technology. The focus is on the Western field and how it formed certain norms that, over time, became subsumed into universal codes that both govern and obscure the field. The point is to recognize and reassemble the field, not condemn its future. The development of recording technologies along with practices such as ethnomusicology and wildlife sound motivate this chapter’s inquiry. It is important to explore the roots of anthropological fieldwork to show how the nonhuman5 field is connected to the social-political actions of humans. The field, like Lewis and Maslin’s investigation, is tethered to colonialism, industrialization, and the Great Acceleration period. The timeframe I explore is a necessary departure point as it frames a collision of events and actors in which the field emerged and, with it, a set of long-term vestiges taken up by contemporary artists. Disentangling these relations is crucial to reviewing what political, technological, and practice-based influences composed the field’s genealogy. As the chapter progresses, cultural context gives way to practice-based analysis, combining archival recordings with three close readings of contemporary works by David Michael, Antye Greie, and Christopher DeLaurenti. These examples are discussed in relation to authorship, self-silence, and noise. They are steered by the ongoing question: what am I not hearing? Drawing on ecocritical discourse, I deploy a conceptual figuration of the field recordist, which I term the “Noisy-Nonself.” This is a hybrid persona that reimagines subjective presence and propels practice into critical new territories. The point, then, is to initiate a sustained experiment that attends to the multiple causes and effects that haunt such a nebulous term as “the field.” In other words, it matters what fields field the field.

Inhuman Histories Prior to, and including the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial powers subjugated, extracted, and classified people and natural resources.6 During



Recoding the Field

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this epoch-defining context, Charles Darwin published the influential On the Origin of Species (1859), in which he claimed successful species adapted to their environments through a process of natural selection. Organisms that refined their hereditary line by removing undesired traits were, for Darwin, better placed in the evolutionary race for survival.7 The work is acknowledged as a consequence of his voyage on the HMS Beagle, a warship that set off from Plymouth Sound to South America on its near five-year journey in 1831. Tasked with the collection and study of nature, no sound recording equipment existed at the time. But there were other forms of documentation including taxidermy, illustration, handwritten observation, and musical notation. I explore taxidermy and field recording in more depth during a discussion on sonic trophies in Chapter 2. For now, it is worth noting that Darwin himself flourished as a taxidermist in large thanks to learning the craft from John Edmonstone, a man born into slavery in British Guiana who, after gaining his freedom, taught Darwin the technical nuances of the practice while at the University of Edinburgh. Sound recording technologies developed in tandem with natural scientific contexts. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, a device that led to a rush of sonic invention. The decibel (dB) system used to measure sound today is named after Bell, a man embroiled in the eugenics movement, a racist philosophy that relied on quantification and classification as a means to eliminate undesirable traits and races.8 Bell held an honorary role as president of the International Eugenics Society as late as 1921. It was Charles Darwin’s cousin nonetheless, Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. In doing so, Galton promoted the systematic and selective process of human erasure by using the so-called objectivity of instruments and statistical measurement as both ideology and tool.9 One year after Bell’s telephonic foray, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph (1877), a device that enabled sound to be recorded onto wax cylinders. Much like Darwin, Edison produced the phonograph with the aid of his assistants and teachers. Lewis Latimer, an African American inventor, played a key role in both Bell and Edison’s innovations but is often silenced within the canons of techno-scientific history.10 Like Darwin’s taxidermy teacher, these low frequencies,11 more specifically, subjectivities, are rarely heard among the noise of progress and mastery. Sonic media was part of the same colonial project that produced the physical exploitation of materials, places, and people. The very idea of observing, recording, and documenting cultures was constructed by ethnologies of the West.12

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Cultural anthropologist Lee D. Baker links the accession of anthropology in the United States with the legitimacy placed on social Darwinism by the academy and sciences, which institutionalized the proclaimed natural hierarchies. This resulted in the ontological separation of humans and animals, nature and culture. “The rise of academic anthropology in the United States occurred in the late 1880s and was concurrent with the rise of American imperialism and the institutionalization of racial segregation.”13 Ethnomusicology expanded the sensory realm of traditional data collection from writing to sound and is therefore pivotal to the genealogies of field recording. Coined by Dutch musicologist Jaap Kunst, whose own process of sound collection took place in Dutch East Indies during the 1930s, the discipline moved beyond text-based observation by recording voices and music in its social-cultural context: in the field. Commenting on the British, Portuguese, and French empires, sound scholars Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan’s critical framing of ethnomusicology is worth quoting in full. As a colonizing force in the rise of empire, moreover, sound productions became a key tool in imposing other forms of discipline and order. At the outset, sound’s presence was anything but orderly. Occupations were inherently noisy and chaotic, involving massive interventions of people, animals, materials, and things; of assembling, working, training, and discoursing; of violence, negotiation, and engagement. In its participation in social order, however, sound production quickly assumed a role in organizing human behavior.14

Radano and Olaniyan’s overarching aim is to highlight sound’s totalitarian role within colonial occupation: “sound creates and is created by empire.”15 The particular concern for this chapter is less about sound and more about the process of recording and collecting it. Sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne has claimed that ethnomusicologists deployed technology in a way that served to amplify prejudices as “the phonograph became a tool for embalming an already supposedly native present for the future.”16 Writing on the archive as a construct of the state, scholar Thomas Richards claims, “The imperial archive was a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire.”17 Carl Stumpf, a German psychologist and pioneer of ethnomusicology, argued that collecting and archiving sound was “a necessary corollary of our colonial aspirations in the highest sense.”18 Stumpf managed to amass a wealth of recordings as part of the Berlin Phonogram archive that included musical cultures from Japan, India, and Cameroon. However, many of these audio



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documents were ironically recorded in Berlin as diasporic communities formed the entertainment and leisure industry, also known as ethnological show business.19 The field, as ethnomusicology scholar Eric Ames illuminates, was a site of construct within Berlin itself. It emerged as a zone of displacement where issues of spectacle and voyeurism pervaded. Recording sessions took place at several venues, including the Zoological Garden and the Circus Busch (where human and animal shows intermingled), the Central-Hotel and the Wintergarten (upper-end variety theaters), the Passage-Panoptikum and Castan’s Panoptikum (wax museums), the Velodrome (a bicycle track that doubled as an out-door exhibition site) and Luna Park (an amusement park on the outskirts of the city).20

The field is built upon asymmetrical encounters underscored by the hegemony of Western anthropology. It is not natural or neutral as a consequence. It is not simply an outdoor location removed from borders or issues of power and agency. It is not necessarily a green or rural space. The field is very much entwined with the city, cage, and camp. Media devices such as the wax cylinder and gramophone allowed for the claim of objective measurement in the field, a means to assert scientific truth while establishing divisions of nature and culture, observer and subject. Field recordings were therefore intrinsic to the colonizer’s toolkit.21 Ethnomusicology and, as we shall come to explore, nonhuman field recording, embroil and surface techno-colonial systems of hierarchy and extraction. Music scholar Kofi Agawu makes clear that “ethnomusicology itself is a child of colonialism, a discipline rich in colonial filiation and affiliation.”22 As a consequence, we begin to find the field in which field recording emerged. In the United States of America, the field can be traced to the frontiers of capital and nature that were opened with the genocide of First Nations people.23 Indigenous survivors were brought to reservations and camps as part of an unnatural process of naturalization, by means of religious and cultural assimilation. Song and dance rituals were censored as part of legislative procedure.24 Long-held practices and relations, with land and communities, were endangered by this systemic and manufactured process: recordists were waiting in the wings. Ethnomusicologists dragged their portable machines into reservations and camps to capture the disappearing voices of their subjects along with the environment itself. The field was born not out of a separate or pure wilderness but from the spatial consequences of internment, observation, and division. Xwélmexw (Stó:lō) sound scholar Dylan Robinson’s work interrogates this exact

16

Listening After Nature

historical intersection by combining the auditory points of view of indigenous and settler perspectives. Robinson argues that colonialism also settled listening into a fixed and hierarchical idea of what subjectivities are included and excluded. The ethnomusicologist who pointed the microphone was “hungry,” someone who “takes part in content locating practices that orient the ear toward identifying standardized features and types.”25 John Wesley Powell established the Bureau of Ethnology (BAE) in the United States in 1879 to study indigenous communities under social Darwinist principles of natural selection. Powell’s view of first peoples resounded colonial narratives in which subjects were studied through observation and technological measurement as justification for their erasure or cultural reshaping. He claimed, “There is no great and uninhabited region to which the Indian can be sent. He is among us, and we must either protect or destroy him.”26 Powell’s quote is chilling in its assumed control of indigenous people as objects: things to move, preserve, or destroy. Like Darwin’s eugenicist cousin Galton, Powell had transposed Darwin’s 1859 treatise onto humans. The invitation to do so hides in plain sight in the second part of Darwin’s famous title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). That such a sensibility shaped the ethnomusicological project once again serves to demonstrate how the practice of outdoor sound recording is tied to hierarchies of power and subjugation, that the recorder and recordist can never be neutral witnesses within these asymmetrical relations, and how the field too can never be an impartial space of encounter. Sonic salvation does not arrive out of unaffected processes. It is salvage hidden within the altruistic preservation myth that occludes why such restoration is needed in the first place. The devastation ethnomusicology attempted to document is recoded through the powerful constructs of archival conservation and the white savior recordist.27 Writing on the gendered practice of recording indigenous languages and cultures, postcolonial scholar Roshanak Kheshti amplifies the prominence of upper-class white women who were recruited by the likes of the BAE. Frances Densmore, probably the most well-known female comparative musicologist, is an example whom Kheshti suggests was “ideally suited to perform the task of savior.”28 One of Densmore’s earliest forays was based on field recordings from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, a “human zoo” that showcased racist ideologies and infrastructures of the time.29 Densmore is ironically best known for a photographic image of herself recording the sound of a Blackfoot Mountain



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Chief rather than the audio document itself.30 The image of Densmore and the Chief is striking in how the field appears so staged. Much like a set or museum diorama, it is a site of simulation. The encounter is manufactured to inject authenticity into the scene of sonic salvage. Kheshti makes clear, “Fetishizing the virgin savage’s first encounter with modernity, the listener’s colonial-nostalgic desire in turn imagines the context of original contact.”31 Contact, of course, was prior to this representation and hovers in the low frequencies of the image like infra- or ultrasound, inaudible and unseen, yet utterly present. The encounter between Densmore and the Chief demands an assessment of listening ethics and amplifies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal question: can the subaltern speak?32 Who has the right to record and for whom is the recorded subject captured and composed? These are the ethical entanglements that I endeavor to unravel throughout this book. There can be no doubt that a patriarchal white Western masculinity underscores much of the savior recordist complex that persists today. Alan Lomax is Densmore’s male equivalent in terms of ethnomusicology. Lomax is lauded as one of the pioneers of folk field recording, collecting songs from Appalachian, Andean, and Blues musical cultures. Prison Songs (1947–8) is a set of recordings based on the ballads of African American inmates as they worked outdoors: the myth of salvage and savior is once again constructed within the field of interment and servitude. Much like Densmore, Lomax, whose archive is undoubtedly to the benefit of history, was steeped in ambiguity in terms of practice-based methods. In a letter sent to the Library of Congress, Lomax comments that field recording can be particularly useful “if the informant does not know the interview is being recorded, and if he never learns it.”33 The specter of appropriation hovers over the field and is only enhanced with the duplicitous nature of sound. Ethics become further complexified in Chapter 2, which addresses the rights and agencies at stake when humans record and represent animals. The field is therefore a crosshatch of political and sensory paradigms; it carries a constructed bias toward those who point the microphone. We cannot jump straight to the nonhuman field without exposing the human roots of its construction. None of these conclusions condemn the field, historically or contemporarily. Ethnographic recordings have a huge import in terms of knowledge. They pluralize Western scientific modes, document languages now extinct, and celebrate the vitality of ceremony, ritual, and song. But it is not

18

Listening After Nature

only what these documents contain that matters. The critical test resides in how they are auditioned and what set of questions and methods are relevant when Listening After Nature. The point for practice, as I repeat throughout this book, is to keep pressing record and to keep pressing play. This first analysis, then, attends to the erasures and myths that build universal claims. It unsettles the field as a site of benevolence and impartiality. Stirring human histories, cultures, and technologies, I hope to surface ethico-aesthetic intricacies that connect to nonhuman field recording. I am unpicking the field’s stitches so that we might reemerge with a practice that has a self-critical ear woven in from the start. The artists and works featured in this book all animate what is possible when we begin to critically interlace the fields that field fields, the sounds that sound sounds, the recordings that record recordings.

The Electric Wild Between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the potential for outdoor sound recording grew with technological advancements in terms of portability and the arrival of electricity. Coupled with the cultural validity attached to practices such as ethnomusicology, a growing number of natural historians, wildlife experts, and hobbyists across the UK, Europe, and North America began to focus their attention away from the salvage of voices and, instead, placed nature, particularly birdsong, in the crosshairs of sonic capture. As the material and political space of the field emerged via techno-colonial conquest, so too did the potential for scientific observation and the study of wildlife, which prior to electricity had largely been illustrated through taxidermy, text, and musical notation. The technological field of wildlife and environmental sound recording was therefore driven by the same rationale as ethnomusicology: sounds supposedly outside the conventional music hall or studio could be recorded in culturally situated contexts and were prime material for capture due to the objective witnessing of microphones and machines: “sound recording promised a more fine-grained type of analysis, because it enabled sounds to be repeated, measured in different ways, to be visualized and compared as formal patterns.”34 Albert Brand, a former stockbroker and key figure in the history of wildlife sound recording, penned the provocatively titled paper “Why Listening Cannot Be Adequate” (1937). He marveled at the role technology would play in securing the fidelity of nonhuman phenomena such as birdsong, and the



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veracity that would emerge as a consequence of technological innovation: “the birdsong student has had to rely entirely on auditory impressions [but] with mechanical devices such as the sound camera, an objective medium of study is now available.”35 Brand joined the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 1929 when the practical task of outdoor sound recording concerned itself primarily with signal-to-noise ratio.36 The pursuit of birdsong and wildlife, in general, was a race for craft-based fidelity. The field became a site of diagnostic listening as recordists focused on the identification of species, enabled by high-resolution sound capture. Technological recording was deemed more trustworthy than scores or written accounts based on the naked ear. Institutes including the Cornell Lab and The Smithsonian Institution played major roles in facilitating, disseminating, and developing the technology for recording environments, built on the pursuit of objective, measurable field recordings. Instruments such as the parabolic microphone, a hyper-directional tool for sound capture, or visual technology such as the spectrogram brought the field and laboratory closer as overlapping sites. Similar to ethnomusicology’s rationale, wildlife recording mixed the preservation myth of salvage with scientific legitimacy, along with a desire for fieldcraft in and of itself. The Cornell Lab leveraged its position with the help of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghost species that has winged its way in and out of existence over the past one hundred years.37 In 1935, Brand’s colleagues Peter Kellogg and Arthur Allen managed to record a pair at their nest in Louisiana. It stands today as the only sound recording of the bird’s vocalizations.38 Although the ivory-billed woodpecker initiated a compelling rationale for nonhuman field recording, an earlier precedent arrived almost fifty years prior. It was 1889 when Ludwig Koch, aged eight at the time, made the first known recording of birdsong onto a wax cylinder.39 The bird in question was a common shama that hailed from Muscicapidae lineage, a large family of small Passerine birds emanating from the common house sparrow. Ironically, these birds are not known for their song, yet it is from this species that we have the first recorded trace of an animal’s voice. Displaced from Southeast Asia, relocated, and recorded within a cage in Germany, Koch’s pet shama bird resonates ethnomusicological histories in which asymmetrical power relations underscore the recorded encounter. Made from a place of childhood curiosity rather than any type of salvage paradigm, the artifact is still telling. Recorded in a constructed situation, with borders and staging, fueled by the Victorian era’s cultural penchant for

20

Listening After Nature

collection and display, there remains nothing natural or neutral about the first recorded birdsong committed to media. Field recording’s first nonhuman field, the cage, echoes the reservation sites of the ethnomusicological field. Both are moments in which we might say the field emerged. Whether it was in the reservations where Densmore gathered her salvage stories, or the cage in which Koch recorded birdsong, tracing these critical cartographies entangles the multi-sited fields of field recording. The field’s underlying myth is that it is separate and located outdoors, beyond the concert hall or recording studio, and that recorded salvage is born from altruistic concerns. Contrary to this, the field is a shifting territory made from the traumatic schism of political, material, and infrastructural subjugation that desired to separate nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, through observation and mastery. The very idea that music, stories, and the environments in which they were produced mattered was developed in tandem with the production of recording technologies and the drive to measure and extract. From such confluences, the nonhuman voice became an inevitable subject for the Western ear. A sonic frontier was born and justified through the preservation myths of science and salvage. Cultural-historical moments, both human and nonhuman, therefore matter in the formation of the field, as does the right to record and represent others. The practice of field recording is bound into the production of the field as a site of displacement. It is built upon asymmetrical relations of power. It has never been a natural or neutral space, separate from the grip of technoscience. The field opened up as part of the frontier and so the business of animal and environmental plunder began. Capturing sound in its “outdoor” context triggered a culture of sonic extraction that mirrored the drive for natural resources. It sowed the seeds of a practice-based myth that sound could be captured endlessly, without consequence or critical reflection. Sonic nature, viewed as a sample to be drained, manipulated, and composed, influences field recording encounters to this present day. Technology was never an objective witness and the field was never a site of impartial encounter. As the drive toward craft and veracity accelerated into the twentieth century, the field simultaneously began a process of fragmentation, becoming a site of interpretative possibility. Ironically, as recording technologies assumed power as the primary listening mechanism, in the field, recordists themselves withdrew further into the recesses of media and site. In doing so, the subjective presence of those who held the microphone became embroiled in



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an ongoing game of hide and seek: an interplay between absence and presence, silence and noise, conservation and predation, power and empathy. We can hear the low frequency beginnings of reticent recordists in field recording’s first nonhuman contact. Among the calls of the common shama bird and the scratched media into which it was recorded, Koch remains silent throughout. Inaudibly present within the crackle of birdsong and mechanical noise, Koch is also captured somewhere and inscribed into the wax. It may be the first carrier of birdsong but it is also the inaugural rendering of a wildlife field recordist. It sets a pattern for the next century wherein silent authors, those who grip the microphone, become media phantoms within the signal and noise of sonic capture.

They Want to Be Eaten Earphones on, I audition what I presume will be a classic field recording experience. Frogs croak and cicadas stridulate. I anticipate yet another production of nature, one in which no human appears present and where the mechanics of industry are somewhere in the distant, inaudible spectrum. It sounds hot and damp. Perhaps it is nighttime? These expectations, vestiges of years spent listening, are shattered as a low voice asks, “Let me know when you are ready?” It is a shocking moment that sends my imagination into overload. Am I ready? What should I be ready for? Do I need to be worried about what is going to take place? Have I done enough preparation for this moment? In the simultaneity of my listening-thinking, another voice, softer, enters my right ear, “I’m ready.” The first speaker, now louder, shouts, “Are we all ready?” In the distance, another voice, barely audible says, “Yes.” Frogs and cicadas continue to flood the soundscape, drops of water drip, bodies move, one sequence in particular sounds close and ungainly, laughter gathers somewhere in the distance. Water splashes among faint conversations and corporeal adjustments; the rustling of clothes renders with the calls of frogs. For the next five minutes, this interplay continues among the clumsy-sounding interactions of something wooden, perhaps a pier? A motor engine starts and confirms my intuition. The acoustic atmosphere is pierced temporarily before grinding to a halt. On the next attempt, the noise remains constant and establishes itself within the biodiversity of place. A churning resonance thickens the scene and for a short while blends the soundscape into a mechanical hybrid

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Listening After Nature

before all sounds slowly disappear with the aid of a noticeable fade out, inserted as a postproduction decision and effect. The audio document I am listening-with40 is the antithesis of a classic nonhuman field recording. It does not attempt to represent the great outdoors as unfettered from human presence or techno-industrial incursion. The recordist, or in this case, recordists, are placed within the stereo image. They provide a critical shadow to field recording’s historic emphasis on authorial reticence. The track, titled “They Want to Be Eaten,” is one of eleven that make up David Michael’s digital publication “Microphones Are Not Ears” (2016). The work includes three pages of artwork and extensive liner notes that detail the process and intention of the project. Michael is aware of his subject and nuances of sonic knowledge; he states, “The presence of the recordist has the potential to reveal information about the situation of the recording, socially, spatially, and environmentally. Even the approach or retreat of footsteps can give a listener context of the terrain and surrounding environment. The story of how a recording came to be is contained in what is edited out.”41 Michael’s work amplifies events and circumstances that are commonly silenced within human and nonhuman mediated encounters: offcuts destined for the digital trash yard in the Cloud. It is an archive of otherwise inaudible events between 2009 and 2016 and is unique in that it offers a paracommentary on fieldcraft itself. Hearing the process of the recording event agitates aestheticized renderings of nature. Speech, microphone handling, and laughter are historically marginalized elements deemed noise. Here, they are reclaimed as creative content for artistic production. The work speaks toward process, authorship, and intentionality, aspects that never fully disclose themselves with absolute authority. It emphasizes listening-with the peripheries of acoustic marginalia, from the shuffle of bodies to the utterance of breath. The recording was made in 2009 near Lake Mamori, Brazil. Liner notes reveal I was listening-with a workshop scenario. Michael’s own microphone captured a selected batch of recordists as they prepared equipment and waited to board a boat. Well-known field recording artists Francisco López and Slavek Kwi are named as part of the expedition. Michael states, The people in these recordings are mentors, teachers, friends, and acquaintances. They have shown me how to listen, how to record, and how to think critically about what I am doing and why I am doing it. They have led me to locations



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I would have been unable to access alone and taught me the techniques and technologies of recording.42

Field recording is often a solitary endeavor, rarely undertaken as a group exercise due to the desire to repress unwanted human sounds. Self-silence is motivated in part by striving for the greatest signal-to-noise ratio possible. Animals and other nonhuman subjects being the signal, humans and technology being deemed noise. Signal is more often greater than noise when one gets as close to the recorded subject as possible. Michael’s project is an intriguing, at times, comedic intervention to high-fidelity pursuits of an individual recordist moving as far away from other humans as possible. In this case, irony is deepened as the recording location was chosen for its nonhuman abundance, yet as Michael’s project highlights, it is impossible to escape the impact of recordists themselves. The track reminds me of a military drill known as a field training exercise. This is a programmed rehearsal conducted by units of soldiers. It is a preparation for combat and often functions through collective sweeps and checks of an environment. Guided by hand signals and a quieting of body movements, individuals attempt to make as little discernible noise to an enemy as possible. Similarly, in Michael’s document, multiple recordists prepare and sweep an area while negotiating their own acoustic detritus. The recording takes on a tactical element in this reading and consequently transforms itself into a pedagogical document of fieldcraft. We hear the preparation, logistics, and interactions that occur in making a field recording. However, the multiplicity of bodies makes it less a document of classic reflection and more one of diffraction, as recordists echolocate within the margins of audibility. The field becomes a fractal version of itself, a multi-sited zone of listening, sounding, and learning. How the authors of the soundwork—American, Spanish, and Czech men— came to be in Brazil on a recording expedition speaks to ethnographic fieldwork legacies in which colonized lands continue to remain a laboratory for WesternEuro desires. Why are they there? What are they listening to and for whom are they recording? Who or what might we provocatively assign as the enemy within a quasi-military framing? Michael’s own choice, to amplify a collective nonpresence, is a pertinent one within this line of questioning as it addresses the low frequencies of practice: it recodes the power of silent witnessing. The question of where the field begins and ends in this particular recording is underscored as what we hear is a series of preparatory acts, conversations, and movements

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Listening After Nature

before recordists depart on a boat toward their desired location. The track is a preliminary sketch of the field, a pre-field recording. Where does the field begin and end? What is being captured beyond the so-called signal? Such questions burrow their way throughout this book and hope to bring about discussion on the ethics of field recording and the possible ways in which recordists might encounter and represent nonhuman species and phenomena in critically nuanced ways. As we advance further into the field, we learn that aside from histories and cultures, what haunts the signal is in fact recordists themselves. Analyzing the track once more, I hear the origins of its title as a recordist says, “I’m eating all the bugs tonight.” A surprised voice, further from the microphone, answers, “Really?” “Hmm tasty,” the first recordist responds. The second recordist, less surprised and now more concerned, says, “Don’t eat them.” The first recordist replies, “They want to be eaten.” This ominous statement speaks toward the implicit mastery of nonhumans and sets off another mode of “hungry listening” that takes us toward the monstrous and inhuman. When recordists capture nonhuman subjects, might it be deemed a form of eating? Is the digital hard drive a fridge? Do the voices of nature come with expiry dates? Who is really eating whom? Before we tread quietly into the monstrous potential of such questions, I want to relay a historic example that is haunted by matters of capture and consumption. I came to know of this reference thanks to Ernst Karel, a practitioner whose own work with artist Helen Mirra will be discussed in Chapter 2. Karel led a public event for Points of Listening at London College of Communication in 2015.43 In it, he presented the story of Michael Rockefeller, would-be heir to the Standard Oil fortune and son of former US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. In 1961, Michael Rockefeller joined a Harvard Peabody ethnographic film project located in what was then Netherlands New Guinea. Recording hours of sound onto a Nagra portable recorder, his archive captures a vast swathe of human and nonhuman sounds. It is a collection that also illustrates a moment in which anthropology wrestled with the authority of the written word as sonic media expanded traditional literary methods. It is interesting to remember that ethnomusicology and wildlife sound recording both claimed original legitimacy through the objective witnessing of technology. As the second half of the twentieth century accelerated, the very notion of authenticity began to unravel exactly because of the multiple truths that media afforded. Joining Robert Gardner, who worked in the context of ethnographic film, 22-year-old Harvard graduate Rockefeller recorded classic anthropological



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contexts during the project including music, funeral, and warfare ceremonies. He also established categories for sounds and labeled one collection as “Occupational Sounds and Sounds from Nature.” These are the examples that Karel presented, the everyday sonic events of environments such as animals and weather. Rockefeller’s recordings not only document colonized cultures in historic transition but also capture the marginality of the recordist along with evidential artifacts produced through a medium such as tape. Like so many recordists, Rockefeller learns through practice. We hear handling noise on the microphone along with volume and frequency adjustments. These artifacts are useful much like David Michael’s examples of fieldcraft: they reveal some of the decision making within the signal-to-noise battle, and they make an obscure representation more perceptible and highlight a level of authorial power otherwise suppressed. In addition to these media artifacts, Rockefeller employed the microphone as a tool for locative memory. In one telling commentary he states, “Microphone is placed on the hill, behind the camp so that the war whoops are coming out of the distance.” A loud bump follows. Speaking closely to the mono microphone, his vocal descriptor is an intimate mark-making signature that many recordists will be familiar with. It functions as a note to self, intended for a future to come. The time-stamping device of the marginal self-narrator forms part of the construction of place. As Spivak reminds us, “the colonizer constructs himself as he constructs the colony. The relationship is intimate, an open secret that cannot be part of official knowledge.”44 In Rockefeller’s case, the mediatic construct of place is always surreptitious and in a state of precarity as the self erases and forms itself, perpetually running the risk of disappearing altogether. It was November 1961 when Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing ventured into troubled waters off the southwest coast of New Guinea. Their long canoe upturned and left the pair drifting without any communication to land. After twenty-four hours, and with the aid of two empty gasoline canisters, Rockefeller decided to swim toward the coast. He was never seen again. What exactly happened to Rockefeller is debated to this day. Did he drown? Was he attacked by sharks? These speculations have been eclipsed by the influential claim that he did make it to shore only to be met by Asmat tribal communities who eventually killed and ate him. Writing on Rockefeller’s disappearance, Carl Hoffman claims to have spoken to first-hand witnesses and seen physical paperbased evidence of this during his investigative research.45 Hoffman justifies the context of this scenario through the tribe’s documented history of cannibalism,

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as described in the 1959 issue of American Anthropologist.46 He argues the tribe’s appetite was driven by the fact that some of its members were killed by Dutch colonists in a 1958 raid on Asmat communities: devouring Rockefeller would be an act of justice. Regardless of evidential truth, or the use of racist tropes such as cannibalism, Rockefeller’s death highlights the paradoxical politics of conservation and predation, capture and consumption, hunter and hunted. The Western savior recordist, on his mission of salvage, was “eaten” by the very thing he felt so entitled to collect and preserve. The dialectical mythos of salvage and savage haunt the low frequencies of the Rockefeller archive. These are the spectral identities that lurk in the quiet bodies of recordists and the hiss of tape. There is much to deem monstrous within the margins of field recording. What is captured within the shifting terrain of signal and noise, humans and nonhumans, audibility and presence? What type of listening is required when auditioning the extra-verbal presence of recordists, the shuffle of body or the exhale of breath?

What Am I Not Hearing? Field recordist and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp’s work “Kits Beach Soundwalk” (1989) has been discussed at length for its powerful commentary on both site and studio.47 During the composed audio track, Westerkamp captures the Vancouver shoreline while her vocal annotation, recorded in the studio, talks the listener through various editing and filtering effects that are audibly demonstrated. It is a compelling precedent with which to anchor discussions around the presence of recordists and the mutability of the field. The work has pedagogical application thanks to the transparency of Westerkamp’s instructive manipulations of sound and space. She highlights critical questions in relation to what recordists choose to include or exclude when representing an environment. Westerkamp’s motivation for removing or enhancing certain frequencies is driven by the classic division of nature and culture. She places our ears into the crackles of barnacles rather than the rumble of the city. Recording and manipulating nature to appear separate and therefore restorative, Westerkamp claims she can “face the city again” with all its acoustic detritus and to “even be playful with it.” Toward the end of the track, Westerkamp states, “Play with the monster then I can face the monster.” For Westerkamp, and acoustic ecology more broadly, the urban city has been demonized as the monstrous other.48 Here,



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I am interested in what happens when we pull focus away from landscapes and zoom into the bodies of reticent recordists. What potentials and pitfalls might be heard if we bend the ear backward, toward the hiss of itself? What identity might lurk in the margins of audial representation? How might such questioning unsettle listening and the power of those who point the microphone? Self-dissolution is an unshakable legacy and trend for contemporary nonhuman field recording practice. Technological capture, conservation, and asymmetrical observation have consequently embalmed recordists into performative witnesses. Self-erasure is guided by the myth of noninvasive, lowimpact fieldwork and is motivated in a variety of ways. It may be due to concerns of not wanting to disturb a fragile ecosystem. It might be guided by sonic fidelity and the battle to remain as close to the subject-signal as possible. It is also tied to philosophical motives of moving beyond the human. To survey prominent field recording publishers such as Touch, Gruenrekorder, and/OAR or Impulsive Habitat, the visual field offers further evidence of self-erasure. Representations of empty landscapes and environments dominate label artworks. However micro or macro the emphasis, place is the locus of experience; the recordist is nowhere to be seen or heard. Field recordists are engaged in the negotiation of their own ongoing absence. Self-erasure can be critiqued as a form of ethnographic abuse, where the agency of a recorded subject is undermined through the hierarchical figure of the nonidentifiable, silent observer. Reciprocity is subsequently negated in the field as the environment along with its inhabitants and sounds are recorded with presumed impunity. Capture is deemed inconsequential as sounds are endlessly extracted for documentary or compositional projects. A friction-free ethos of recording is hardwired into the field; ethics can easily be wavered. How does one establish genuine consent with a bird or tree? If digital extraction does not appear to leave a mark or trace, what harm can it be doing? Chapter 2 unfolds these tensions explicitly, but it is clear that the noninvasive mantra of field recording is critically and practically untenable. In a time when human impact is changing the sedimentary signature of earth, it seems even more implausible to claim impartiality. The long-empathetic notion of lowimpact recording has become a redundant ideal that is as illusionary as so-called nature itself. Searching for absolute self-dissolution, in the field, is fundamentally flawed through an understanding that silence is never the complete absence of sound but a presence in itself. It becomes urgent, therefore, to address such vulnerabilities in practice by focusing on certain questions. How can

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practitioners highlight the negotiation of self as part of site-based work? What new knowledge might emerge from listening outside the normative frames of field recording? What strategies of critical audition are required?

Trying to Be Silent I am listening-with the expansive hum of a landscape, trickling water, and the high-end hiss of a digital recorder being audibly pushed to its limits. Movement in both ears. An exhale on my left side. I cannot tell if the source of these extra-verbal utterances is human or animal. Wind shakes my listening, more specifically, the microphone that is mediating my site of audition: a desk in the British Library is the field. More wind and micro-adjustments. An effervescent effect bubbles to the surface among a noisy ecology of things. Toward the end of the track, a presence clears its throat. I realize my ear has been grafted onto someone, or something else. It is yet another shocking moment in the incidental revelations when listening to that which is not there. A cough and short giggle are followed by an abrupt cut. The auditioned track is called “Trying to Be Silent” and forms part of a collection of seven field recordings archived under the title Sonic Wild Code Recordings (2015).49 The work is a collaborative endeavor led by Antye Greie, a digital media artist who specializes in poetry and sonic activism. Co-contributors include Till Bovermann, Dinah Bird, Anja Erdmann, Kristina Lindström, Vygandas Vegas Simbelis, and Caspar Ström. The project emerged as part of “Hybrid Matters,” a biannual arts and science field laboratory that took place in remote Finnish Lapland, Kilpisjärvi. The initiative describes hybrid matters as anything that has a physical and technological aspect and as such is a product of intentional and un-intentional human activity. People with smartphones, networks and trash are examples of hybrid matter. But also genetically altered or a synthetic organism are part of this category as they are of technological origin but biological in matter. Hybrid matter leads to the thought vehicle of hybrid ecology that helps us to expand and rethink our traditional concepts of environment.50

The overlapping impacts of the human and nonhuman are key relations when Listening After Nature. Attempting to hear, record, and represent such porosity means the specific agencies and entanglements bound within the process of field



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recording must be noticed. These are the infra-ordinary and extra-verbal sonic effects that haunt field recording. The shuffle of a recordist’s feet and clearing of the throat, the mediation of an environment through the noisy footprint of media devices. I am not advocating the insertion of such artifacts, within artworks, as a quick-fix solution to the issue of self-dissolution. At worst, such insistence could lead to a cookbook of reflexive practice: sonic selfies for the sake of saying “I am here.” Instead, these elements function more as auto-mediatic shadows from the field. They are not pleasant on the ear and invite listening-with noise and the nonrepresentational; they push my listening toward the interplay of humans and nonhumans, sites and technologies. Potentiality resides in the practice-based learning such artifacts surface: pressing record enacts a negotiation of the field rather than its definitive capture. Like David Michael’s earlier example, “Trying to Be Silent” short-circuits a history of lone recordists escaping anthropogenic sounds that include themselves. Operating as a field recording assemblage, the artists draw attention to the social potential of practice and the desire to learn through doing. Their intentions pivot around a key aim to “test possibilities to enable the landscape to speak for itself.”51 This dilemma strikes at the heart of contemporary practice as recordists attempt to offset their audible impact by becoming an impartial conduit of place. Empathetic in motivation, such practices are undermined by the fact that landscapes are polyglots and speak in mixed tongues. They inscribe and transmit histories of continual human intervention and can be understood through media scholar Dominic Pettman’s term of “Vox Mundi,” which substitutes notions of nature’s essential voice for “the sum total of cacophonous, heterogeneous, incommensurate, and synthesizable sounds of the postnatural world.”52 Pettman’s book, Sonic Intimacy: Voices, Species and Technics (2017), troubles who has the right to claim a natural voice between the human and nonhuman. Pettman complexifies our understanding of landscape beyond the anthropocentric projection that its voice is singular and translatable. Justifying self-silence through the lore that landscapes speak for themselves is one way to hear nonhuman agency. But Listening After Nature, is this enough? The focus may need to turn toward the dynamic relations of practice and place, no longer separate but entwined with the negotiation of voices and agencies, plural. Place cannot be heard or represented in the previous paradigm of letting it speak for itself; as it turns out, itself never existed in the first place. Instead, the indexical nature of geology and organic life stratifies recordists into its polyvocal

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stories across time and space. In other words, recordists are always part of the landscape’s voice, whether audible or not. Integrating self and place is a precarious practice-based dance and there are times when autoethnographic reflexivity can become an overbearing trope. Is Greie’s team successful in letting the landscape speak for itself? The answer appears to be a resounding yes, but not through a conventional hands-off approach. In one example, not included in the archival repository, but relayed via digital field notes, the team activates the sonic timbre of a fence. This is a classic way of “playing the field” as recordists scrape, tap, and perform found architectures. The method can have interesting implications for improvisation and the musical interface of people and places. However, the technique also threatens to undermine the very thing at stake: the agential capacity of landscape. Whether battering a fence with a stick or assigning musical language and metaphors, the nonhuman voice is inevitably anthropomorphized and shaped by humanist desires. This is the paradoxical practice of letting things speak. One of the more intriguing examples on this subject is found in a similarly entangled incident. Under the guidance of Greie, participants initiate a soundscape of screams into the landscape. One by one we hear the yells of humans released into the air and echoed back. Recordist and landscape enter into dialogue. No longer split as a separate voice, the landscape mutates, distorts, and expels signals back and forth. This sequence builds until Greie invites a collective howl. The amalgamation of screams speaks on behalf of all field recordists and the silent repression that governs every move. The scream is selfrevelatory and ironically one of the wildest moments in the overall project. It sounds a collective protest to the horrors of self-dissolution and resonates the shocking knowledge that humans are now a geological force. Yells ricochet the landscape of Kilpisjärvi Lapland, one of the most northern parts of Finland. They reverberate the ghosts of the nomadic Sami people, an indigenous community whose traditions of animism and reindeer herding have been marginalized throughout time.53 Hence, we come to hear the landscape speak through a process of feedback in which the specter of cultural erasure and the mediatic versions of self transfuse. The use of a non-semantic human voice can therefore be deployed as a tactic for revealing the presence of recordists. It also functions as an acoustic device that helps build a picture of place and space across time and events, often hidden or occluded. A scream or utterance can initiate a productive dialogue between the inexpressible reaches of the human and nonhuman, where traumas and



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repressions leak like aural ectoplasm.54 As Pettman evocatively summarizes, “playing a serious game of Marco/Polo with our fellow nonhuman earthlings may be one way forward, to lessen the violence we wreak, directly or not, on all terrestrial creatures.”55 However, the imperative to enter into creative dialogue, between humans and landscapes, always contains with it the dangerous lure of speaking on behalf. This tension stirs the low frequencies of practice-based decision making. Sonic Wild Code Recordings make the field more apparent. Like David Michael’s previous example, the work is uniquely constructed from multiple bodies and authors. We gain insight into the practical methods and negotiations of self, place, and technology that triangulate the field. It is interesting to note the word “code” in the title of this particular work. As listeners in the field or armchair, we decipher, code, and recode. My ear must burrow into that which it cannot observe, touch, or identify. As a consequence, the process of listening back to recordings is always an enigmatic one that straddles speculative possibility with representational knowledge. Wrestling with such demands, field recordings provide a rich repository of pedagogical import for students, practitioners, and hobbyists alike. But what if the notion of voice disappears altogether and we are left with the echoes of surfaces and bodies? What concepts can help galvanize the extra-verbal dispositions of self, place, and technology?

The Noisy-Nonself In this section, I work toward a critical understanding of recordist self-silence. To do so, I evoke a conceptual figuration I call the “Noisy-Nonself.” The term draws inspiration from feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway’s essay “The Promises of Monsters” (1992) along with eco-critical literature and related discourse from cultural monster studies.56 My hope is that authorial presence can be critically and imaginatively resuscitated, in practice, if we unpick the prospect of a monstrous identity. I examine the contemporary connection to bodies, monsters, and anthropogenic change; colonial hauntings; and specific auditory phenomena including white noise and feedback. This is a speculative exercise in listening-with the shadows of recordists, not as an audial lack or absence but as a chimerical process of reconfiguration and possibility. The current times are indeed monstrous. The rate of habitat destruction and extractive resource depletion has horrific consequences for the planet by

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way of irreversible climate change and ongoing geopolitical trauma. Nature– culture binaries have been fused into one another as a result of anthropogenic impact: humans are now considered a geological force and the consequences are staggering.57 Moving beyond a singular notion of human identity prompts new ecologies where actants including microbes, people, and machines are brought into relational webs. The book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017) takes up this contextual concern while situating its focus on the figure of the monster; it asks “us to consider the wonders and terrors of symbiotic entanglement in the Anthropocene.”58 Monsters, the editors claim, are not either-or but rather human and nonhuman, destructive and generative. Shapeshifting octopi, jellyfish blooms, and coral reef symbiosis prove animals and ecosystems have monstrous agency. They work outside the supposed natural order of things and blur bodies, landscapes, and categories as a result. Ghosts and monsters are distinct yet inseparable entities in these discussions: “ghosts guide us through haunted lives and landscapes. Against the conceit of the individual, monsters highlight symbiosis, the enfolding of bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche.”59 Although monsters appear pertinent to these times, neither they nor ghosts, by their very nature, ever go away. Sociologist Avery Gordon examines this subject in her book Ghostly Matters, Haunting and the Social Imagination (1997). It is concerned with the long-term reverberations of oppression and slavery in North and South America. Gordon challenges disciplines such as sociology to go beyond normative methods of analysis and evokes the concept of haunting as a way to do so: “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge.”60 Gordon describes that which appears absent as a “seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.”61 To consider a presence seething is to claim that an inexpressible or repressed intensity lurks in the margins. Transposed onto field recording practice, many aspects may be deemed seething and ghostly. The individual who negotiates selfsilence treads quietly, not wanting to rustle dry leaves underfoot. They resist audible bodily movements and hope to mute the cracking of knee joints. Holding their breath, they move in slow motion and merge into trees and rocks as part of their dissolution process. The drive to become inaudible does not produce a silent nor impartial identity. As Gordon states, “ghosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them.”62



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Field recording has traditionally focused on the landscape as its site of haunting and, in doing so, neglected the bodies of recordists as part of its spectral remit. Having established the constructed nature of the field, we can say that colonization, resource extraction, and asymmetrical power haunt field recording. These are the low frequencies that persist within every encounter, recording, or representation between humans and nonhumans. This is not to claim that field recording automatically reproduces such matters. It is more that these histories and practices are tacitly present in any recorded signal: they are pulled through the low frequencies of time and space as seething noise and must be noticed as part of critical practice. Within a time of mass anthropogenic acceleration, the ghosting of past specters is met by the grief of future species extinction. Practice pivots between these dual points of loss. Simultaneously present and obliterated as a consequence, the figure of the reticent recordist begins to occupy both monster and ghost. The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness: like the ghost of Hamlet, it introjects the disturbing, repressed, but formative traumas of “pre-” into the sensory moment of ‘post-,” binding the one irrevocably to the other. The monster commands, “Remember me”: restore my fragmented body, piece me back together, allow the past its eternal return. The monster haunts; it does not simply bring past and present together, but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned foreclosure.63

Confronting ghosts in the field embroils the monstrous performativity of field recordists themselves. Monstrosity, we must remember, is never exclusively human or nonhuman, more a crosshatch of both. The so-called human body is a more-than-worthy subject for monstrous inspection. As Haraway reminds us, we have never really been human as our “genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such.”64 Recordists, or as I shall call them for the remainder of this section, “NoisyNonselves,” function analogously to that of the monster, defined as “a strange byproduct or leftover of the process of making.”65 Always in the margins, a “monstrosity never presents itself … it can only be mis-known.”66 Historically, the monster “exceeds symbolization and can potentially rupture our sense of reality.”67 The Noisy-Nonself is a chimeric artifact, an anomalous derivative of human and nonhuman technological encounters. It is the noise in its own

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signal; hovering between presence and absence, it destabilizes notions of identity and knowing as the “monster stands on the threshold of becoming.”68 Noisy-Nonselves function as true-fictions. They are disruptors who perform like a glitch, utterance, or felt movement that agitates the peripheries of audible apprehension. The Noisy-Nonself simultaneously invades environments and evades self-analysis; it occupies a parasite–host duality like a shimmering thing caught in its own medial web of entrapment. As a conceptual figuration, the Noisy-Nonself is deployed to comprehend the potentials and threats of self-erasure. It is a chimerical proposition or nonidentity that prompts ethical critique and asks what the consequences are of hearing our own monsters. Listening-with this evasive form produces new possibilities for aesthetics situated in radical notions of becoming, where subjectivities, both human and nonhuman, can be actively performed, hybridized, and renegotiated. The Noisy-Nonself persistently challenges us to ask what are we not hearing. It functions as a device that invites a noticing toward that which we might otherwise forget. If Noisy-Nonselves haunt field recording practice and publications, how can the hiss of self-dissolution be recoded? Can we embark on a sonic experiment that thinks with noise and the thresholds of audibility?

White Noise Noisy-Nonselves are haunted by a historical conflict with themselves. Attempting to offset self-noise through the untenable pursuit of silence, the body has become a monstrous hierarchical other, functioning at the level of abject interference. Noise can be defined in a variety of ways. In general, it is understood to be a loud or unwanted sound. We comprehend noise as an intrusion, something that impedes a situation or desired signal. Noise can be measured technically in quantifiable units. It can be interpreted from personal judgment as an affective sensation. Humanities and the arts extrapolate cultural meanings imbued in noisy transmissions. Sound studies scholar Marie Thompson states noise can be “understood as an interruption that induces a modification in bodies, systems, and relations.”69 Whatever the context, it is clear that noise has the power to orientate perspectives. Feminist scholars Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin state, “It is only through the diffractive lens of interference that we can understand how (power) relations really merge.”70 Noise does not have to be



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loud; it does not even need to sound. It is effective through interference which amplifies relations. Noisy-Nonselves are quiet disruptive actors, they produce a transmission effect that evades typical scientific measurement, representation, or expert analysis. They are medial entanglements that operate outside rational meaning or aesthetic norms but are nonetheless telling in their performative function. Recalling the example of Koch and the first-ever recorded birdsong rendered onto a wax cylinder, noise is also part of a mechanical chain of reproduction. Material remnants such as tape hiss or vinyl scratches mix with the lurking artifactual presence of Noisy-Nonselves, caught among the motes of media. Philosopher Theodor Adorno famously described listening to a phonograph record as an event shadowed by its medium specificity, which he described as a “sort of acoustic stripe.”71 Sound studies scholar David Novak reminds us that noise “provides a kind of metadata that informs listeners about the context of reproduction.”72 Within the acoustic stripe of sonic media Noisy-Nonselves are captured and replayed. Their presence infers another level of metadata that is always marginal and unstable. Digital capture and audition are also anything but friction-free; various types of noise can be mobilized to aid our discussion. Blue, brown, and pink are spectrums of noise with their own nuances and composition. White noise is an example worthy of specific consideration here. Produced by combining many different frequencies, it is a ubiquitous presence that spreads across the audible range of human hearing. It is not a singular unit of sound but rather a multitude of resonances. The pervasive nature of white noise means it is often employed as a device to mask other sounds. Its soporific character helps to occlude, which is why so many people use it to aid sleep. Whether it is manufactured broadband noise or the comparable sonic effect of an air conditioning unit, white noise operates at the level of being unnoticed yet entirely present. Like the NoisyNonself, it is a sonic actor hiding in plain sight. Pioneer of acoustic ecology R. Murray Schafer shows the dual positionality of noise as both accountable and absent by claiming “noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.”73 Ironically, Schafer also claimed that when listening, “the first rule must always be: if you can’t hear it, be suspicious.”74 Speaking about noise as an industrial pollutant, Schafer’s words take on new meaning if we incorporate the figure of the Noisy-Nonself into a critical ecological perspective: recordists are a form of white noise that we have learned to ignore, yet we must remain alert to their presence and impact.

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Noise functions as an affective disruption, something that agitates and orientates otherwise dormant relations. It has been discussed by philosopher Michel Serres within a matrix of parasite–host relations.75 Parasites do not kill their hosts but live in, off, and on them, deriving nutrients over an extended period of time. Parasites are smaller than their hosts, the smallest being bacterial agents that are undetectable unless microscopically analyzed. In many cases, it is impossible to prove harm is done to a host. The defining function of the relationship is exactly this: the host does not register the presence of the parasite. However, if noise enters the parasite–host system, relations are affected and change: power and hierarchy become known. Placing the Noisy-Nonself within parasite–host discussions helps frame the position of recordists and the environments in which they record. At first glance, recordists might be deemed worthy parasites, feeding (recording) on a place or species incognito. This is particularly thought-provoking in the context of nonhuman field recording. Introducing the figure of the Noisy-Nonself draws attention to this quiet coupling. Whether audible or inaudible, the NoisyNonself leaks information on observer–subject, parasite–host relations, altering the chain of sent and received knowledge. Yet, assuming the landscape is a passive host is incorrect. As Noisy-Nonselves tread ever so quietly in the field, environments register and react. Birds alarm call and soil indents, things listen to you: the field witnesses and records. Noise often manifests itself through auditory terms such as feedback or echo. Both are produced when a signal is received (microphone) and amplified (loudspeaker). The sound of amplification ghosts its way back into the signal and a loop is introduced into the chain. Feedback gathers everything within the range of the microphone. Space and extra-verbal artifacts amalgamate and echo as part of the looping process. If managed, feedback noise can be utilized as a sustained spatial shadow. If pushed, it can become an affective experience in its own right. It performs chimerical agency, which can emerge and dissolve like any good monster can. Also known as parasitic oscillation, feedback is typified by circular echoes and loops. A microphone positioned in front of an amplifier or speaker is the most common reason for feedback. The signal being received is too close to the output being fed back. Negotiating the echo of feedback becomes a constant process of revelation and consumption. The horrifying power of auditory feedback is embodied in the specter of the Noisy-Nonself whose key function is to help reveal the field’s intimate relations.



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Commenting on the role of the self in documentary practice, film anthropologist Jean Rouch stated that the function of the recordist is that of the “taker and giver of doubles, as an eater and shower of reflections.”76 Similarly, the Noisy-Nonself is made of echoes and loops of itself and its environment. It is a monstrous auditory identity that consumes and is consumed. The parasite is also the host and so we loop back to the question of who is capturing whom. Perhaps, more accurately, what is capturing what? The Noisy-Nonself becomes at one and the same time more apparent and elusive. The self is estranged yet utterly familiar. Philosopher Dylan Trigg sums up this horrific predicament by stating, “Confronted with a doppelgänger, we tend to react, not with the narcissism suggested by encountering our image, but with horror at the implication that subjectivity has been duplicated and therefore deformed.”77 In relation to this quote, the Noisy-Nonself, a horrific echo of itself, is induced as neither a reflective trope nor a negative deformation of subjectivity. Instead, it is an idiosyncratic figure dredged into earshot and operationalized in practice; a methodological intervention in the field and a focus for critical audition elsewhere. The Noisy-Nonself helps amplify the low frequencies of practice, sites, and material sensory entanglements. Whether intentionally played with or repressed as a seething presence, the Noisy-Nonself initiates a monstrous resuscitation of the historically dissolved self: the body becomes a site for radical rehearing. The Noisy-Nonself is therefore summoned to invite new ethical, aesthetic, and pedagogical interventions onto field recording. It urges practitioners to confront their own ghosts and monsters, and to recognize signal and noise will always be entwined rather than separate or reducible. Listening-with the Noisy-Nonself and all its shapeshifting potential mixes a combination of the real and artificial as we come to a fused epistemology. Quantifiable rationality is tempered with transformative speculation. We might need such contributions within discourse and practice to shift from knowledge to relations. However, we must remember monsters always escape: “the monster’s body is both corporeal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift.”78 In other words, monsters are both a promise and a threat. The monster is marginalized and celebrated, curious and repulsive, here and there, flawed yet potentialized. Identity and meaning, categories and representation are productively troubled. Hence, the consequences of hearing the Noisy-Nonself are affirmative and disruptive. As Westerkamp played with the monstrous city, the Noisy-Nonself invites practitioners to play with their monstrous self. How

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is this possible in practice? How might field recordists reanimate presence in more than self-reflexive ways? What new knowledge might the echoes of self and site reveal when brought into playful, intimate feedback?

To the Cooling Tower, Sastop A roar fills my ears like the movement of traffic on a motorway. It is punctured by the dripping and turning of water. Are these sounds occurring as part of mechanic or organic processes? Different layers of acoustic strata pull at the place I am listening-with. It is cold, dark, and without a doubt subterranean. I hear a distant alarm that morphs into a singing voice in my head. Micro- and macro-mechanical operations are underway as infrastructure is roused into life. Things click and whir, spatial dissonance becomes felt volume, alarms continue to sing as perfunctory actions splutter the edges of audibility. Something begins flapping and slapping in the water. It is more than an automaton. Something is living and breathing, moving and dragging itself through an underworld of time and space. It petrifies my listening. Strange reverberations and more wet maneuvers. Things drop. I am walking through listening and it is not a comfortable journey. My auditioning gait is clumsy, I become a fugitive presence rendered into recorded events as they unfold. It feels utterly compelling and repulsive. Fear pervades over everything I can hear or feel. There is a desire to escape, a pull to move up and out. I am listening-with Christopher DeLaurenti’s To the Cooling Tower, Sastop (2015). The single track documents DeLaurenti’s movements as he passes through a tunnel beneath the abandoned Sastop nuclear power plant in Washington State. DeLaurenti’s journey is a real-time walking-stumbling-climbing-sliding ambulation, through an underground tunnel that took approximately fortyfour minutes, the total length of the track. Over email, DeLaurenti tells me a small microphone capsule was stuck to each side of his head. His body became a technological hybrid as he prepared for the recording, at night, in the interior of his car. Senses heightened in this pre-field act, DeLaurenti interlaced cables, sticky tape, and skin before entering the field. The resulting work is a unique compositional performance in its own right. The auditory depiction of space is intimate and transformative as a listening experience. In the liner notes, DeLaurenti states, “My movement through this architecture co-composes the soundscape. Presence becomes performance.”79



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Placed within the ears of DeLaurenti, we become witnesses to events as they unfold. Listening-with DeLaurenti’s movements I cannot help but imagine an animal striking and swiping its way through space, enclosed, restrained, captured. No words are spoken, only utterances made. We are crawling through the goop of non-representation, sticking and shedding the aural real and imaginary. I continue to decode and recode through listening. The slap of a body dragging itself across a wet surface, turning corners, throwing stones. Presence is altered through the noise of its echoes. Listening reiterates and grows anew when pushed to such extremes. The specter of nuclear energy and the lingering threat of outright extinction press on my ears. DeLaurenti becomes a vibrant corpus of slippery call and response. The field is doubled, trebled, and fed back through the multitudes of self and site. As human cells continually die and reproduce, we are never the same as we were last week or last year. This revelation summons the clone or doppelgänger once more. DeLaurenti is not who he was when he first entered the tunnel, nor am I by the end of the track. Like my own process of listening, DeLaurenti accumulates and distorts himself throughout his subterranean journey. He diffracts reflexivity and propagates affective sensory modulations. Philosopher of science Bruno Latour put it well when he claimed that mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.”80 DeLaurenti is an interference, a pivot for new material relations of body, site, and sound: horrifically present, he has become the Noisy-Nonself. The Sastop nuclear power plant has never been a functioning or complete site. Its construction began during the 1970s but ran into trouble through escalating costs and divided public relations. Building ceased in 1982 but it was not before the cooling towers were erected and much of the infrastructure put in place. Given the context of its partial status, DeLaurenti’s performance can be retroactively read as a rehearsal for a time and place that never transpired. The echoes and repetitions of body and site enhance further with the permeable potential of structural voids. Architects Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shang might describe the cylindrical tunnel of DeLaurenti’s performance, or the circular structure of the cooling tower, as an “incontinent object.”81 The term denotes an incomplete or open structure, its porosity suggesting the powerful collapse of time and space: “The hole suggests an inability to enforce the order or territoriality of the body. It may operate independently of the will of its host— performing strange functions, allowing traffic in or out. The breach is a threshold of momentous, and possibly dangerous, agency.”82

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Like recordists, nuclear materials persist in their obscuration. Out of apprehension or behind closed doors, radiation is not perceptible on a dayto-day basis; like sound, it contravenes borders. The classic noise of a Geiger counter clicking is a culturally coded alarm that something contagious might be present; radioactive waste is buried in the hope that nobody encounters it within tens of thousands of years. The utopian promise of nuclear efficiency is offset by the horrors of its geotraumatic history across war and waste. Fear pervades the nuclear imagination and is a low frequency that persists in DeLaurenti’s recording. It continues today in Sastop, now a space of regeneration and business.83 Sound scholar Steve Goodman describes the sound of fear as an “affective tone,”84 a particular feeling of dread that comes through human-altered landscapes and atmospheres. The sound of fear is hardwired when Listening After Nature as the horrors of anthropogenic climate change are felt. Yet dreadful vibrations, whether audible or not, can elicit reconfigurations of the human and nonhuman and invite new ecologies of practice. They initiate novel strategies of listening in the pedagogical sense of audition. We must continually ask: what am I not hearing? One of the timestamps of the Anthropocene is the early 1950s when plutonium-239 showed up on the earth’s crust. Also known as the “Great Acceleration” period, atomic bomb testing arrived as a result of Cold War paranoia and the escalating military-industrial desire for weapons of mass destruction. Plutonium-239 never quite goes away. It has a decay rate of about twenty-four thousand years and so brings us back to the ghosts and monsters, humans and nonhumans, that stalk landscapes and materials everywhere.85 Bodies, sites, and technologies are leaky horrors that return and revisit. DeLaurenti’s work shifts field recording into new modes of self and practice. The field trembles with fear through the echoes of itself and its agential actors. The Noisy-Nonself emerges, ominous and unpresentable, seething in the margins. Best understood as a strange echo of itself, the Noisy-Nonself is an acoustic doppelgänger that returns representation through distortions rather than exact mimesis. Practice-based knowledge bends in response. What does all this mean for the auditioning ear? How do we decipher the recorded shuffles of bodies and the husk of breath? Do we need to train our ears to be like ghost hunters? And what about the other field of audition, the armchair, speaker, or headphone that is intimately connected to the document I am listening-with?



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Summary: The Apophenia of Listening This chapter demonstrates that the field is an asymmetrical construct, a place assembled from systems of power and cultures of extraction. It has never been separate from anthropogenic incursion or biopolitical life. Field recording emerged from the entangled practices of ethnomusicology and wildlife sound recording. Both relied on the myth of salvage and technological objectivity as justification for pressing record. Within the very moment of capture, recordists consume and are consumed. The monstrous and horrific is not only located in histories of colonization or the manufactured landscapes of the Anthropocene. The locus for such trauma is also found in the fields of recordists themselves; they too must become sites of exploration when Listening After Nature. However, this is not a straightforward task as recordists occupy material, epistemological, and audible blind spots. The Noisy-Nonself has been introduced as a nuanced response to such a demand and functions as a practice-based interference, a white noise present yet undetected. This conceptual actor dredges the ghosts of environmental destruction, performs in the margins of representation, and is more than selfreflexive. A promise and threat, it never goes away, and with that revelation lurks horrific potential: it destabilizes the human and its exceptionalisms therein; it blurs distinctions between subject and observer, signal and noise; it means recordists must be more than mirrors; it demands new ways in which to appreciate knowledge as something both rational and irrational; it emboldens practitioners to critically and creatively acknowledge the negotiation of power and agency, in the field. As the field is tethered to political sites of power and the monstrous potential of self, we must remember it is also an appendage to a place of future audition. An iterative chain of displacement enables a field recording to travel into my ears from birdsong to microphone, hard drive to laptop, editing suite to composition, mastering, and manufacture, until eventually I put on my headphones, or sit in front of speakers and press play. I can be listening in an armchair or as I travel through the streets of London. The field is consumed and folded again and again among the habitual comings and goings of another time and place. Whether I am walking around a park or standing in a venue, it is never entirely here, never entirely there. Listening-with the polyphonic sites of the field and the spectral hauntings of Noisy-Nonselves, therefore, demands new modes of critical audition. How can

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we recode the extra-verbal sounds of the field and the ubiquitous white noise of its recordists? Apophenia might well be the most useful phenomenon to draw upon in bringing this chapter to a close. This is the cognitive condition where clouds appear to resemble dinosaurs, rocks seem to smile, and Jesus himself emerges from a piece of burnt toast. Often anthropomorphic, it is the process of interpreting patterns that may otherwise be deemed noise. Once noticed, these shapes and forms cannot be unnoticed. To listen-with the field’s hybridized subjectivities and the complex entanglements of time and place requires a similar process of meaning-making. Scholarly and pedagogical inquiry must listen beyond the so-called signal to rehear the enmeshed traces of power and authorship that haunt all documents of capture. The challenge for critical audition is how to hold onto agential relations among the absence of clear signal. Such listening demands an ethical commitment on behalf of critical practice, a mandate to persistently ask what am I not hearing.

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How do we avoid the very real danger of simply creating yet another product, a CD with yet more amazing sounds? … In the worst case, they have become an imported product, a neat sound without any real meaning beyond the WOW experience … We must ask ourselves, when we compose a piece or produce a CD, whether we are bringing our listeners closer to a place or situation, or whether we are deluding ourselves and are inadvertently participating in the place’s extinction.1 Some years ago, I stopped recording environmental sounds. The decision came in the middle of a site-specific study when I should have been doing the opposite. Why I chose not to release the blinking red light on a portable recorder was motivated in both felt and conscious ways. On a personal note, an ongoing physical injury canceled most ambulatory recording efforts. Accessing the great outdoors becomes very difficult when you can barely walk let alone carry equipment. To exaggerate this point, there are the bodily contortions any field recordist would acknowledge that transpire during a focused act of listening. I have often found myself in a position I could barely remember initiating, or holding a pose for an unhealthy amount of time as the North Sea wind began its skeletal deep freeze. Not pressing record reoriented my approach to listening and the ethical relations that exist between humans and nonhumans in the field. Asymmetrical contact is the foundation for any such encounter. I point the microphone. I create a mode of representation. I cannot gather formal consent from a bird or rock; believe me, I have tried. It remains all too easy for the act of field recording to be deemed inconsequential, for nature and the environment to be treated as a limitless resource. Yet, if we are to continue to record and represent lifeworlds beyond ourselves and the environments in which so much change is occurring, we must also consider how such complex entanglements can be

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unpicked. What concepts and practices are required to examine the animal voice in terms of rights? What happens when we apply a culture of finitude to the soundscape itself? To stop recording is not the answer. It is a luddite’s trap and can lead to an essentialization of listening, an activity no less technical or mediated than pressing record. A designated quota of moderation would be my recommendation. On reflection, a four-year abstinence was probably too much for me. The key is to return after such a period with renewed focus for the margins, to record the frictions and performativities of the encounter and not necessarily the sound object one deems so worthy of capture. Listening After Nature, field recording leans toward the asymmetries of practice and documents overlaps of the human, nonhuman, and technological so often exposed in sites of anthropogenic entanglement. Surrounding this claim is a somewhat contradictory reminder that the field also listens. If we are to build a critical practice that can address ethics and power, recognizing that birds listen to humans and that the earth records our steps is a shift that can generate new discourse around agency and rights. In other words, critical practice cannot overturn asymmetries but it can listen-with them. This chapter examines how cultures of sonic extraction have been built, how they pervade, and the ways in which animal sounds have been mined and monetized. As Chapter 1 drew attention to the fabrication of the field, Chapter 2 will stress how animals are embroiled in unnatural histories of cultural appropriation and technological experimentation. I propose the “conservation– composition complex” as a way of framing tensions brought about by field recording’s ongoing negotiation of nature, as both archival and musical resource. The rights of nature are discussed in relation to sound in an effort to locate responsibility within critical practice. Who or what constitutes the sonic witness is a question that propels three interlocking sections on conservation, music, and trophies. A further three practical examples, this time historic, are deployed through dogs, whales, and environments to consider the commercial and aesthetic repercussions of collecting and manipulating nonhuman sounds. In addition to archival recordings, I reflect on contemporary soundworks by Sally Ann McIntyre and a collaborative piece by Helen Mirra and Ernst Karel. The chapter functions as a gradual call to action. I am attempting to drive up the stakes for practitioners and scholars by drawing attention to contexts, recordings, and practices that may, at the very least, be able to amplify, even disrupt, the privilege implied in pointing a microphone toward an animal or



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environment. The point is to stress test the field in the hope of finding new critical methods and practices. I explore one possible opening through animal mimicry in the context of extinction and propose nonhumans as valid field recordists in their own right. The chapter culminates by discussing how humans might also harness the duplicitous nature of sound and mimicry through the art of Foley, a postproduction sound effects technique employed in film and television, and relied upon in wildlife nature documentaries.2 Is there a way in which the deliberate doubling of the nonhuman world might animate the ethical conundrums that circumnavigate the field? How can field recordists play with our relationships and responsibilities to the planet?

The Conservation–Composition Complex Nature has been exploited as a resource throughout time. The planet has been terraformed by humans and their technologies to an extent that we have entered a new geological epoch. Along with their bodies, animal sounds have also been mined for capital across the arts and popular culture. This claim is not comparable to the damage wreaked by industrial farming, for example,3 but sonic nature is a resource economy. One does not need to offer cash or goods to record a Muntjac deer’s vocal display. There is no immediate contract to sign between a recordist and a river. It is open season within the friction-free mythos of field recording. Animal sounds have been exploited on the back of the same hierarchies that produced ontological divisions of nature and culture. Nonhuman field recording walks in these cultural footprints. It is motivated by numerous subjective, political, and aesthetic aims but is galvanized by three key drivers that include the preservation of environmental sounds, the composition of species and phenomena, and the curiosity of sonic objects in and of themselves. Let’s begin with the first of those three. Acoustic ecology, the study of humans and their environment, as mediated through sound, is the clearest strand of practice that sits within the conservation camp. Born out of the pioneering work of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) and established in 1971 at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, the WSP asked, “What is the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change?”4 The research was led by R. Murray Schafer whose publication Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994) consolidated the group’s activities. Split

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into four sections, the text provides a historical and social account of sound in everyday life. Differing from ethnomusicology, Schafer and the group focused on the extra-musical content latent in the field: atmospheres, environments, mechanical and organic, human and nonhuman, rural and urban. The study promoted an acoustic consciousness, a social awareness that sound was part of a culture of senses, and that field recordings were valid items for collection and conservation. Schafer believed the sonic milieu of place could be captured, dissected, and analyzed.5 Field recording was the perfect method to do so. Similar to the role of a traditional ethnographer, Schafer emphasized firsthand accounts from recordists in the field. Acoustic ecologists were deemed “earwitnesses,” silent capturers and conduits of ecological change. As with any act of preservation, who or what is deemed collectible is contentious due to what is excluded as much as included. Schafer’s rationale for preserving significant sounds was determined by an ideology that has been rightly critiqued for its transcendental moralism and subjective bias.6 I do not wish to add to such well-trodden arguments here. Instead, I want to address the consequences of acoustic ecology and move toward what Jonathan Sterne has called the “preservation paradox,” the contradictory promise of conservation versus the inevitable frailty of media.7 Critical animal studies scholar A. C. Isenberg suggests that the motivations for any act of nonhuman preservation can only ever be derived from human values.8 This is certainly true in Schafer’s case, but at the level of an institutional archive, human values transform from the individual to collective; cultural legacy and educational access expand rationale. The K’auai O’o A’a songbird from the Hawaiian archipelago, declared extinct in 2000, is useful to note here.9 The only material trace of its life resides in a digitized representation of its call. The bird is gone but its voice lives on, so the argument goes. Field recording is guided by such mantras. Sound preservation functions as a form of specimen taxidermy that is more affective and temporal than seeing a reconstructed bird in a bell jar. A default culture of practice and discourse pervades in which the myth of conservation recording is an equivalent act of altruism: capturing and donating sound takes on the moral amplitude of giving blood. Nothing lasts forever. Certainly not sonic media. Whether it is a wax cylinder, tape, or digital file, loss and erasure are part of the material process of recording and archiving. With regards to the digital era, such documents do not deteriorate over time like analog carriers. Instead, they disappear through hard drive failure and file corruption. Loss is the basis for most priority-driven



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decision making in archives. Rarities and unstable formats take precedence over more bountiful signals and robust media. Given the sheer volume of sounds out there, the improbability of capturing them all, let alone having the ears and hours for audition, only amplifies the preservation paradox. This is not an argument against conservation but an acknowledgment that all histories, whether analog or digital, are formed upon partial truths: decisions and agendas, fallibilities, and fragments. As Sterne points out, “perhaps it is historians’ special way of shaking a fist at the image of their own mortality, but every generation must lament that its artifacts, its milieu, will largely be lost to history.”10 Consequently, Sterne claims that “sound recording is an extension of ephemerality, not its undoing.”11 If preservation is both justification and field recording fantasy, the questions that repeat again and again are what is being captured? What are we not hearing? What content, both material and conceptual, exists beyond the so-called signal? For whom are we recording and collecting?12 Over the course of Schafer’s influential soundscape text, he moves toward a notion that the sounds of an environment can be acoustically designed and shaped like a musical composition. The world and its nonhuman agents exist to be cataloged and composed. His quest, therefore, aimed to push sonic responsibility, both moral and aesthetic, into everyday consciousness. The following quote evidences the hubristic romance that guided Schafer’s intentions: “is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?”13 The entanglement of music and nature casts a long shadow. Zoomusicologist Emily Doolittle outlines two primary ways in which the relationship is negotiated. First, animal sounds inspire music and composition. Second, there are musical qualities imbued in animal sounds that make it more relevant to speak of animal songs.14 Doolittle stays with Western musical traditions, on the whole, relaying the work of composers such as Oliver Messiaen who “recorded and then transcribed birdsongs, using them as fundamental gestural, rhythmic, melodic, and structural building blocks of his musical language.”15 The nonhuman voice was intrinsic material for composition and romantic inspiration, but it also helped bring humans closer to matters of interspecies care. If the world and its sounds are easily extracted for conservation purposes, then recording that is motivated by music throws the remit for capture wide open. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (2012) by Bernie Krause is one contemporary example of how

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animal sounds and field recording are related by way of music. Krause, an acoustic ecologist whose work demonstrates biodiversity loss through the silencing of species, posits, “Every place, with its vast populations of plants and animals, becomes a concert hall, and everywhere a unique orchestra performs an unmatched symphony, with each species’ fitting into a specific part of the score. It is a highly evolved, naturally wrought masterpiece.”16 The description celebrates the vitality of nonhuman life while applying romantic and virtuoso filters. It is an emotional calling card for a nature best understood through musical attributions that remain suspiciously human.17 There can be no doubt that animal sounds inspire music as much as they are songs in and of themselves. Rhythm, structure, improvisation, and collaboration all exist in the sentient world of nonhumans. Field recording has the critical capacity to amplify such relations not only in the field but also through the work of soundscape composition.18 However, the desires and filters that guide such research are tethered to humanist dogmas. Anthropomorphic sentimentality lingers as a specter over such works and discussions. Listening After Nature, I am interested in how the conservation–composition complex, a patriarchal Western design, has transmitted into a practice and discourse that assumes atmospheres need capturing, birdsong needs identifying, and forests need composing. In May 2019, famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough made an announcement. He was opening up his sound archive titled My Field Recordings from Across the Planet (2018) to the public in the form of a competition. Producers, musicians, and DJs were invited to remix a recording from Bali made in 1956. The audio contained the sound of a gamelan orchestra captured while filming the Komodo Dragon for the BBC nature series Zoo Quest. Entries to the competition were judged before a panel of experts with the eventual winner selected by the public from a shortlist of candidates. The example demonstrates how field recordings and archives enter the public imagination through the context of music. The platform provided a useful form of outreach but did little else for a discipline in need of critical reflection. At the time of the announcement, there was ambiguity over the rights and ownership of the original material. Who is the music creator? Attenborough? The unknown subjects who were recorded and may now be deceased? Their families or communities? Or is it now the winner of field recording’s very own X-factor contest?19 A quote from the competition blurb did little to clarify the dubious cultural appropriation of sound: “All revenues generated from additional sub-licensing will be shared equally between the



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music creator, BBC Worldwide, and Sir David Attenborough’s affiliated charity Fauna & Flora International.”20 Roshanak Kheshti highlights the issue of sonic plunder in the context of world music. A long-standing and pervasive practice, Western musicians and record companies have captured and sold indigenous songs or profited through their reproductions.21 Dylan Robinson locates these histories within the salvage paradigm examined in Chapter 1. Between 1880 and 1951, the “Canadian Indian Act” censored song and dance rituals of First Nations communities. Recordists were part of an engineered process of cultural erasure and conservation. They were not the straightforward savior figure the myth of preservation promotes. Robinson explains that indigenous peoples did not know that “upon sharing their songs with ethnographers for safekeeping, these songs might also be ‘pinned down’ in contemporary compositions without consent.”22 As Robinson expands, when songs are also practices of healing or law, their capture not only jeopardizes musical legacy but also threatens the transmission of cultural knowledge. Attenborough’s competition is built on the same asymmetrical legacies that code the field, where ownership of material and intellectual property is easily abused. If such precedents exist in the case of human-to-human field recording, how are we to grasp the complexity of rights when documenting nonhumans? Contracts and ethical consent are not part of the field recordist’s kit. Perhaps they should be?

Sonic Rights Writing on nonhuman agency and rights, Vanessa Watts argues that nature has been historically dismantled as part of the colonial project: the systemic division of objects and subjects, environments and cultures. “The measure of colonial interaction with land has historically been one of violence and bordered individuations where land is to be accessed, not learned from or a part of.”23 For Watts, an Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar, land is brought into lively relation through the practices and cultures of humans living and learning with nonhumans, over time. Agency, and therefore rights, cannot be separate from the nonhuman as indigenous cosmologies view soil as an extension of the flesh itself. Vibrant agential nature is entwined within the stories, bodies, and rituals of life. Watts suggests the consequence of

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interconnection is located in the obligation and responsibility it brings. This is not agency as a performative thing separate from the human but something that is woven into the fabric of personhood and shared community. Watts states, “Habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement. Non-human beings are active members of society. Not only are they active, they also directly influence how humans organize themselves into that society.”24 In this context, nature is not considered a passive resource to be plundered as part of a pervasive logic of extraction. Theorist Paulo Tavares echoes the importance of this view as a strategy for planetary survival: in guaranteeing the rights of nature, we guarantee the right to human life; both are inseparable from one another.25 Michel Serres’s book The Natural Contract (1995) synthesizes these topics through a central question: who or what has the right to be considered a legal subject? His call to action culminates in a declaration that all things, including nature, should be deemed a legitimate legal entity. Fast forward to 2008 and the rights of nature are ratified into the national constitution of Ecuador. Rivers, rocks, and trees are deemed legal subjects; not just property under law but agential actors to the extent where they can be named as a defendant.26 Whether it is a tree or rock, any discussion on rights brings in the courtroom as a theater in which prosecution, testimony, and judgment play out. If something is deemed an agential subject, by proxy it also witnesses and can give testimony to events. This is the nexus of relations forensic scholar Susan Schuppli explores in her investigations of media and natural objects that harbor trace evidence of specific incidents. Schuppli’s concept, the “material witness,”27 is driven by an acknowledgment that matter, including nonhuman and technical apparatus, both capture and mediate evidence of anthropogenic change. Materials such as ice cores or radioactive film stock timestamp events and bring forth a series of epistemologies and practices embroiled in their production and reproduction. Nature, therefore, witnesses and “speaks back.” Flipping to this end of the spectrum, we come full circle and question who is listening to whom. Human exceptionalism is troubled as a consequence of debating nonhuman agency and rights. It is not just that it orientates an ethical responsibility toward recording; it also helps understand the field as a site of multiple perspectives. I comprehend that nature listens and documents my traces as much as I might claim to capture it.



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But what does all this have to do with sound? What does this have to do with recording the chatter of birdsong or the trickle of water? Surely sonic nature cannot be enshrined in rights? The pragmatics of these questions may well be true, but it is necessary to fold them back onto a practice that deems capture inconsequential. As I have said, there are no ethical signatories between a recordist and a river. The relationship is asymmetrical in terms of consent due to the hierarchy of the mediated encounter. I am under no illusion that any paw or talon will ever put pen to paper. I am also aware of the conundrum in terms of where rights would begin and end. Plants, insects, stones, and birds would all be exposed to the same problematic agendas that drive archival decision making. At a mechanical level, the air itself would have to come under consideration as it is the medium in which vibrations propagate. One could argue that sound is free from strict object-orientated rules: why do we need to discuss sonic rights when the sound of a tree is a combination of environmental factors rather than the tree emitting sound in and of itself? These rational challenges cannot halt our inquiry. We must pursue the subject of rights as it helps shift debate onto the ethics of nonhuman sound capture, something rarely brought into consideration. This is not a practical problem to be solved. It is not about sound becoming property. Considering the rights of sonic nature helps recognize the agential capacity of the medium as both actor and witness to events, entangled within human and nonhuman encounters rather than separated as a sonic resource. This is a process of questioning that might induce criticality; it may divert field recording from a logic of extraction and instead forge new possibilities for practice, where the de facto setting is not inexhaustible capture. It is a line of inquiry that shakes the hierarchies and constructions of the field, but it does not eradicate positionality and power. Human exceptionalism becomes glitched. The situated tensions that underscore all recording encounters rise from the low frequencies. I listen-with responsibility. This might be all, but it is enough. The most concrete legal precedent for the sonic rights of nature comes in the case of the MGM studio lion roar. In 2008 European courts granted this nonhuman sound legal status: trademark number 005170113 (EUIPO 2008). The report document includes technical details of the sound recording, the name of its legal owner, and a statement that it is from an individual classified as “Nature.”28 It omits the specific subject, namely Leo, who produced the roar in 1995, one of seven lions to have been used by MGM over the years. Formalizing Serres’s call for a natural contract in the media entertainment business might

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ironically reinforce the anthropocentric monetization of nonhumans. But thinking with the rights of nature may also be a useful way of disrupting the conservation–composition complex. Not in terms of practical consent or moral codes but as a speculative, creative, and critical tool: a protocol for the field that might help practitioners focus on the low frequencies of human–animal–land encounters. Navajo field recordist Raven Chacon’s Report (2015) renders this proposition through a poetic text score, excerpted below: Listening to land is not a pristine act that finds the quiet wild not the breeze stirring leaves, not the falling snow as your heart beats not the clairaudience that filters out all but buzzing insect and rustling reed that filters sound, that is, from land hear the word sound scape built upon the word landscape— its colonial gaze, its hungry designs —separating heartbeat from heart hear the word sound scape collect the resonance of lands, waterways, skies, collect whispered breath and life that dwells therein … the sounds of this land are not resources nor messages to be deciphered for danger and delight, for xwelítem mining sound from site to listen without extraction, selchí: meleqel what does this sound like?29

Sonic Trophies In contrast to Chacon’s ethics of relation score, acoustician Trevor Cox’s book Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound (2014) begins with a map. It is titled “The Sonic Wonders of the World” and depicts a flattened image of the earth with nineteen pinpoints marking his wonders. These include names and locations such as “Mighty Noise Tidal Bore” (Brazil), “Rock Gongs” (Serengeti National Park), “Whispering Gallery in Gol Gumbaz” (India), and “King Seongdeok Divine Bell” (South Korea).30 It is a map of sonic treasures, brought



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back from the field and relayed through filters of curiosity and adventure. This is the logical consequence of the conservation–composition complex. The field is everywhere and anything. The ultimate sound trophies lay in wait. Pack your microphone and map. Let the globe-trotting sound hunt begin. Cox is interested in the science of these sounds, how echoes and reverberations propagate under unique spatial conditions. His justification for collecting them pivots around a claim that our visual obsessions have led to “images of bizarre and beautiful places, but surprisingly few recordings of wonderful sounds.”31 Cox wants to rival the volume and scope of visual culture, and the swathe of images in circulation that have come to represent every corner of the globe. In doing so, his project leans heavily on ecotourism as a motivational trope for listening and recording.32 The musicality of environments is inferred throughout Cox’s scientific claims. Describing the experience of visiting Kelso dunes, he compares his footsteps to the sound of a tuba; when scrambling on all fours the sound of a “comical brass quartet.”33 Today, his sound hunt incorporates music explicitly into its search. In 2019, National Geographic Magazine published an article by Cox titled “15 Musical Wonders to See—and Hear” where he asked readers to “plan an acoustic journey to the planet’s most melodious spaces.”34 Cox is not alone in his sonic odyssey. An article on field recording written in the New York Times in 2018 did something similar. Produced as part of the newspaper’s “Voyages” supplement, the issue has since been archived online as a guide to the world’s most exclusive sounds.35 An extension of the sonic trophy hunt, it is a productive yet complicated move on from a static map. The field, now mediated, becomes accessible while at the same time more distant and objectifiable. Do contemporary curiosity collections of sound reinforce objectifying practices? Does field recording trigger a muscle memory that comprehends nature as a resource? Is this sonic neocolonialism? What is the impact on local communities? What type of practice does the conservation–composition complex encourage? There can be no doubt that a culture of trophy collection encourages the pursuit of spectacular sound objects. More concretely, the field entangles matters of hunting and predation through its plural uses and abuses. Speaking on the development of wildlife sound recording, science historian Joeri Bruyninckx states that the field “was not just physically accessible to professionally sanctioned scientists. Rather, it was shared with hunters, tourists, commuters, or laborers.”36 Sound artists can be added to this practice matrix along with discourses

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that narrate the field. Gordon Hempton, one of the world’s renowned nature recordists trademarked the phrase “Sound Tracker” to describe his practice. For Hempton, tracking is part of an environmental mission to record the world’s quietest places, without any trace of his presence. A long-standing and popular field recording radio program called “Framework” also promotes itself as “The Art of Sound Hunting.” Even Ludwig Koch published field recordings of fox hunting for the publication Hunting by Ear: The Sound-Book of Fox Hunting (1937). Whether for conservation or composition, hunting has quietly grafted its way upon the language and discourse of field recording. One only needs to say the word “capture” to evidence the predation that stalks the field. If the goal of hunting is to terminate a pursued subject, what is erased during a sound hunt? If a language of predation proliferates such activities, what does it say of how sound circulates culturally, how it is treated conceptually or materially? What does it imply for the sonic rights of nonhuman species and phenomena? David Michael’s article “Toward a Dark Nature Recording” (2011) critiques recordists who claim to represent species and environments as pure specimens, those encouraged by the sonic trophy hunt ethos of adventure and fidelity. Drawing on philosopher Timothy Morton’s call toward a “Dark Ecology,”37 Michael promotes recordings that capture the more abject qualities of nature as a counterweight to portrayals that seek to beautify as separate and pristine. A productive move on the one hand, it is also prone to amplifying the shock and awe of sonic gore. Michael uses a famous example of getting close to the wild by way of renowned field recordist Chris Watson and his recording of vultures pulling apart the bones of a dead zebra.38 The audio was collected during 1994 in Itong Plains, Kenya. Watson placed microphones onto carrion, rolled out cable up to 250 meters in length, and pressed record as birds ripped and tore at the decaying flesh. The document destabilizes the babbling brook or dawn chorus nature trope and situates the listener in a world of visceral alterity. The trend in wildlife documentaries for getting as close to the animal as possible means microphones become part of the rotting corpse. With such proximity, we reach the conclusion of the conservation–composition complex. Although Watson remains cabled back at a distance, we the listeners are thrown into the squawks and snaps of the animal kingdom. Yet the recording somehow defeats itself. The fetishization of animal consumption produces the same effects of curiosity, wonder, and awe as the conventional roar, song, or classic object specimen. In other words, getting



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close to a visceral sonic nature does not necessarily attend to relations and ethics; it may ironically produce distance and further objectification through its intimate intentions. Watson has worked extensively in locations such as the Serengeti, Kenya, the same area where conservationists, hunters, and tourists have long crossed paths.39 The field we must remember is a site of cohabitation, of mixed practices and desires. What are we not hearing in the extremities of this signal? Watson enacts the Noisy-Nonself but does not operate its potential. The close-up plundering of a dead animal is an invasive yet all-too-easy possibility within the asymmetries of the field. Histories of subjugation hover in the low frequencies: colonial practices of big-game hunting were driven by a similar aim and ease “of productive exploitation and sovereign access.”40 It is worth recalling that the capture, consumption, and representation of animals is not a one-way process. Getting close to nature has had lethal consequences for various impassioned individuals. Crocodile hunter Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray barb. Timothy Tredwell, the empathetic animal lover memorialized in Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man (2005), met his end in the jowls of a bear. Bears reoccur in these stories, as do national parks and legacies of colonization. In 2017, a bear devoured a remote microphone that was supposed to be documenting the changing soundscape of Karupa Lake (Alaska).41 Tredwell’s incident occurred in Katmai National Park (Alaska). In 2019, a French musician was killed by a bear. The victim was making field recordings for a musical project in Tulita, a remote region in indigenous Métis territories of Canada.42 As the previous chapter included the story of Michael Rockefeller’s presumed consumption, I bring these stories with serious sensitivity and as evidence that preservation and predation entangle the field, practically and culturally. The conservation–composition complex fuels these circular patterns and is perhaps best understood through the Ouroboros, an ancient symbol of a dragon eating its own tail. Whether the sonic trophy hunt takes place among the infra-ordinary of the everyday or the far-flung corners of the earth, the risk of nonhuman exoticization pervades. The practice of field recording is caught in cycles of capture and consumption, so much so that one does not need to position a microphone on a dead animal to make the point: practice eats itself. Hence, the conservation–composition complex is not a riddle to solve, more something to amplify, even begin to play with. I have already proposed the Noisy-Nonself as one strategy to help reimagine

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practice and will also explore mimicry, through the art of Foley, later in this chapter. Before doing so, I want to address a period when the contemporary lust for sonic plunder evidenced itself in the public domain, and begin to consider the ramifications of technological processing as part of an unspooling of the real. What follows next is a speed dial through three unnatural histories that route this discussion and ultimately help seek to forge a way out of the conservation– composition complex.

Unnatural Resource Economies Humans and animals share wired histories of relations and power. We have a penchant for illustrating dominance by reasserting technology back onto the animal actor. Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frogs during the 1780s declared animal flesh as a natural conductor of electricity. Jacob Smith has written extensively about the Lac beetle’s complex geopolitical role in the making of shellac discs.43 Surveillance campaigns are another rich source, from Acoustic Kitty in the 1960s to more recent GoPro-wearing Dolphin spies.44 The conservation and care of animals is also wired through geo-locative media tracking.45 Animal bodies are firmly in the crosshairs of technological production. The field is an electrical corpus of flesh and fur, cables and capillaries. Nonhumans are repeatedly hacked for their informatic data and monetary value. Nicole Shukin’s book Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009) relays this context by tracing the material relations of animals and capital production. Shukin highlights technology as an embroiled actor in the milieu of bodies, both human and nonhuman, along with issues of race, labor, and finance. She weaves examples from automobile industries to the abattoir and industrial farming, traces the lives of animal stock to the financial stock of the market, and calls for a zoopolitical inquiry in which human life and the politics of nonhumans can be analyzed. In one section of the book, Shukin focuses on Thomas Edison and an elephant named Topsy. In 1903, Edison, a man once accused of being addicted to electricity,46 conducted a macabre and hubristic demonstration by insisting that 6,600 volts of alternating current be sent through electrodes under Topsy’s feet. The event was filmed in Coney Island, New York, a space of spectacle and ethnological show business. Filmed on black-andwhite celluloid with no sound recording, it was simply titled “Electrocuting an Elephant.” Shukin states, “Topsy’s execution served simultaneously as a public



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demonstration of the effects of alternating current and as a promotion piece for the cinematic branch of Edison’s technological empire.”47 Shukin alludes to how different the film might have been if the environmental sounds of Coney Island were present along with Topsy’s vocal response and thunderous collapse as smoke billowed from her feet. Without sound, the film promoted the effortless power of electricity, demonstrated its potential use for capital punishment, and highlighted the objective qualities of the moving image camera, a technological device made by the Edison Manufacturing Company.48 The film is a cultural artifact that once again underscores the field as a complex mediatic site of asymmetries. Through the invisible hand of electricity, animal sacrifice becomes the ultimate display of human innovation and mastery. It is a dominance that now prevails beyond the bodies of animals and into the far reaches of earth, air, and sea. The silence of data and digits has replaced the crackle of electric shock. Nature was, and remains, a financial resource, exploited through techno-scientific exploration, extracted from communities and sites of the neocolonial present.

Dogs, Whales, and Environments Animals and environments are prime sites for cultural, technological, and capital desires. But what about their sounds? In 1955, Carl Weisman, a Danish ornithologist, recorded and edited the barks of five dogs named Pussy, Pearl, Dolly, King, and Caesar. Splicing and pitch-shifting the canine crooners on reelto-reel, Weismann set the dog’s voices to the tune “Oh! Susanna,” a song first published in 1848.49 With producer Don Charles providing musical backing, Weisman’s record was released by RCA Victor. The A-side featured “Oh Susanna.” The B-side comprised three short songs including “Jingle Bells.” The work sold over a million copies and was reissued in 1971. It has remained a commercial Christmas success ever since.50 Weisman was able to finance his practice and research from the disc sales in what must be considered one of the first animal-specific examples of musique concrète.51 To some extent, cutting and splicing nonhuman voices is ignorable, hardly as literal as the hacking of bodies such as Topsy. Yet there are consequences, legacies that influence the epistemes of recording and representing the sounds of nonhumans. A culture is born in which animal sounds, much like their bodies, can be extracted without recourse and manipulated for human desire or material

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gains. This hegemonic scenario is underscored by the publisher RCA Victor, famous for promoting itself through a mixed-breed terrier named Nipper. The company’s profile is based on the image of the dog leaning its head into a gramophone horn alongside the phrase “His Master’s Voice.” Anthropologist Michael Taussig suggests the image plays on the powerful function of mimesis. The fidelity of playback is so great that the dog believes the actual voice of its owner is in the gramophone. Sound quality sells the product while reinforcing who the master is and who is being tricked.52 We do well to add a layer of affirmative meaning to the image of Nipper and the gramophone. As well as listening under the servitude of Man and his sound machine, the logo suggests Nipper could also speak back. Perhaps Weisman himself saw the latent performative potential in the image: that the animal could be an agent of sounding rather than a passive receiver. The Singing Dogs (1955) began a trend in which animals and their sounds could be captured, repurposed, and sold. Aligning the barks of dogs with musical songs built on anthropomorphic traditions that valued nonhuman nature for its melodic qualities. This aesthetic legacy is a significant factor that has influenced contemporary field recording practice: nature is a presumed musical resource to be captured in the field or bent into compositional material once out.53 What other animal sounds might be deemed musical and therefore sellable? How far can the commerce of nonhuman sonority be stretched? In 1970, Columbia Records released Songs of the Humpback Whale. American marine biologists Katharine and Roger Payne were its authors, having spent years recording ocean life and the calls of humpback whales. Underwater microphones—hydrophones—allowed access into aquatic worlds that human ears alone could not audition and record. This type of technology and its creative use will be explored in Chapter 3. For now, it is part of another story in which the calls of animals became commercially profitable and culturally influential. The Humpback Whale LP went platinum upon release, selling one hundred thousand copies. The recordings were so successful that National Geographic inserted a flexi-disc version inside ten million copies of its magazine during 1979 for global distribution. As ecological awareness gained more traction in the public consciousness of the time, the record tapped into life beyond humans and the delicate balance that sustains ecosystems.54 Whale song expert Denise Russell sums up the traditional approach within science for understanding and representing nature: “if it does not relate to feeding it must relate to breeding.”55 This binary dogma frames the human pursuit of



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wildlife where sex, territory, and food triangulate how nature is normalized and conveyed through media. Songs of the Humpback Whale moved beyond science precisely because of the medium and media on which it was produced. The record was not an identification guide per se, nor was it a deliberate attempt to obscure objectivity. It provided a sonorous journey, both real and imagined, that engendered a sense of communication and care, across all species. Sound enabled something beyond representation and visual markers, an illusion of music that was entirely human yet utterly alien. Identification, science’s ultimate bargaining chip, becomes unsettled by animal sounds. The trained ear may be able to transpose characteristics and behavior onto whale song, but for the majority of listeners, identity and meaning is fluid. Male, female, human, animal, instrument, space, and body commingle within an elastic ecology of relations and borders. This interpretation resonates with artist and writer Drew Daniel’s claim that all sound is queer. For Daniel, sound is itinerant and as a result can trouble categories, displace absolute knowing, and orientate perspectives: “hearing the queerness of sound might help us echolocate the edges of subjection.”56 Writing on the popularity of the Humpback Whale record, scholar and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun expands the discussion toward the cosmological: “the immense outpouring of wonder and affection which greeted these recordings suggests that the act of listening exceeded scientific enquiry. Hearing whale song was understood as a journey of discovery equivalent to the exploration of outer or inner space.”57 Both The Singing Dogs and Songs of the Humpback Whale brought animal sounds to the commercial market and underscored the ease with which humans could capture the voices of nonhumans without consent. The latter record differed through its cultural openness to meaning and identity, achieved ironically without the manipulations and cuts that Weissman’s dogs required. Whale song helped queer the science of listening and demonstrated that even without postproduction editing, nonhuman sound was primed to challenge claims of human exceptionalism through its own becoming. It was 1969, one year before Songs of the Humpback Whale, that Syntonic Research Inc. began releasing LPs under a series called Environments. Distributed by Atlantic Records, the inaugural release was titled Environments 1. Both sides of the record were thirty minutes in duration. “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” made up Side A, while Side B consisted of the “Optimum Aviary.” The tracks promised a powerful representation of nature directly into the listener’s home or headphones. The series author was Irv Teibel, an early pioneer of field

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recording and multimedia entrepreneur.58 Teibel had been recording various shorelines along the east coast of America, convinced of the sea’s relaxing musical potential but often frustrated by the results upon playback. Only when Teibel took his ocean sounds to friend Louis Gerstman, who had access to an IBM 360 at Bell Labs, did the recording become the ultimate representation he so desired.59 With the aid of technology, Teibel could cut, equalize, stretch, and loop one wave into many repetitive motions. A definitive representation of the sea became highly subjective and technically manipulated, a soothing synthesis of location sound and electronic processing. Teibel’s voice was even deployed within the mix. This was outside the scope of objective-based fieldwork. It was an illusion of the sea, an eco-fantasy and transcendent artifact removed from the difficulties of recording itself, let alone the realities that oceans are not isolated objects waiting in situ. The record suggests there is no pure nature but one that could be worked into fantastical shape. Ironically, Teibel’s ultimate seashore was derived from recordings along the waters of Coney Island, the same place that Topsy the elephant had been publicly electrocuted. Side B, the “Optimum Aviary,” also acknowledges things are not as natural as they appear to sound. Here, the calls of birds, transformed again through a similar technological process, suggest a pure, unfettered animal world. However, the birdsong was recorded in Brooklyn Zoo, a caged environment of spectacle and display. Much like the field, technocultural histories and constructions mean nature recordings are anything but natural. Teibel’s record along with LPs such as The Singing Dogs and Songs of the Humpback Whale brought consumers into a new age of listening, where animals and their environments could be experienced in the domestic field as sonic wonders. Home-based listening practices expanded along with the planetary consciousness of the time. Nature was now a marketable product and sound was the perfect conduit to the consumer.

Listening-with Humans and Nonhumans Auditioning a field recording, and assembling its meaning, is a similar yet very different process to making a jigsaw. As a child, I tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle without the crutch of the image guide. It was a process that oscillated between hope and despair. Hope at the freedom to imagine, despair at the realization that my picture did not match the pieces in my hand. Sure, I could just follow



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the form of individual segments and the image might reveal itself. But I wanted to will meaning into the frame as much as build its inevitable shape. Never completing the task, I was left with sparse pockets that sort of fitted together: a partial cloud, some of the frame elements, what looked like trees, broken and incomplete. During this process, the initial hope of imagining and building my own scene gave way to the inevitability that each piece would simply click into the form of a predetermined image. Now, when I playback field recordings with students, we speak about jigsaws. Auditioning the extra-verbal sounds of environments and phenomena, we discuss the difference between building scenes and letting them go. We debate whether we need an image guide, or if there is a sonic equivalent to the jigsaw. We conclude, more often than not, that the point is not to build a visual picture when listening to field recordings but to recognize the audition process as a knowledge in the making exercise. As listeners we build something that will always be a combination of subjective and cultural experience: memories, associations, and affects linked with the analytical pieces of the puzzle that give us more direct clues about time and space. Listening-with students, I make sure we attend to the missing pieces, the holes in the jigsaw or lacunas in the audible. I do this again and again by asking the question: what are we not hearing? It draws attention toward the marginal, the forgotten, the inverse, and the underheard: there is always something beyond the audible when auditioning field recordings. Whether it is the suppressed knee joint of a recordist, infra and ultrasounds outside human hearing, the chain of actions and infrastructures that unsettle site, the histories and futures dragged into the present: the puzzle is more perforated than it is whole, more plural than it is a singular scene. Field recordings break down conventional representation, they trouble the image code and its desire for completeness. When listening together, we do not build pictures; we rather assemble connections and relations, tuned by an attention toward the cavities of meaning and the fissures of knowledge. This is where learning takes place. Listening-with becomes an ethico-imaginative bond. It facilitates an elastic infrastructure of meaning built from discussion and debate. Conversations link, delink, stretch, and obliterate parts of the puzzle. Meaning is also drawn in from listening elsewhere: on the internet, in archives, through sleeve notes, by auditioning related recordings. There is a plethora of contextual possibilities available. These shadow sites do not ossify a scene but add more layers to interpret, more holes to listen-with.

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What we are left with is a jigsaw done otherwise, an “unjigsaw” that never wanted to be an image in the first place. It is a puzzle of connections and interruptions that leaves more questions than answers. The point is to stay in the assembly process, together, constructing meaning, challenging representation, attending to methods and matters of the audible and inaudible. It involves swings from knowing to unknowing, and in that process we might come to care, we may begin to take responsibility for our listening, in the studio or the field. Responsibility is important due to the anxious and ambiguous state of nonverbal field recordings. It is critical due to the asymmetrical relations between humans and nonhumans, which have led to a culture of inconsequential sonic extraction. As discussed, whether animal sounds are captured for scientific or aesthetic purposes, there are few avenues of protest in terms of the right to be recorded. Yet nonhumans do signal agency through their ability to voice back. This next section turns toward such stories by way of bird mimicry and the proposition that animals also record, edit, and reproduce the sounds of environments. I discuss verbatim technique as a way in which we might begin to rehear the frictions so often smoothed over by trophy hunters and soundscape composers. What messages are coded through the nonhuman voice, beyond musical association? If we consider bird mimicry a form of environmental testimony, would this make animals valid witnesses to anthropogenic events, their calls pluralizing narratives of extinction and human impact? And what of the consequences for listening and learning, for building and unbuilding the jigsaw of meaning? Following this, I explore human mimicry, not through traditional routes such as music but by way of Foley, the art of postproduction sound effects deployed in film and television.

Environmental Verbatim Wahwawah … ChcccchhhhhhHHHH … Burrddubbbbledmuuurr … Madooba? Kerjer … Kerjer … Wahwawah … KkkkKKKKkkkCCChhh … urrDeeKkkkCCChr … Madoo … M’ba? Wahwawah … ChichhHHHH … EeeaHHHEeeeHH … Kerjer … Kerjer … Kerjer … dubbbbledmuuur ……………………… KkkkCCCh …………… KkkkCCCh

The words above attempt to describe what I am listening-with. The sounds are familiar yet baffling. I have auditioned them with students and members



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of the public on numerous occasions. The response is always poignant and imaginative: “It sounds like a machine malfunctioning.” “Is it a child playing?” “Is it from a science fiction film?” “Something sounds wrong.” We are in the unjigsaw process, building together from the perforations of verifiable knowledge. I hear a semblance of things in the recording. Wood being chopped, voices speaking, drilling, and language I cannot identify. It must be a construction site but it is impossible to say with certainty. Everything sounds identifiable yet not quite trustworthy. The media itself has an almost cartoon-like quality, and its highfrequency filter suggests it might be televisual. The sounds auditioned are in fact produced by a fawn-breasted bowerbird mimicking chainsaws, construction noise, and human voices. The audio was recorded by Ian Burrows in Papua New Guinea, a site of repetitive extraction within this book. It was published as part of a compilation CD called Bird Mimicry (2006). The book Nature’s Music: The Science of Birdsong (2004) describes how this particular encounter unfolded: “a fawn-breasted bowerbird netted during a banding exercise in Papua New Guinea by Ian Burrows, left lying in a bag near the nets whilst awaiting release, gave convincing renditions of the cries of children, and the sawing and hammering sounds of carpenters.”60 The image is a haunting one. A bird trapped in a bag vocalizing the anthropogenic sounds of its environment, its visual space reduced yet auditorily mapped thanks to the porosity of sound. The recording is a fractal commentary of capture that reverberates the close-knit practices of preservation and predation. The mention of “rendition” yet again evidences the musicalizing trend toward birdsong. How can we move away from this inclination and instead hear the bowerbird as an agential witness? What else might we learn? Can we apply verbatim technique beyond human language and consider the translation and performance of environments, and the nonverbal, as part of a more ecologically relevant inquiry?61 Verbatim is the exact repetition of a set of words or sentences, a direct quote being the most common example. Theater deploys verbatim as a practical method to inject documentary realism. Traditionally, speech recorded from an interview is transcribed word for word, forming the basis of an actor’s script. During the 1990s, Anna Deveare-Smith and Mark Wing Davey developed headphone verbatim, a method that went further than the written word. In this scenario, actors would listen to recorded speech through headphones and recite words, in real time. The technique meant that actors would not only perform authentic sentences but would also do so while auditioning and communicating

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the affective qualities of the voice and its performative utterances. Verbatim technique is challenging on a cognitive level as the actor attempts to process listening and speaking simultaneously while accounting for the mediation of technology. Realism slips and stumbles as an inevitable part of the process. Watching verbatim headphone theater is similar to auditioning the bowerbird recording. Recognizable information is transmitted, but how content is sounded suggests the veracity of reportage is disputable. It might be down to appropriateness of tone or a lag in the matrix of technology, ear, and mouth, but exact mimesis is productively troubled. What we are left with in such instances is more than mimetic commentary. Hearing the bowerbird’s not quite so real mimicry, therefore, disturbs acoustic knowing and allows new meanings and relations to emerge. As mentioned, the recording was made in Papua New Guinea, a place well heard through Steven Feld’s sound anthropological study Sound and Sentiment (1990). Papua New Guinea has a complex identity tied to histories of colonization.62 Bowerbirds are resident in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Their dual presence mimics the geographic poles of extraction and displacement that colonial violence demarcates. Scholar Donna McCormack examines trauma and memory within the postcolonial present, past, and future, exploring the ethical “role of listeners in bearing witness to unarticulated, unknown and unspeakable histories.”63 McCormack states, “Bearing witness to trauma is an embodied event. Testimony is not only a speech act that renders a traumatic event ‘real’, it is also a sensorial expression of the unspeakable or the unarticulated.”64 McCormack searches for ethical responsibility in utterances between words, in the gaps and frictions of what constitutes the real. Within the embodied memories of horrors such as colonization, we might want to consider nonhuman voices as sensory registers that expand discussions of what constitutes the sonic witness. Species such as the bowerbird provide a form of testimony to anthropogenic climate change and to the causal networks that stretch across the postcolonial present. We may not be able to verify semantic meaning, but as McCormack reminds us, mimicry and repetition highlight how power functions; however, this does not mean knowledge is pinned back into something translatable: “Testimonies to trauma are performative in that they often compulsively, endlessly and repetitively bear witness to an event for which the narrative form cannot quite do justice.”65 When words fail, extra-verbal sounds must be examined as part of the meaningmaking puzzle. The truth might not be any closer, but power, mastery, and the Anthropos become unsettled.



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Bowerbirds constantly transgress nature–culture binaries through their complex vocalization and spectacular homes. They perform sentience, technicity, and aesthetic desire while developing the attribute of mimicry within specialized conditions. The bowerbird’s environmental verbatim is ground truth testimony rather than hard scientific data; it is a soft register of ecological crisis. When such vocalizations resound processes of human-industrial incursion, as they do in this recording, we hear a larger cartography at work, one in which anthropogenic matters of industry, deforestation, and colonialism linger as problematizing artifacts. Nonhuman verbatim is a traumatic sonic facsimile of the Anthropocene, but it is also much more. Although the bowerbird recording might induce an elegiac effect, I want to stress its affirmative potential. It is precisely through the slippages of the verbatim method, of hearing the impossibility of mimesis, that we uncover multiple truths; we draw listening toward the performance of field recording, the mediation and circumstances of the encounter and the possible stories we are not hearing, the histories and erasures that hover in the low frequencies of the field. Furthermore, the recording disrupts anthropocentrism and the claim that humans are the only species able to give commentary on the environment. The complex process of listening-with mimicry is a double bind that also entails listening-without semantic certainty. McCormack puts it well with the reminder that “we must begin with an openness to listening, to hearing that which moves us and undoes us.”66 Noticing the not-so-real voices of nonhumans, as they play back the sounds of a damaged planet, amplifies what anthropologist Andrew Whitehouse calls the “anxious semiotics” of listening.67 Whitehouse argues the Anthropocene induces anxiety as its default position: listening to birdsong within the context of extinction produces doubt over the continuation of a species while resonating the complicity of humans in their demise. To audition mimicry, as I have done so here, heightens anxiety further and places greater responsibility upon my own listening as the receptor of events. Moreover, questioning what constitutes a real or natural voice intervenes the conservation–composition complex and the historic desire for analogous harmony. This is not a time for symphonic transpositions. It is a time to destabilize listening, a time to linger in the knowing anxiety that all is not quite right. Two examples are useful to note here, before moving to human modes of mimicry and the deliberate strategy of utilizing all that might be deemed anxious and uncertain in listening. The first is located in the context of the Australian

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bushfire crisis of 2019–20. During this time, a Magpie was recorded mimicking the sound of emergency sirens as response vehicles raced to put out fires that were undoubtedly a consequence of climate change.68 The Magpie’s song not only ventriloquized its environment but also acted as a literal alarm call that signaled biodiversity loss. It did so while performing animal agency beyond the linguistic exclusivity of humans. A second and final example can be found in footage from a BBC wildlife documentary hosted, once more, by Sir David Attenborough.69 Doing his best to become the Noisy-Nonself while narrating his journey in whispers, Attenborough creeps through the forest like a sasquatch journalist, moving in and out of sound and image, settling next to the superb lyrebird he has stalked in Southern Australia. The bird demonstrates a vocal repertoire that involves mimicking other species including the kookaburra. Along with an impersonation of chainsaws and car alarms, the lyrebird replicates the sound of a camera clicking and reloading. It is an unsettling moment of nonhuman affirmation as we comprehend that the bird is listening, recording, and rebroadcasting the sounds of asymmetrical capture, live and direct from the field.

When Mimicry Is the Last Song Left In the Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Archive of New Zealand there is a sound file, reference number 26325, dated 1949.70 Streaming the recording from a desk space in central London, I am introduced to the voice of Robert Batley, a man who speaks in a vintage radiophonic manner. He tells me about the plight of the Huia bird, a long-extinct species last sighted in 1907. As most of these stories go, the bird became vulnerable due to hunting and deforestation. Māori tribes and later settler colonialists imitated the Huia call as a method of literal capture. Bird mimicry was a sonic snare integral to methods of hunting. Batley goes on to introduce Hēnare Hāmana, a Māori man who was part of an expedition to find remaining Huia’s in the mountains and forests of the North Island during 1909. Hāmana joined the mission as an expert in bird mimicry. Auditioning the crackles and pops of a digitized acetate disc, I cannot help but imagine the 1909 team slowly treading through the forest floor, leaves and branches crunching underfoot, conveying the same sonic effect as the original format. Preservation and predation are brought into an ironic relationship again in the context of this recording. The call once used to lure and kill is now



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employed in the hope of conservation and care. After Batley’s introduction, Hāmana provides a series of vocalizations that illustrate a male and female pair of Huia’s communicating to one another. In an overly structured scenario, we are invited to listen to the imagined calls of the birds as they go about their daily feeding routine. A notoriously quiet species, there are no sound recordings of the Huia in existence except that of Hāmana’s mimicry he performed for the 1949 broadcast. The context and recording bring an inevitable sense of sadness and loss, but they also do much more. Environmental scholar Ursula K. Heise writes about the effects of elegy and mourning so often associated with extinction stories. While acknowledging the grief of biodiversity loss, her book Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species (2016) disrupts doom-laden narratives that celebrate apocalyptic fantasies. Heise claims this trend is evidenced through film, sound, photography, and advertising, and contributes toward a cultural imagination typified by individual hopelessness and indifference. Her argument is aimed at industrial modernism, the stories that are told and sold. Heise attempts to dig her way out of sorrowful ground by rewilding the imagination. She proposes speculative fiction, humor, and play as necessary ingredients for interspecies justice and calls upon stories that possess the “capacity to cast the present as a future that has already arrived.”71 Heise briefly discusses an artwork titled Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild (2012) by field recordist Sally Ann McIntyre. The work draws upon the extinct Huia and the fact that no recording of the bird’s song exists. McIntyre documented the sonic atmospheres in and around taxidermied Huia specimens within the museum setting. She then broadcast those sounds back into the bird’s original environment as a poetic gesture. This type of intervention is exactly how grief and loss can still be imbued with activism and play. The performativity of silence and the use of rebroadcasting places demands on the auditory imagination. I, the elsewhere listener, must conjure the Huia through the presence of its absent song.72 A more telling work for the debates of this book is found in one of McIntyre’s series titled “Huia Transcriptions” (2012–13).73 Sitting in a chair on a late drizzly afternoon, I listen-with the track. The calls of birds mix with drops of rain and someone, or something. Presence is felt, not necessarily identified. Tinkering takes place among an atmospheric forest scene. Slow mechanical melodies filter through the spaces of listening. The Noisy-Nonself cranks a melody into life. It is a vulnerable signal, one that teeters on the edge of existence with

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each precarious note of playback. Paper tears, movement, and shuffling. Is it McIntyre or a bird? Probably both, possibly neither. Repeated attempts to conjure the relics of music stretch my imagination beyond romantic elegy and toward a critical appreciation of mourning, witnessing, and artistic attempts at resuscitation. McIntyre made the work by transcribing written musical notations of Huia calls onto a paper strip that was fed into a small hand-cranked pianola player. She played back the acoustic instrument on trees in the forest of Kapiti Island, New Zealand. These are the same trees Huias may have climbed and the home of the last known sighting in 1907. Recording this process, the work operates the conservation–composition complex, not as a record of loss but as a compound document of the entanglements between humans, animals, and technologies. McIntyre’s repeated attempts at playback amplify a fragmented sense of music far from the bombastic associations of a great animal orchestra. Here, the relationship is broken, impossible, yet undertaken again and again. The transposition of extinct birdsong within the context of music and conservation, along with its repetitive performance, produces a critical mourning that is aware but not subsumed by elegy. Scholar Heise is perhaps privileged in choosing to think beyond the negative impacts of extinction. She negates the fact that such loss is often enforced on communities and geographies of those most vulnerable, and that both humans and nonhumans have been living and imagining extinction over and over.74 However, if we are to strive for things such as interspecies justice, social responsibility, planetary care, and ethical stewardship, bleak realities must be tempered with imaginative and hopeful counterpoints. Similarly, if we desire a critical and creative field recording practice, we must entangle elegiac portraits of endangered species or damaged sites with practices of play, humor, and intervention. Listening-with mournful documents of mimicry can encourage a renewed sense of creativity in recording and auditioning practices, in and out of the field. The affirmative potential of mimesis is located in its fallibility and consequent destabilization of identity. McIntyre’s intervention is fragile, fragmented, and vulnerable. Within the Ngā Taonga archival recording, I hear the distinctly human breath of Hāmana as he goes about his imitation. The secret is out from the start with both examples and ensures that the poignant impression of an extinct Huia’s call will not be cataloged with the tag of grief alone. This is what mimicry, both human and nonhuman, might be useful for: not a striving toward



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fidelity or truth, but a practice aid that amplifies the vulnerability of so-called knowledge. It is a method for resuscitating the ghosts of the Anthropocene and a persuasive reminder of the imaginative force of listening. What might mimicry become if we take it further into field recording practice? Can the deliberate fakery of nonhuman sound attend to political ecological matters? How might recording the squeaks of a plastic bottle, while representing it as the sound of a melting iceberg, address the causality of climate emergency, more than a recording of the subject itself? Next, I turn to the art of Foley, a postproduction sound effect technique that offers new approaches to the field. It is a practice that conveys meaning through sonic fiction and turns up the aesthetic dial of anxiety when Listening After Nature.

Foley Field Recording Sitting at the kitchen table as sound filters through the room, I am listening-with a work by Mirra and Karel titled Maps of Parallels 41 ºN and 49 ºN (2015). It becomes part of my surroundings, so much so that I do not question what I am hearing. It is natural, rendered, and real. It is only when I place headphones on that I can hear the fictions it presents, the content that suggests it is anything but what I thought it was. Wind noise surrounds everything I listen-with. There are rattles and taps of things being animated. Gusts cut abruptly like in everyday life, but a little different somehow. There is a constant tempo. It sounds like a plucked string, but I want to believe it is a natural rhythm. The wind changes frequency, it shifts and grows lower. Audio debris accumulates and conjures: I anticipate a storm. Creaks and soft transformations lull me into an acceptance of what I am hearing. It must be a real place? It must be a natural event? A site of desolation, perhaps a house or dilapidated structure, exposed and at the whims of its weathering. The title of Mirra and Karel’s work geolocates land between latitudes 41ºN and 49ºN, a space in North America affected by settler–colonial incursions. Dutch Elm disease eradicated much of the tree population within these coordinates by way of Bark Beetles that arrived from the Netherlands during the early twentieth century. The disease decimated populations of Elm and led to deforestation and habitat loss. These histories belong to the low frequencies of listening, relations, and events otherwise lost in the pursuit of signal veracity. Sound sources are

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revealed in the sleeve notes that read like a poetic recipe list of human and nonhuman collaboration. land: guitar railroad: 16mm film rewind crank deep water: bass guitar winds: analog noise generator and filters rivers: silences75

The work is one hour in duration and arrives from Mirra’s long-standing conceptual practice that investigates place and its representation. Working with field recordist Karel, Mirra states they aimed to make a work “with sounds not imitating natural sounds, but analogous to them.”76 The sound of deep water is analogous to a bass guitar. The sound of noise generators is analogous to rivers. The sound of a 16mm film rewind crank is analogous to a railroad. Sound scholar Salomé Voegelin unearths the sonic as a medium that can both make and dismantle space. For Voegelin, sound has an inherent nonrepresentational quality that allows for a mapping otherwise. “A Geography of sound has no maps; it produces no cartography. It is the geography of encounters, misses, happenstance and events: invisible trajectories and configurations between people and things, unfolding in the dimension of the actual while formlessly forming the dimensions of its possibility.”77 A geography of sound may not produce cartographic representation, but the coordinates of Mirra and Karel’s work do root it to a specific place, with specific histories and specific events. Their title functions as a generative constraint. It prompts expectations of authenticity while deploying analogous sound as a tool for untethering. The work is equally a map of provenance and doubt made acute by the deliberate blurring of sources and sounds. Mimicry is not the pursuit of a perfect copy; we know this is neither possible nor the point. The aim is to make vulnerable versions of the real. Sonic doppelgängers and decoys invite listening-with the fictions and fallibilities of field recording practice. Mirra and Karel’s work plays with the potential of mimicry by adapting conventions found in Foley, the art of making postproduction sound effects. Foley artists recreate extra-verbal sounds associated with close-up movements or objects, as well as atmospheres. Clothes, footsteps, bodies, breathing, mechanics, weather (ad infinitum). Such examples are recreated through performance as the Foley artist synchronizes sound to moving image.



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Sounds generated have a legacy function in that they become part of the artist’s or studio’s effects library. Work is performed in a bespoke setting. The field is a soundproofed room optimized for sonic control and fidelity. Foley stages are mutable environments. Floor textures and surfaces can be easily swapped. Everyday objects such as chairs or door handles are detached from contexts and elevated into performative agents. Vegetables, tin foil, and umbrellas are just some of the mundane items that Foley artists come to rely upon for recreating detailed sonic effects. Film theorist Michel Chion claims Foley does not strive to produce exact sonic replicants. He suggests the aim is more a rendering of associative affects made by hearing sounds that are not the thing they pertain to be.78 Bear claws are paper clips attached to gloved fingers. Thunder is a piece of tin foil. Rain is the sound of frying bacon. Cornstarch is analogous to snow underfoot. Chion claims Foley sound operates at a near unconscious level as our aural imaginations accept sonic fiction as sonic fact.79 As a method and artform, Foley is uniquely positioned to challenge categories of identity and meaning across the human and nonhuman. Within the context of cinema, sound is deployed to enhance a character or atmosphere beyond the falsehood of faithful mimesis. However, when the context is documentary, and the subjects are animals and environments, there is a presumption made on behalf of the audience that what is being broadcast has a commitment to veracity and, therefore, the production of authentic knowledge. The very word “nature” implies that a location-based sound recording is used to represent nonhuman life. BBC guidelines for making such documentaries state that “audiences should never be deceived or misled by what they see or hear.”80 Yet Foley methods are routinely employed in wildlife and nature documentaries for practical and aesthetic reasons. The noninvasive mantra of humans recording animals is part of this motivation, as is the fact that parabolic microphones are still second best to the zooming capabilities of a telephoto lens. We know what happens when recordists get too close to the animal signal, hence safety also motivates the use of Foley sound. Microscopic worlds of butterflies or insects are recreated in the studio through the flapping of gloves or the flick of a comb. The difficulty of capturing macro sounds, on location, provides the rationale for recreating them back in the controlled environment of the Foley stage. It is in the studio and consequent mixing process where aesthetic renderings come together to enhance perceptions of size, weight, and texture along with broader dynamics of time and space.81

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Wildlife documentaries have come under scrutiny for their use of sound in recent years as viewers appear to have finally discovered their ears. Big-budget documentaries such as the BBC’s Planet Earth II series are an example in which the issue of sonic authenticity reached public interest. One Twitter user said, “I hate the fake sound effects every time something moves”; another added, “A lizard gliding through the air does not sound like a jet.”82 A BBC series called Seven Worlds One Planet was singled out for syncing a bear call onto the wrong species of bear. Similarly, the call of a site-specific bird was dubbed onto a location it had never been resident of.83 Details concerning sonic provenance are noticed by experts such as bioacousticians rather than the general public, who tend toward aesthetic reactions. Both expert and nonexpert criticisms are addressed by the “making of ” appendage that strives for methodological transparency. Animal studies scholar Brett Mills has critiqued the whole assemblage of sounds deployed in wildlife documentaries, elements that also include voiceover and musical score. The latter veers toward the dramatic and emotive while the former perpetuates hegemony through its hierarchical disposition.84 Nature is sounded by the cultural habits and constructions of humans. Foley is ironically the most faithful sonic attempt at rendering the real, beyond music and voice, motivated by what is appropriate rather than authentic. Sonic naturalness should be comprehended as a sliding scale dependent on the message of its context. Nonhuman field recording is perhaps the most stripped-back form of nature documentary with no voiceover or musical score. However, it remains a technological and mediated practice, which, as we know, does nothing to enhance claims of accuracy. What are we not hearing in nature documentaries? The hum of aviation that occupies every inch of the planet, the ultrasonic fizz of recording technology, the infrasonic vibrations of architectures and animals, the carbon footprint and energy drained by industrial media crews, the Noisy-Nonself recordist, present yet undetectable to the ear. Attending to such matters can pave the way for a critical field recording practice that tunes into inaudible stress points. Might Foley be the most appropriate method to do so? Surely its duplicitous nature can help? If we remove the process hierarchy of image first, what might be gained? What practice-based knowledge exists in fictional play and strategies of critical decoy? Mirra and Karel’s project begins with imaginative rigor rather than with an attempt to sync sound to image. Beyond radiophonic histories, one of the first examples of Foley before film arrives from the year 1951, an exhibition titled Men



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from Montaña held at the American Museum of Natural History. Established in 1869, environmental scholar Stephanie Rutherford describes the museum as “the authoritative source on what is defined as real, valuable and worthy of memorialization, this museum functions as the arbiter of what counts and what doesn’t in the construction of nature.”85 Men from Montaña was a typical anthropological demonstration of the time that focused its Western gaze upon eight Peruvian tribes and their material and cultural practices. The use of media, however, was not so conventional, as sound was employed within the museum setting for the first time.86 Contrary to marketing that implied site-specific field recordings from the mountains of Peru, sounds were sourced from sites such as the Brooklyn Zoo, also the scene of Irv Tiebel’s forays, and produced through Foley techniques recorded in a Manhattan bathtub.87 Released under the giveaway title Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America (1960), the consequent LP acknowledged this was a project of sonic fiction. That Peruvian crickets were recorded in Connecticut confirms the appropriative potential of field recordings, let alone the fictive capacity of methods such as Foley. The museum exhibit and subsequent LP support the illusion of a place rather than the specificities of a Peruvian forest. Fiction is hardwired into the act of field recording. Krause suggests a recording is “an illusion that creates an honest sense of place.”88 Film scholar Rick Altman insists on the heterogeneity of recorded sound as a superimposition of materials, contexts, and time. For Altman, a recording can never be a simple sonic truth due to the chain of events and apparatus, pre- and postrecording, required across scales of audition.89 Field recordings are therefore mutable forms of evidence that speak to a “here” as much as a “there,” to truth as much as fabrication. However, within the context of science or museology, veracity matters. When representing voices that have been historically marginalized, the stakes are enhanced. Animals are also subject to sonic exploitation due to asymmetries of consent. The challenge to Foley more broadly, then, is in rendering its potential to delink truth and knowledge while holding onto sociopolitical relations. How can field recording repurpose methods such as Foley in critical and creative complicity?

Fictions and Fallibilities Writing on wilderness preservation, postcolonial scholar Ramachandra Guha discusses North American National Parks as examples of how nature has been

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romanticized as separate and pure. Critiquing the essentialization of nature, Guha states that deep ecology’s celebration of wilderness “also displays an uncomfortable convergence with the prevailing climate of nationalism in the American wilderness movement.”90 Environmental scholar David Spence has dug deep into the National Park icon as the beacon for all that is considered natural. Such parks promote themselves through notions of the pristine. Spence makes clear they are anything but that. Yosemite Park, for example, was built upon the forceful removal of indigenous communities: “Americans are able to cherish their national parks today largely because native peoples either abandoned them involuntarily or were forcefully restricted to reservations.”91 We should remember that such reservations opened up the field on which field recording is built. Practice has a muscular drift toward the same illusion of nature as pristine and separate. It is exercised by the pursuit of silence, a search one can reform through the ethically orientated question: what am I not hearing?92 Responding to histories and erasures that underwrite nature’s universal tropes can be placed under the claim of “decolonizing nature.”93 However, given the specific and serious scope of such a term, I am cautious to use this terminological position. Within the context of academia and practicebased research, decolonization statements do not remedy institutional bias or systematic power. Indigenous Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and postcolonial thinker K. Wayne Yang remind Western-Euro scholarship that decolonization is not a metaphor. It cannot be adopted as a vanity tool for institutional claims of diversity.94 Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd draws attention to the whitewashing effect of current Anthropocene scholarship. Todd asserts that current discourse on the collapse of nature–culture binaries erases many indigenous thinkers and concepts that have long investigated such entanglements.95 Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen proposes “multiepistemic literacy” as an intervention into curriculums dominated by Western-Euro writers.96 Art practice tunes into methods and media as impetus for decolonization. Postcolonial scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris highlights artistic activism as a way of attending to “submerged perspectives” occluded by ongoing processes of extractive capitalism. For Gómez-Barris, artists resurface hidden subjects through the deployment of aesthetical and performative modes of resistance.97 Sound scholar Leandro Pisano explores how the sonic medium itself can be useful in such contexts: “sound can help to decolonize our gaze and reveal geographies and spaces that are hidden in the surface of modernistic maps, deconstructing the authorized combination of materials, unlocking the



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soundscape as an archive in which documents, voices, objects and silences are scattered.”98 Tuning attention to methods, media, and materials, by way of Foley, is one practical route I want to pick up here. By necessity, it involves a turn toward fiction as a locus for disrupting the codes that govern the field and nature. Unsettling the master narrative that equates truth and knowledge as part of the same natural bag, Foley delinks the two and produces “epistemic disobedience.”99 In addition to knowledge intervention, I am interested in the complicity of materials, actions, and soundings going on in Foley field recording practice. Can we “green” the materials of Foley, use only sustainably sourced products, or ensure items are scavenged as a part of an upcycling mandate? And finally, I am interested in how these new knowledges and material ecological relations fold back into learning. How might students, practitioners, and publics come together to share, perform, and debate climate causality and help generate aesthetic imaginaries in response?100 In his book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), Eshun uses the term “mythscience” as part of a decolonizing shift that claims technology and science propel us further into the unknown than the known. Consequently, we are better equipped to deal with realities if we operate forms of sonic fiction. Eshun interprets music not just as sound but as a mélange of sleeve notes and artworks, bodies and circuits, scratches and grooves. Media sensory semiotics crisscross through time and space, opening up possible futures already past. Fictions manifest at the level of frictions found in the fissures of technology and the fallibilities of media. It is in the break of the beat that sonic fiction emerges and a possible future that “is a much better guide to the present than the past.”101 Sonic fictions rupture and reterritorialize aesthetic norms, affirm the agency of cultures and communities previously colonized, and reinvent what sonic knowledge is or can be. Attending to such matters rewires the field’s modus operandi and the myths of practice otherwise lost. To address the climate emergency of our current present, I would argue that it is necessary to materialize forms of sonic fiction as a responsible mode of serious play. This is not a propulsion toward far-flung fantasy but a tactic for intimate destabilization. It is a way in which practice can be folded back onto itself in the hope of disrupting the natural ear. Proposing Foley as a practice of sonic fiction helps lift the curtain on field recording. It resists greenwashing the field as somehow separate, outdoors,

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and over there. Deliberately playing with showerheads that become waterfalls debunks rarefied nature by making transparent the methods embroiled in practice-based research. McCormack puts it well by stating, “If we are to hear something different from the ordinary, then we have to start listening to what may sound fictional or what may easily be discounted as impossible.”102 Mirra and Karel’s work is an example of Foley field recording that frees itself from the hierarchies of the moving image and attempts to deconstruct meaning in the process of doing so. Further examples of this speculative genre already circulate. Angus Carlyle and I released an LP titled Decoys (2018) in which we created the sounds of a scorched planet populated by a lone field recordist. Sounds were produced in the Foley studio with specific detail given to the figure of the Noisy-Nonself protagonist who was constructed from materials including mud, fans, and cassette tape, and environments from polystyrene and foil.103 What does it mean to produce recordings with anthropogenic materials? Can an ethico-material sonic practice emerge in which objects employed are sustainably sourced and reused? The potentials of Foley field recording are worth restating. The practice can unsettle prototypical representations of nature and the powers that govern the field. Freed from the hierarchies of visual imagery, the method celebrates sonic fiction as a critical and creative tool, one that shapes new forms of artistic and pedagogical production. Repurposing objects as “natural” sounds doubles down on the knowledge that Western nature is a construct; it draws attention toward the codes that remain otherwise lost in the pursuit of signal-based meaning. Incorporating the frictions and fallibilities of the field becomes a playful and critical maneuver that amplifies a multiplicity of versions and perspectives. Robinson suggests that a decolonial process of listening entails different approaches for settler and indigenous communities, yet the shared impetus remains in “becoming no longer sure what LISTENING is.”104 Within sound and musical contexts, Robinson claims this “means shifting the places, models, and structures of how we listen.”105 My emphasis has shifted methods and materials of practice in its attempt at intervention. Foley, the art of delinking of truth and knowledge unsettles the ear and sends it toward the edges of its meaning-making; it helps trouble nature as separate and pristine. Moreover, within the finitudes of mass extinction and biodiversity loss, scarcity of resources will inevitably mean doing more with less. Remixing and reusing materials as a practice of sonic upcycling offers a further layer in which universal naturalisms can be reheard, if not repaired, in critically buoyant ways.



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Summary: Vulnerable Conduits This chapter has explored the constructed naturalisms that entangle field recording. Animals and environments are exploited as part of any technological process of recording and experimentation. Asymmetrical relations permit the one-way flow of sonic resources. Practice flickers between science, arts, and a meta-discourse fueled by the conservation–composition complex. Altruism and preservation are knotted to issues of predation, extinction, and anthropomorphic transposition. Nature is music full of wonder and awe, so the myth goes. It can be tamed or liberated, hunted for curiosity or composed as an experience or trophy. Whatever the rationale, nonhuman subjects are at the whims of human desire, mastery, and design. How to continue? How to press record? How to practice otherwise? Donna Haraway insists on the importance of exploring human–animal relations as it “draws us into the world, makes us care, and opens up political imaginations and commitments.”106 Art historian Steve Baker’s description of “animal-sceptic art” encourages works that differ from advocacy and instead investigate the complex cultural and mediated relations between humans and animals.107 If the field and its human and nonhuman agents are a mixture of perspectives and powerful constructions, it seems that reimagining truth itself might hold practicebased possibilities. This is not to suggest alternative facts but to assert that sound is part of an assemblage of meaning, of captures and mediations, gaps and uncertainties. I have explored the complicated relations of mimicry within human and nonhuman encounters as a way in which to situate this proposition. Species such as the bowerbird resound anthropogenic change through the ventriloquism of human-made noise. These acts teach us that multilinguistic reproduction is not exclusively bound to the human. Bird mimicry, therefore, troubles knowledge as we know it and inscribes new voices in the narrative of environmental witnessing. Birds record and reproduce sounds live and direct from the field, performing the role of field recordist, microphone, hard drive, and playback device all in one go. Auditioning such recordings entails listeningwith the anxious frictions and slippages of representation. It is a process that destabilizes assumptions of what is real. Listening to the sound of nature is never natural, ontologically or materially speaking, but mimicry stretches this further. It demands a critically imaginative filter as part of a process of aural reconstruction, based on the loss of signs and signals.

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Nonhuman sonic verisimilitude prompts a repurposing of mimicry as a critical and playful device within the practice-based domain of field recording. Traditional forms of imitation have been explored through music but are inevitably caught in the conservation–composition complex. Listening After Nature, a shift to other forms and methods is required. Foley has been probed as one option available for practice. Nature is a construct, but that creation can be played back on itself. Postproduction sound acknowledges artifice from the very onset. Deliberately faking nature can draw listening into territories of productive doubt. It promotes suspicious audition above romantic immersion. Foley, therefore, channels associations and affects over absolute veracity. It offers a route out of illustrative entanglement and the untenable codes of Western nature. As a consequence, Foley is open to creative use and abuse. I have employed it here to draw attention to ethical debates on the rights and representations of nature. The props and objects employed in Foley field recording should also be accountable within the promise of practice. These summations lead me to a final question, one that will inevitably be answered with many more. What exactly is a field recording? This line of inquiry is worthy of a book in itself but can be encapsulated here in relation to the work of Chapters 1 and 2. A field recording is only ever a partial document. It is a slice of one possible truth remade by the ears of another, elsewhere. Send two people into the field with the same equipment and you get two different results every time. A field recording is therefore a stratification of subjectivities, a mixture of landscapes and its actors, of audible and inaudible phenomena—human and nonhuman—and the tangled temporalities that collapse binaries of the here and there. Field recordings are vulnerable conduits of knowledge; they demand imaginative critical strategies of audition across all fields of listening.

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Our ethical responsibility is to listen to what we cannot understand, as well as to the familiar and the comprehensible. It is to bear witness to this intimate tie that is forged through self with others, that primary tie, that binds us together. In bearing witness to the unknown we open up knowledge to further questions and destabilize existing certainties and practices.1 This chapter examines the sites and sounds of anthropogenic entanglement. From forests to oceans, mountains to glaciers, the pervasive impact of humans is leaving a geological imprint. Natural resource extraction continues to damage ecosystems, yet such harm is often imperceptible and occurs across timescales, geographies, and sensory thresholds difficult to apprehend. How are artists engaging with the manufactured landscapes of modernity and what can field recording do? What methods and aesthetics are required to deal with the complex responsibility of recording and representing sites under stress? With the planet stretched to its extremes, what consequent bends must listening make? How does microphonic technology provide access to worlds above and below the human range of hearing and what imaginative, scholarly, and ethical demands does such elastic audition require? I address these questions over three incremental phases of writing. The first locates oil as a material actor in relation to recording, pedagogy, and sonic knowledge. Pivoting around a field recording by Peter Cusack, I explore the practical and aesthetic dangers embroiled in representing sites of pollution. Drawing on contexts from journalism, documentary, and ethnography, I discuss participative modes of meaning-making and reassess observation as a critical method in which field recording represents subjects without recourse to voice. Snowballing throughout the chapter are conversations on fieldcraft, filtered through my own practice, and the practice of others.

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Crossfading into the second phase of the chapter, I consider technologies that move us into sites beyond the human. Infra- and ultrasonic worlds, accessed by nuanced modes of capture, are relayed through historical contexts and contemporary field recording examples. Soundworks by Jana Winderen and Joyce Hinterding are listened-with to ask what cultures and practices are embroiled in the low frequencies of technologies such as hydrophones and contact microphones. How are contemporary practitioners listening-with and without so-called knowledge? What are the sites and sounds of nonhuman alterity? Feminist new materialism and critical post-humanism provide theoretical frameworks that help respond to such questions and the ethicoaesthetic strain involved when listening-with the sounds of shrimps and stars. The third phase of the chapter proposes a conceptual model that I call “contact zones and elsewhere fields.” It draws upon discussions from ethnographic fieldwork and posits a new way in which to comprehend the mutability of the field, a space that is always connected to the sociopolitical actions of humans. Finally, I transpose such thinking onto a work by Andrea Polli as a way of operating the concept’s practice-based potential in relation to ice, field recording, and data sonification.

Oil There is no conventional guide. No hand or voice to walk with. No map or referent to where I might be or what I am surrounded by. Physically, I am passing through a busy street in East London. Aurally, I am moving through a thick atmosphere. It engulfs more than my headphones, drenches me in its haptic costume. London is textured by the sound of elsewhere, it pours from ear to ear. Shrieks call out above smaller squeaks and oscillations. Mechanical movements map onto my own. Crows caw. Alien insects vibrate. Rhythms, chains, metals, and cranks, at times distant, gradually move in and out of my physical outline. These sounds do not reside within me, they leak through my porous skin and meet the air like an acoustic shadow self, a penumbra of sounding. The effect is soothing and unnerving. Frequencies drill deeper and deeper as if lowering my body into the earth. Cars and movement, perhaps they are here, in London, not in my headphones? No sign of a human voice, no occupational hands. I walk through a land of mechanical giants: ominous and beguiling, inhuman yet endearing.



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The track I am listening-with is Peter Cusack’s “Oilfield Soundwalk 1,” part of his CD and book project Sounds from Dangerous Places (2012). The title does what it says on the tin. Cusack made the work by walking through one of the most polluted places on earth, the Bibi Heybat oilfield along the Caspian shore outside Baku, Azerbaijan. He did so in 2004 with in-ear binaural microphones. Cusack performs the Noisy-Nonself. He is a ghost interlocutor who “narrates” the environment with corporeal agency instead of spoken word reportage. Moving through the nodding donkey pumps of oil mining, Cusack edits and composes live, in the field. The resulting work moves beyond a static picturepostcard image and places the listener into a dynamic spatiotemporal event.2 The work forms part of an approach to field recording Cusack calls “sonic journalism.” This term is “based on the idea that all sound, including nonspeech, gives information about places and events and that careful listening provides valuable insights different from, but complimentary to, visual images and language.”3 Sonic journalism attempts to tip the visual and linguistic weight of reportage into a shared sensory arena, one that advocates recording and listening to environmental sounds as part of a critical recording practice. Cusack insists nonhuman environments and phenomena should not be captured for their compositional merit but rather their affective and informatic qualities. He wants the auditioning ear to focus on the “factual and emotional content”4 of soundscapes. This is not the promotion of sound centrism. The book and CD evidence a multimodal approach based on sound as a primary material that is tethered to lengthy texts, references, and imagery. These elements function as metadata to the sounds presented. They are media coordinates intrinsic to the project as a whole. Admitting that sonic journalism cannot stand as a sound-alone project is a productive move. It summons the suspicious ear of listening to search beyond the limits of medium obsession and shifts focus onto the multisensory experience of hearing along with the expanded documentary demands of representing a field recording. The rationale for “non-cochlear”5 aesthetic production is far greater when a project engages in climate emergencies and sites of environmental devastation. Without such metadata, I would be left musing on the musicality of soundscape drones or the alien insect associations of machinery. I would not necessarily comprehend a site that has geopolitical significance and health impacts upon local human and nonhuman communities. This is perhaps where the real danger of the project resides. Within studies of sensitive sites, sound, while positioned at the top of the media chain, must be willing to engage in

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the lower hanging fruits of visual production. Engulfed by the omniscient conservation–composition complex, sound centrism, like any media bracketing, tips dangerously toward aesthetic voyeurism, sonic fetishism at worst. As ecotourism hovered over Chapter 2, dark tourism, the motivation to record and represent sites of pollution and trauma, clouds this chapter’s discussions. Thankfully, Cusack is not only ecological in terms of his subject and use of multimedia. His awareness, toward the aesthetic dangers of representing sites, through sound alone, helps shift field recording into a multisensory appreciation of place, one that can accommodate layers of media and, therefore, layers of meaning. Bibi Heybat is one of the most photogenic and sonogenic places I have ever visited. It looks and sounds fantastic. The area is covered with hundreds of drilling rigs and nodding donkeys, many of which have decayed into twisted sculptural heaps of blackened metal. The light is special, the sky and the sea are blue, the soil is yellow where it is not black, and the various structures reflect brilliantly in pools of oil waste.6

This confessional statement highlights the attraction and repulsion at play within polluted sites, as well as the reality that sensory experience cannot be blinkered to one mode. The underlying danger of the project is its risk of producing aestheticized objects that obfuscate the impacts and effects of oil, a material that has seeped into consumer culture since modernity. The threat of a “dark field recording” is therefore pertinent and can be historically situated through Hal Foster’s damning critique of artists working with site. His essay “The Artist as Ethnographer” (1996) outlines how place-orientated practitioners run the risk of the same extractions of knowledge and materials that ethnography navigates. A similar concern was echoed in Chapter 2, only now the animal body has been replaced with the sites of environmental trauma. I refer to Foster’s essay as a warning, a reminder that dangerous places also drag perils into practice, perhaps less tangible than the immediate risks of physical sites, but present nonetheless. This is not to say that field recording automatically renders landscapes into the sonorous sublime. Sound alone does convey knowledge through its nuanced effects and affects. Environmental acoustics carry complex meaning and field recordists are responsible for its capture and transmission. Rather than deny the challenges of sound or the fragile truth claims of a singular listening experience, the artworks and positions I weave throughout this book attempt to play with the paradoxes of practice.



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Such works strive toward what field recording practice does, and how recorded materials matter, rather than what they might pertain to illustrate. Cusack is explicit in what he believes sonic documents offer. Field recordings convey far more than basic facts. Spectacular or not, they also transmit a powerful sense of spatiality, atmosphere and timing. This applies even when the technical quality is poor. These factors are key to our perception of place and movement and so add substantially to our understanding of events and issues. They give a compelling impression of what it might actually be like to be there.7

Like Chapter 2’s example of the fawn-breasted bowerbird, I have played and discussed this recording with students on many occasions. Without context, I ask participants to notate responses to what they hear, or think they hear. Acoustic analysis, key sounds, affective notations, whether they perceive the recordist, time, atmosphere, and location. “This is not a stationary recording.” “It’s industrial, late at night.” “Is it close to the sea?” “I like the squeaks and musical textures.” “It makes me feel comforted, happy, like boarding a plane.” It is remarkable how the responses build a detailed picture of Bibi Heybat oilfield while at the same time entangle sound’s contradictory associations and affects: the threat of misinformation being heightened when matters of environmental justice are at stake. Such pedagogical tasks steer clear of showand-tell sound studies. Instead, knowledge is co-constructed through layers and stages of revelation and media. Students have also drawn the place they listenwith. Scaled further, these diagrams can be modeled into architectural replicas and mockups. In the context of learning, the emphasis is less biased toward the sonic and more focused on the interpretative powers of listening, the analytical and imaginative effort it takes. It is an incremental process of deconstruction and reconstruction, across senses and media. Critical audition, the pedagogical assemblage of materials and meaning, as discussed in Chapter 2, offers a set of coordinates that are explorative and emergent, not necessarily fixed or absolute. It prompts listening conversations that accommodate the forensics of building place, with sound, while recognizing the dangers particular to that which we cannot, or do not, hear. In this case, oil itself, the health effects on local communities, both human and nonhuman, not to mention the networked sites lubricated by petroleum’s geopolitical influence. Chapters 1 and 2 show how environmental sound has long been positioned as worthy material for conservation and composition. It has also been recognized

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within ethnographic and anthropological contexts as a method, medium, and analytical intervention that short-circuited a sensory reliance upon text and visual observation. As early as 1972, anthropologist Steven Feld asked, “What about an anthropology of sound? What about ethnographies that are tape recordings?”8 Feld is perhaps the most well-known proponent of “sound anthropology” in the contemporary sonic field; he is well aware of the conservation–composition complex: “I tried to critique the limitations, sonic and cultural, imposed by the notion of ‘music’.”9 A major component of Feld’s practice is based on the long-term sonic ethnography of Papua New Guinea.10 It is no coincidence the location returns as a site of extraction throughout the pages of this book. Papua is captured and consumed again and again within the processes of subjugation and repatriation. It has become an atemporal zone in which the Noisy-Nonself and His recording machine persistently haunt. Sonic knowledge is framed through acoustics and experience. Reverberation is perhaps the most common effect that can reveal detailed information about a specific space or event. Feld takes this further through the notion of “acoustemology.” His term is a combination of acoustics and epistemology, a way of knowing through sound. “Acoustemology engages acoustics at the plane of the audible—akoustos—to inquire into sounding as simultaneously social and material, an experiential nexus of sonic sensation.”11 Feld places relations at the epicenter of his discussion on what constitutes sonic knowledge. This is not meaning acquired but experience made in relation to place and its human and nonhuman agents, “an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection.”12 For Feld and Cusack, emphasis is on ground truth presence. Sonic knowledge is accrued by “being there.” Listening and recording on location functions as a form of participation and testimony wholly dependent on the claims of an intimate, site-specific experience. The nuanced demands of sounding eco-sensitive sites mean information is vital, but experience and affect must also be part of the message. Removing the human voice is the critical stress test for sonic journalism and field recording more broadly. Within the contextual promise of linguistic reportage is the threat that other voices, both human and nonhuman, will either be silenced or spoken on behalf of. Filmmaker and postcolonial scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha has been at the forefront of such discussion, what is called “giving voice” to subjects, those that historically fall under the Western ethnographic gaze. Minh-ha acknowledges the “tendency to apprehend language exclusively as meaning”13 and links “giving voice” to indigenous participant-subjects through



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sound bites, subtitled summations, or voiceover commentary, the latter being more often than not “an all-knowing (preferably male) voice-over with its marked neutrally scientific tone to perpetuate the master’s knowledge and to package information.”14 Minh-ha is interested in finding sounds between the documentary rubric of voice, effects, and music, the “grain, tone, inflections, pauses, silences, repetitions.”15 Minh-ha calls these “holes in the sound wall.”16 They are leaks and fissures that open up spatiotemporal possibilities. It is in the holes of the media assemblage (pre and post) that agency and perspectives might therefore emerge and mix. Field recording may well be the mediatic void Minh-ha is searching for. It is neither voice, effects, nor music, but something in between; it makes a home for itself in the lacunas of conventional reportage. Like a hermit crab, the discipline finds solace among the detritus of its more robust media partners. It is through critical practice that interstitial knowledge conspires, never quite scientific, disciplined, or absolute. How can sonic knowledge, with its untenable demand of “being there,” accommodate the missing links that network sites and actors? How are the stakes raised aesthetically when sites themselves move from the picture postcard to the incinerator or refinery? Can observation be reclaimed as a critical method beyond language, untethered from its insistence upon the human as the epicenter of sonic knowledge?

Here and There Oil is the binding agent of social industrial modernity. Fueled by the sun’s energy and the sintered remains of algae and other organisms, it is a natural composition that runs on finite life yet is drilled at ever-increasing scales of intensity. Writing on exuberance and catastrophe, scholar Frederick Buell claims oil “is a prop underneath humanity’s material and symbolic cultures.”17 Petroleum, or crude oil as we commonly associate it, is part of a process of industrial extraction and refinement that pervades everyday products and materials. Oil has transformative powers and manifests across vast and intimate, personal and planetary, scales. Engine fuel, vitamins, shoes, insect repellent, toothpaste, speakers, gasoline, refrigerators, pillows, glasses, dice, and much more.18 I do not realize the umbrella that stops me from getting wet, or the glasses that allow me to see these words, are petroleum-enabled objects and events. As a substance, it is difficult to see or feel let alone hear or comprehend. I am distant

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from nonrenewable energy and the vast chain of scales and circumstances that conspire with my everyday life. Oil is in my recording equipment, and yours too. It soaks the scene of Bibi Heybat oilfield through and through. Any journalism is pushed to its limit when dealing with such a material, let alone one that prioritizes the sonic. The oilfield is the field, but how does one claim its singularity when oil is so tentacular? Philosopher Reza Negarestani’s book Cyclonopedia (2008) prospects a similar question. His text mixes prose, theory, and fiction to articulate the complex military-industrial contexts that oil operates within the geotraumatic context of the Middle East. Negarestani’s work reads like ecstatic journalism. It is cacophonous and polyphonic, at times barely comprehensible in depicting the realities of oil. Horror drenches Negarestani’s theory-fiction in the form of oil itself, a shape-shifting camouflaged actor that hacks the human and nonhuman, site and its elsewhere. Listening After Nature, field recording occupies these mutable zones and materials more than ever, landscapes altered by anthropogenic activities, sometimes audible, sometimes not, often on the threshold of rural and urban, human and nonhuman. From landfills to damaged oceans, disappearing rainforests to industrial farming, nonrenewable mining to electronic waste: these are the inevitable fields recordists will occupy. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing asks of such sites, “What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin?”19 Tsing traces the lively assemblage of multispecies actors within the context of mycology. Her emphasis binds the subjective act of noticing with the more collaborative and communal scenes of learning: both can survive and thrive under the most extreme conditions. The point being that exhausted landscapes, which play on the edges of ruination, must not be condemned to a dangerous or damaged status in perpetuity. In relation to Cusack’s work, key questions emerge that include the following: how can field recording participate, document, and communicate sites in critical complicity? How can observation be reimagined within the contextual need for producing site-specific knowledge? What methods and affordances exist without recourse to the human voice? How can the contexts of journalism and ethnographic documentary practice infuse discussions on the representation of site, both in terms of its specificity and its supply chain of actors and geographies? Cusack’s oilfield soundwalk is a participative intervention. Many other tracks that makeup Sounds from Dangerous Places are observational in a conventional sense. A microphone is set up and left unattended. Its author floats everywhere



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and nowhere. Listening points toward subjects at a distance. The threat is that environments become separated and objectified. Cusack compares his project with photojournalism, yet sound, even in standard observation mode, operates in different ways to the fixed image. Sound is itinerant, it moves and shifts. It is a phenomenon often described as something we are in, rather than witnesses of.20 Cusack performs the Noisy-Nonself as a (dis)embodied and perhaps more critical version of objective observation. The track is not autoethnographic in the sense of Cusack announcing his presence vocally by way of narrative reflection or field descriptions. Instead, presence becomes a pattern of meaningmaking and marking. We travel and recode a spectral body and site through the apophenic process of audition. The scene is made from a monstrous comingling of myself and the Noisy-Nonself. “We” walk through an oilfield and street in London. Site, time, and bodily matters transfuse back and forth. Within the context of reporting climate emergencies, journalism has been assigned four modes of interrogation: monitorial, facilitative, radical, and collaborative.21 “Monitoring,” in which veracity and fairness motivate reporting, is the most relevant filter to reassess practice-based observation. This applies to the majority of Cusack’s project as he strives to educate from sites of anthropogenic entanglement. Yet, as we have explored, truth cannot be held entirely to account in field recording practice. An environmental recording is a vulnerable conduit of many truths. There is no fact-checking process. No ethical consent forms. Authors are, by and large, phantoms. There is no app for translating multispecies languages. The recording itself may have been constructed in postproduction with the help of a Foley artist who clinked chains and layered textures from an air ventilation unit. Thankfully, within the gaps of certainty, practice-based possibilities lurk. Like most multisensory endeavors, field recording collapses disciplinary schemas. Cusack’s sonic journalism, specifically his oilfield soundwalk, invites us to reimagine the faithful potentials of observation and reportage through the embodied participation of its “missing” author, who constructs multiple points of view without relying on conventional spoken word. Instead, Cusack’s observation is critical, felt, and participatory. The field is a sensate entanglement of lives, of humans, nonhumans, and the technologies of industrial capitalism. It is impossible to reduce the work to one subject alone. Would it be the nodding donkeys? The landscape? Its corvid actors we hear at audible level? The workers? The local communities? Cusack himself? Anything and everything can be deemed subject due to sound’s vast reach.

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Whether “journalism” is the right holder to place a sonic project under is debatable. Things have certainly changed since Cusack made these recordings in 2004. We have moved into a post-truth era in which objective, fact-based research has boomeranged back into the spotlight as a counterweight to autoethnographic individualism and the potential of deepfake everything.22 Within this shifting terrain, would “sonic documentary” be a more flexible term that could attend to the slippery demands of media and art? Might it provide precedents with which to orientate this discussion? Writing in 1926, scholar John Grierson famously claimed that documentary is the “creative treatment of actuality.”23 This is certainly the case for field recording practice. Scientific truth is not a tenable aim. A “science of feelings” or the “truths of editing” are useful counter notions to bear in mind for soundbased projects that harbor an eco-reportage sensibility. In balancing the need for information and affect, anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor has called for a reinvention of the observational mode within ethnographic approaches to filmmaking. Castaing-Taylor, director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, seeks a constant and unrelenting gaze as a way in which to reimagine nonfiction documentaries. In this open-ended framing, subjects, both human and nonhuman, are given time and space to perform agency. Like Cusack and Minh-ha, Castaing-Taylor wants to steer away from the conventional narrator, which in the case of film exists as a classic talking head who reduces experience to neat sound bites. Critical observation emerges as part of the stories and identities of the event experience rather than the subject–object loop. Sound artist Emeka Ogboh’s Lagos project is useful to audition in light of this observational mode. Ogboh’s durational field recordings of Lagos, Nigeria, a territory long spoken for on behalf of its various colonizers, is given the time and space in which a multiplicity of perspectives and narratives commingle.24 Considering the Western centrism of field recording, the seething white noise of its evasive authors, and its conservation–composition complex, the discipline must work hard to discover new ways of observing itself as much as its so-called subjects. One practical option would be to incorporate the bookends of capture into recorded artifacts. If Cusack included the setting and positioning of a microphone, for example, before the long take that he/we reside within, we might pin a sense of critical intention to the recording process. But field recording can do better than this. Observation can be reimagined through a method such as Cusack’s walk, an entangled participatory form of witnessing, embodied and situated while allowing time and space for the emergence of an



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environment and its actors. Architectural historian Jane Rendell reminds us that walking “provides a way of understanding sites in flux in a manner that questions the logic of measuring, surveying and drawing a location from a series of fixed and static viewpoints. When we walk we encounter sites in motion and in relation to one another, suggesting that things seem different depending on whether we are ‘coming to’ or ‘going from’.”25 Truth is no closer in Cusack’s oilfield walk, but a critical observation develops in which the authorship and mediation of human and nonhuman relations are amplified. Although routed through the embodied ears of Cusack, perspectives shift rather than dwell from one point alone. Cusack is the nodding donkey and the nodding donkey is Cusack. Discursive stakes are raised concerning a field recordist’s embroilment with a sound event rather than its object status. Ambulatory sonic journalism promotes explorative responsibility; it galvanizes communicative stewardship. Combining a documentarian appreciation of practice frees the veracity demands of traditional journalism and accommodates the multiple truths and agencies that construct the field. Both contexts help forge a new type of observation within the sonic context of eco-sensitive sites, where informatic knowledge is necessary yet also understood as partial and contingent. Critically reframing observation is not, therefore, in disavowal of the frictions that field the field. It meets them head-on in an attempt to rewire knowledge. The demand of such work is distributed and falls across the author-recordist and elsewhere listener. As I walk through a street or sit in an armchair, I too have the task of coding and recoding. One of the key relations for a critical observational mode in the field is, therefore, that of audition once out. I reobserve and become a participant within the construction and representation of fieldwork. The curation and pedagogy of field recordings must account for sound’s longitudinal strains. Hence, “slow listening” might be the logical conclusion to such matters: a sonic sibling to the cinematic genre that promotes durational events as they unfold over time.26 The oilfield may well be the location of Cusack’s project, but the field does not start and end there. Oil is porous and plural. As a geopolitical site and material, it is here and there. The networked nature of anthropogenic impact means any site-specific project must attend to its parallel chains of causality. The oil pipeline is perhaps the best way to route such thinking. It is an infrastructural guide that stretches practice and knowledge along its sprawling journey, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) being a useful example to consider here. It is

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nearly 2,000 kilometers long, from from the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota down into Texas, North America. The DAPL crosses territories in camouflage, underground, and out of sight, carrying up to five hundred thousand barrels of crude oil every single day. Part of its journey moves through Standing Rock Indian Reservation, a sacred site that is part of the Great Sioux Nation. In 2016, opposition to the DAPL grew as communities and ancestral lands that house graves and burial artifacts were put at risk. The pipeline became associated with the Zuzeca Sape or “black snake,” an indigenous figure that signals the end of worlds. “Water protectors” claimed the pipeline, embedded under the Missouri River, would jeopardize local drinking water. Over many months protests were met with military response.27 Chacon’s field recordings of these events shift sonic journalism into more direct activist practice.28 Whereas Cusack listened-with the nodding donkeys of oil extraction, Chacon documents the political conflict of oil’s myriad consequences. The situated ambiguity of sound is less acute in “protest scenes” as we locate hearing within the acoustic referent of political resistance: the sound of sirens and protest songs. Mikel R. Nieto’s project Dark Sound (2016) is perhaps the most potent way to pivot before moving on. A work of sonic journalism, the book and CD house field recordings with extensive textual and photographic media including reports, testimonies, song lyrics, and a glossary. Whereas Cusack’s publication employed images and text as clarifying solutions onto sound, Nieto obscures meaning even at its semantic level by printing silver text on black pages. One can barely read or see the content unless, as suggested, under direct sunlight. Listening and reading become entropic acts of serious play. The gesture is poetic and political, highlighting the sun’s role in the material production of oil and the destruction that endures within and upon Amazonian Ecuador and the Huaorani people. Although located within a situated geography, the work is notable in its kaleidoscopic approach as it blends causal sites, entangled actors, disciplines, human, and nonhuman perspectives. Nieto’s role as a Spanish artist reverberates the colonial context between Spain and South America. Sonically, the work focuses on cultures of noise, from an indigenous linguistic perspective in terms of the words used to describe sound and nature, and as a material that signifies the destruction of the natural world while promoting the myth of progress. The work places thirty-four separate recordings into one long durational listening experience that clocks in at just over the hour mark. Slow listening is encouraged as a form of critical observation. Many aesthetic conundrums rear their head again as sounds I experience as engrossing become problematic in light of



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the context. I enjoy what I am listening-with until I read that it is the sound of deforestation taking place. Made with location-specific recordings, we hear Nieto’s presence more in another site, the space of the studio. Ground truth knowledge is thrown into jeopardy yet again as the edit suite becomes the field. Employing hard cuts and audibly distinctive montage techniques, the attentive listener hears acoustic differences while being tacitly aware that someone, somewhere, has constructed the journey. We must remember the Noisy-Nonself lingers in the studio, a field equivalent to the field. It is a space in which the decision-making process, to lesser and greater degrees, becomes apparent, amplifying issues of authorship among the constructions of place. Nieto’s work presents a diverse range of sounds of not only objects and events but also acoustic phenomena: the frequencies that exist above and below the audible range of human hearing (20–20,000 Hz). Infraand ultrasounds convey the seismic throb of machinery and the communicative clicks of bats as they echolocate. Field recording’s emphasis on “being there” and the sonic knowledge accrued from embodied intimacy is loosened as a consequence. Critical observation enters a space of radical alterity even when physical provenance is verifiable.

Above and Below Finally, after some time I managed to secure the microphone onto a large Oak. Wedged under a series of branches protruding from the lower base of its trunk, and with the aid of a small amount of putty, contact was established. I heard deep groans like the hull of a boat rocking at sea. Wind activated its surface and steered wooden fingers into my ears. They scratched and tickled my imagination between what I was seeing and hearing. With each creak the Oak spoke. I listened-with and without its timbral testimony. How long had this tree been there, making these sounds? What had it witnessed? How could I navigate the anthropomorphic lure of its poetic affects? What type of listening and recording practice was this?29 Such transduction, audition, and questioning are activated by a particular device that will be a familiar tool for most field recordists: the contact microphone. As sound passes through air, water, and objects with varying degrees of efficiency, it is the latter where contact microphones are employed. Made from a thin piezo disc approximately 2–3 centimeters in diameter, the

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mechanism is less sensitive to vibrations in the air than those moving through materials and surfaces. Attaching the disc onto structures is a craft in itself, with complex options in terms of clips, grips, tapes, and natural affixes. Placement and recording require the constant negotiation of signal and noise. Applying too much pressure onto the microphone causes interference and distortion. Too little and sonic intimacy is lost. When attached with just the right amount of tension, otherwise inaccessible events rush down cables, filling headphones and hard drives. Micro-acoustic sounds are transformed into large-scale effects. The delicate tracing of a branch becomes a giant finger tapping inside my skull. The groan of a tree resonates the hollows of my skeletal frame. Liveliness is perceived in the performativity of nonhumans and the infra-ordinary of everyday life. The process of capturing such recordings is similar to the medical practice of auscultation, where clinicians listen to patients’ lungs with the aid of a stethoscope. Indeed, the contact microphone functions almost identically to its medical kin as internal sounds become amplified in stark contrast to anything the ear alone could hear. However, differing contexts bring distinct disciplinary intentions, between experimental and predetermined modes of listening. In the context of field recording, the contact microphone moves across a surface or structure until its settles on the desired signal. Like a metal detector scavenging for lost relics, the artful listener perceives knowledge through the murky thresholds of its aesthetic offerings. Here, signals are vulnerable with the continual loss of transmission-meaning always at stake. Across medical or military contexts, listening is more prescribed. Auscultation experts know they are searching for the acoustic signatures of lung sounds. Analysis is derived from comparable sonic referents that enable a vocabulary of listening to emerge.30 Acoustic and electrical modes of contact ebb and flow over histories of military transduction. For example, the geophone preempted electrical contact and mimicked the stethoscope’s form and focus for discerning sounds through purely acoustic means. During the First World War, soldiers used the device to notice enemy movement, from the delicate displacements of soil to the footsteps that resonated trench infrastructure.31 Applying the stethoscope procedure onto the ground echoed medical practice. Both modes of auscultation crossed cultures of listening as expert ears diagnosed their respective threats. Electrical contact emerged during the Second World War by way of an instrument known as the “throat microphone.” The piezo disc we associate with contact microphones today was attached to fighter pilots’ throats to ensure communication was as clear as possible among a volatile mix of engine noise and atmospheric



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conditions. Framed within a network of applications and listening cultures, the technological apparatus that permits intimate “contact” is coded by its specific epistemologies and practices. Hence, the poetic rush of sound I hear within the internal transduction of a tree is offset when I return to my central question: what am I not hearing? Within the lure of romantic projection is the low frequency reminder that such microphones arrive from life and death contexts where the consequences of listening can be lethal. The contact microphone is part of a technological family tree that extends listening beyond the human range. Underwater hydrophones, electromagnetic receivers, accelerometers, geophones, very-low-frequency (VLF) recorders, ultrasonic detectors, and more. These technologies emerge across DIY cultures, where recordists build their own, and in the high-end realms of industrial engineering, structural analysis, and seismic monitoring. With the help of technology, field recordists can listen to worlds that are inaccessible or out of audible range. The field becomes anything and everything, from architecture to sea life, electricity to interspecies communication, geologic shifts to celestial atmospherics. Whatever the application, these microphones remain webbed to medical– military cultures of resolution and surveillance. Listening, then, is ghosted by a myriad of spectral aims to detect and destroy, protect and evade, eavesdrop and baffle. When field recordists enthusiastically wave detectors into the night skies to “hear” the ultrasonic clicks of bats (12–160 kHz), they also tremble the low-frequency technocultures of listening. Sonar and radar, developed during the Second World War, are connected to the mediation of bats and other forms of acoustic life such as the low flight tone of mosquitoes (300–400 Hz) and the high whistles of dolphins (120 kHz). Hydrophones and postproduction allow humans to hear long-range vocalizations of beluga whales (1–120 kHz). Water is the most efficient conduit of sound that far exceeds air or materials in terms of speed. Unfortunately, this means marine mammals are equally exposed to the elongated effects of ocean noise generated from boat engines or the oilprospecting blasts of seismic airguns. The irony is that technologies such as sonar were developed through biomimicry, which imitated the natural world. Today, nonhuman technicity feeds back onto itself as humans erase the animal inspirations that enabled such tools. Hydrophones play a critical role within the oceanic battlefield. During Cold War paranoia, the United States Navy developed a vast underwater Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) to track Soviet submarines. “Project

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Caesar” was the classified name given to an operation that detected enemies over long distances by listening through a specific depth of water known as the “deep sound channel.”32 SOSUS eavesdropped under the guise of studying marine biology when in fact it was listening for something entirely different. Following the Cold War, a global network of over one thousand hydrophones bobbed redundantly to their original aims of audition. However, scientists have since reclaimed the recordings as a vital archive in which marine migration, communication, community, and related habitat health can be studied. The Navy’s noise, what they were not hearing, turns out to be a high-fidelity bounty for ocean ecologists.33 The point, then, is twofold. Close contact transductions are never neutral or as intimate as they might first seem. Recordings drag with them parallel frequencies and historical contexts, the epistemes of technological listening. Any microphone captures plurality. In the case of a single hydrophone recording, we may learn about a submarine’s location, the migration pattern of whales, the possibility of earthquakes, the communicative worlds of dolphins, illegal fishing, and ocean acidification. Knowledge percolates through a multiplicity of signals and meanings, both heard and unheard, depending on the situated context of listening. The reclamation of SOSUS recordings by those monitoring the health of our oceans is the key flip to remember in this critical recoding. It seems short-sighted to pigeonhole all institutional surveillance and technology as a one-way channel of power. Repurposing infrastructures, apparatus, and recordings from such contexts might help fold the epistemes of practice back onto itself and produce new meaning as a consequence. The point is not to hang up the microphone but to engage it with critical and creative complicity. Contemporary field recordists are challenging the audible limits of the human by employing nonconventional apparatus. Technology mediates listeningwith infra- and ultrasonic worlds. Whether auscultating a tree, eavesdropping on insects, or scanning the electromagnetic whistles of earth’s atmosphere, the aesthetic effect is similar. Formally, such recordings are typified by the sound of crackles, pops, and drones. They articulate an overwhelming sense of texture and abstraction that trace the edges of acousmatic listening, devoid of heard context. The sonorous lures of sonic journalism are acutely felt when recording and representing worlds beyond the human. Such terrain is rich for the imagination, and artists must navigate sonic affect versus their informatic intention. This dilemma is at the same time a promise and threat. We cannot



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apprehend the plurality of contexts and cultures in the infra- and ultra-signal, but we must continue to ask: what am I not hearing? It is a researching prompt for critical practice that makes itself accountable to the thresholds of auditory experience. How can we comprehend the clicks of a bat or the pulse of a distant star? Perhaps the point is to misunderstand, to accept the fallibility of humancentered knowledge and commit to the serious play of becoming. We must consider whether such knowledge can, or should, be ours to know. This line of inquiry is vital to the critical field recordist’s checklist; it provides a compass for accountability and ethical decision making.34 Taking a deep auditory dive into embargoed worlds might be a productive ontological leap that complicates the site-specific tethers of sonic knowledge. “Being there” is troubled, as it turns out that “there” is just a human-sized slice of sonic experience. The field is not only geographically and temporally connected to an elsewhere, as in the previous example of oil. It is also acoustically multiple, a polyphony of performative acts of communication and evasion, of sounding and witnessing. The Anthropos and its claimed master knowledge is unsettled within this shifting terrain as the realization that we are not the only participant of a sounding world reconfigures practice. The predicament, as Tsing makes clear, is how “can we live inside this regime of the human and still exceed it?”35 Field recordings offer a glimpse into somewhere else, but how do we comprehend and situate such maneuvers? What conceptual frameworks might help us hold onto the low frequency cultures of listening while exploring vibrant acoustic life above and below the human?

With and Apart In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett explores the vital materiality of storms, waste, stem cells, and commodities. Building on the coattails of continental philosophy, Bennett aims to “articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due.”36 Bennett’s work is part of a recent philosophical land-grabbing exercise in the humanities brought about by the intellectual tremors of the Anthropocene. Speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), neovitalism, and posthumanism are strands of research that claw at nonhuman territory in similar yet nuanced ways.37 Such efforts are relatable through their combined recognition

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that nature–culture binaries have dissolved; hence, new responsibilities, practices, and knowledge come to the fore. “Entanglement” is the keyword for this scholarly research that seeks to set humans into varying degrees of interconnection with nonhuman beings and materials. The rush of interest in such matters is ironic since, as Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear points out, indigenous criticism has long advocated a nondualist approach to nature and culture.38 A turn toward the political agency of things can, at best, destabilize the master role of the human while shining a light on hidden ideologies and infrastructures of power. The term “political ecology” is important to note here for Bennett’s project. Exploring the agency of nonhumans should remain webbed to chains of human causality. Extending ethical imperatives means nonhumans must, as ecofeminist Val Plumwood stated, be treated in “agentic terms.”39 It also suggests being open to matter, and matters that are not necessarily enchanting or visible. Hence, the obligation to notice what feminist scholar Stacy Alaimo calls “deviant agents,”40 the chemicals and toxins that flow through bodies, infrastructures, and environments. The vital challenge for new materialism is that it accounts “for the material reality of our everyday social existence without losing sight of the discursive dimension of that reality.”41 The danger of this scholarship is that the human gets erased rather than entangled, as is the case in OOO where dreams of a reticent Anthropos are set among the impossibility of a flat ontology.42 Although a similar threat stalks new materialism, it just about manages to steer clear of misanthropic moves: “New materialist discourse derives its urgency from the ethical, ecological and political imperatives that loom as a consequence of this [anthropocentric] view of the world.”43 Whether Bennett’s project or any of these philosophical interventions are successful is not my concern here. Nor is it a survey of such literature. The irony of these propositions is that all of them explain such matters through language and semantics. What interests me is how new materialist discourse, located specifically under the banner of the critical post-humanities,44 might aid the comprehension and ethico-aesthetic demands of recording, representing, and auditioning vibrant lifeworlds, simultaneously with and apart from the human. Such philosophy is useful flint for listening-with low frequencies. It provides impetus for tracing cartographies, experiences, and nonhuman relations that often occlude inspection: the elsewhere fields that field the field.



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Shrimps and Stars A submerged drone morphs into something mechanical in the air. Industrial squeaks and moans slip away. A series of clicks, pops, and squelching sounds camouflage the original noise and guides my descent. The soundscape bubbles its components into stark isolation. Disentangled from the original drone I hear a dense thicket of movement and activity, a liveliness of relations. Taps and knocks connect to my throat. Listening is bitten and torn. My reference point is the voices of frogs, but I have no certainty here, only doubt and speculation. Under the premise of slow listening, I linger in sound’s demand. Noise, like the surface of an analog carrier, turns to fire. Industrial drones return in rhythmic monotony. In response, an effervescent alien community emerges and disappears. This pattern repeats over twenty minutes. I am listening-with Side A of Jana Winderen’s publication The Noisiest Guys on the Planet (2010). Winderen enlists technologies such as hydrophones and bat detectors to record acoustic phenomena outside the human range, be it spatial as in water or ultrasonic as in echolocation. The title of the recording refers to the pistol shrimp, a member of the Decapod family of crustaceans that includes crabs and crayfish. Pistol shrimps are celebrated for producing one of the loudest sounds on the planet relative to size. Made by snapping its oversized claw, the result is an incredible 210 dB expulsion of bubbles that stuns prey or kills them outright. This ten-legged critter is alluded to in the recording, but in the liner notes Winderen makes clear such animals are commonly found in waters around Thailand; her recordings were made in Norway. The irony is that Winderen, and the wonderfully titled “worldwide shrimp network,” a community of scientists and enthusiasts she enlists the help of, can only estimate what the recorded sounds might be. Communities of knowledge will always include gaps and perforations, the things lost as well as found. Sonic meaning submerges and reveals itself like the process of coming up for air: listening is only ever granted temporary access. With this in mind, what does the recording teach us? Three types of learning surface. The first is relational. Industrial noise, what I know in retrospect to be a boat engine, impacts upon a multitude of crustaceans. I hear their ongoing disappearance and reappearance with each pass of the motor. The incessant chatter of decapods is audibly greater when the vessel is out of earshot. Is this because they physically emerge in the wake of noise? Perhaps they are always present, just masked and revealed by the to and

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fro of anthropogenic movement? It is a dilemma that begs a reassessment of the title of who The Noisiest Guys on the Planet are. Relations are extended in this line of listening-with, from ocean to studio. Has Winderen composed the movement of engine noise into the clattering sounds of crustaceans? Is it a “real” event or postproduction assemblage? The correlation appears crafted to my ears. Winderen is as much in water as she is in the digital workstation. The ocean is an edit drenched in the wetware of her decision making. Through transitions and cuts, fades, and filters, Winderen, the Noisy-Nonself, builds the field. A key editorial space to notice here is the bookends of recording. The beginnings and ends that, when approached rigorously, can offer more than conventional forms of recorded observation. Winderen begins with the boat. Perhaps she is on board, it is difficult to tell and not really the point. What is, is that hearing this moment, I, like Winderen, cross a threshold. Practical and conceptual coordinates of the field become amplified. The impossibility of outright aquatic immersion is acknowledged. Crossing audible borders, therefore, disrupts the myth of “being there” that site-based listening promotes. I/she/they are neither physically nor acoustically listening as one singular axis in an environment. Rather, “we” swim inside and outside, practically with finite oxygen, conceptually with finite knowledge. Second and third layers of learning involve media and the low frequency practice of listening-with. The noise of crustaceans is associated with the sound of tape hiss, an analog carrier where medium-specific “silence” is part of the informatic signal. As Susan Schuppli writes, noise, like all audio “performs a kind of double take that constitutes it as both more than and other to the original event of sonification.”45 What might seem merely associative noise in Winderen’s case is much more operative when we remember that water is part of the earth’s recording toolkit. Its temperature is perhaps the clearest evidence that documents and transmits climatic histories and futures to come. Oceanic creatures are bound into this mediatic context as well. The earwax of whales, for example, like the rings of a tree, are time-stamping global events.46 Water and its assemblage of actors not only record but are media in the agential sense of mediation. Water transduces and transmits its signals for us to decipher and decode, in literal and approximate ways. Finally, a third strata of meaning can be released from Winderen’s recording that impacts scholarly research and the critical audition of field recordings. The holes that puncture sonic knowledge are filled by speculative and critical listening that takes place elsewhere in archives, textbooks, conversations, classrooms,



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news feeds, and the imagination. This is not work undertaken out of lack or as a confirmatory procedure that reduces sonic vitality to contextual factoids. It is a researching toward the network of geopolitical actors and relations that new materialism reminds us is at stake. In fact, studying shrimps elsewhere only destabilizes the human and its presumed gatekeeping mastery. The sound of an oversized claw stuns ontological hierarchies as we comprehend sonic warfare is not confined to the Anthropos alone. Hydrophonic military crosstalk is enhanced when I discover the US Navy sought out large communities of crustaceans as sonic camouflage between 1944 and 1945. Submarines would actively situate themselves in beds of snapping shrimp to avoid radar detection. Weaponry, baffle, camouflage, and decoy are exclusive to neither visual culture nor the human alone.47 The challenges are acute for the critical field recordist wishing to go beyond acoustic worlds as we humans know them. Infra- and ultrasound reveal a plethora of actors participating across sensory thresholds. Recordists are embroiled in an ecology of multispecies observations, yet experience is foreclosed along the way. Technology opens the gate, but this is not followed by a rush of knowing. It does the opposite. As microphones allow listening to parasite the extra-acoustic worlds of nonhumans, the signal-meaning is no closer once retrieved. Instead, navigating the shifting subjectivities of infra- and ultrasound productively throws the sonic subject into disarray. The point is not to project human attributes onto the snaps of shrimps or the clicks of bats but to let the dizzying effect of so-called contact kick us in and out of land, sea, and sky. Our VIP all-access technology means nothing when we eventually get backstage, but in the soup of such dissonance, there is much to claim as valid knowledge. “Loss” is perhaps the most potent word to revitalize here. Recorded representations might be approximations, but there is still information to glean. I will never know what a mosquito thinks, feels, or even sounds, and that is a productive form of difference, based on loss. Agency becomes understood through the loss-based acceptance that things do not necessarily need to speak in human language for them to exhibit their vital capacities and affects. Perhaps we are better left to linger in the specified sites of unknowing, the lacunas of listening-without that which we cannot hear or rationalize. Spectral (2003), a publication by Joyce Hinterding, takes such thinking to its logical conclusion, suggesting we can estrange audition further if we stretch it skyward. Hinterding’s sonic material is natural magnetic fields. Charged particles traveling on solar winds emanating from the sun are deflected and

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accepted, by and through, the magnetic sliver that protects life on earth. This energetic coming together creates geomagnetic storms like the aurora borealis. Out-of-range phenomena can be unlocked with the help of technologies such as VLF recorders as well as custom-built antennae. Listening-with Spectral, I hear pops and clicks. The low hum of electricity builds and gives way to purring. Static fizz soothes and cares. I am listeningwith noise but not of the unpleasant variety. Frequencies shift. I am electrified. It is difficult to set coordinates for what space I am in. No literal sense of place is conjured, at least not one that I am familiar with. Just alien transmissions of worlds too distant to comprehend. For sixty minutes I become a radio dial. Tuning in and out, I scroll for signals, sometimes strong, sometimes faint, received over a series of pulses, echoes, and rhythms. Ghost voices vanish as quickly as they emerge. Ocean waves made of static swell and spray. Beeps and blips flash past my listening, burning bright before fading away. The distance between a shrimp and a star may not be as great as it first appears. Their sonorous effect is undoubtedly coupled. Hinterding’s work sounds uncannily like the vibrant clicks of crustaceans we hear in Winderen’s recording. Even the low hum of electricity that interferes in Hinterding’s scene is comparable to the engine noise in Winderen’s. Is this also a deliberate edit on Hinterding’s part, made somewhere between the site and studio?48 If water provides a natural medium for Winderen’s piece, the earth’s upper atmosphere is Hinterding’s conduit of transmission. Solar storms collide in ways that need no extra estrangement on behalf of the human. Representation is thrown out the window when we remember that nature, like sound, is a performative agent that can leave us lost for words. Hinterding’s track is based on site-specific field recordings made from Bruny Island, Tasmania. Yet any notion of singular place is obliterated by the very process and representation of its capture. Recording always encompasses the loss and discovery of places. Hinterding’s work not only drags the magnetic field into the signal but also resounds picture transmissions from American NOAA and Russian meteor weather satellites. NOAA stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is an imperative connected to sea and air that mirrors Winderen’s and Hinterding’s related endeavors. Planetary data and technological apparatus parasite one another as Cold War legacies occupy the low frequencies of listening. Nature’s energetic abundance and the sound of anthropogenic planetary surveillance amplifies the vibrant and vibrating worlds of the human and



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nonhuman. Territories that appear well beyond reach do remain in touch, even over great distances and spans of time. However, the VLF, hydrophone, or contact microphone cannot be forced into a semantic safety jacket. The knowledge these technologies produce is never either-or as signals flood across contexts and actors. Such multi-scalar oscillations might be to the benefit of a sound-based investigation. Free from the anchors of the textual and linguistic, field recordings offer a different mode of translation. Auditioning the celestial crackles of earth’s upper atmosphere, over the duration of one hour, I become the field recordist; I observe and participate in the elastic nature of the field, at once inside and outside. Philosopher Rosi Braidotti claims the critical post-human subject acknowledges “transversal micro-political connections while aiming at affirmative ethics.”49 Braidotti focuses on methods and aesthetics for affirmation. Bennett locates accountability in the mesh of matters she is so invested in: “Perhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating.”50 This has certainly been a claim I have wanted to emphasize within the recorded encounters of humans and nonhumans. However, as the very notion of a sitespecific field dissolves along with its sonic subjects and knowledge claims, I want to stress that responsibility also falls elsewhere. I, sitting at a table, drinking a cup of coffee, staring into the middle distance, also have a duty of care. As artists are answerable for recording and representing the field, I, the elsewhere listener, must be accountable to the distributed meaning-making of its participation. This is not to say we all occupy the same scene of listening or are entangled in equal ways. We, the listeners, must struggle to hear ourselves among vibrant worlds in becoming more familiar and estranged to the vast scope of geological time and the incomprehensible scales of climate change. Listening-with and without is not therefore a comfortable feeling. The process collapses binaries of the near and far and foregrounds questions of power, accountability, and care.

Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields The final phase of this chapter establishes a conceptual model to understand the mutability of the field. Throughout the preceding writing, the field has been reiterated along with its makers, methods, and modes of representation. Anthropogenic sites and sounds are connected to a supply chain of cause and

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effect, histories and futures, humans and nonhumans. Recording and listening become stretched within the demand of following the flow: acoustically, geographically, critically, and imaginatively, in practice and pedagogy. Authorship and knowledge, claimed as situated and specific, are at the same time plausible and improbable. The realization that we humans are as much within sound, as we are outside, disrupts perspectives and the veracity of the field. Infra- and ultrasound radically challenge field recording’s claim as an individual mastercraft. Recordings themselves dredge media archaeological time and technicity into the low frequencies of signal, practices, and cultures that remind us that gripping a microphone can never be a neutral act. Listening is therefore distributed across a multitude of fields, from the recorded encounter, to the edit suite, to the auditioning participant-observer who has the responsibility of recoding from an armchair, classroom, or archive. There is always an elsewhere. The field is constantly crossed, lost, and found as a plural event rather than a fixed identity. The following framework attempts to accommodate such porous relations. I do so by introducing the notion of “contact zones and elsewhere fields” along with interweaved analysis from Andrea Polli’s work Sonic Antarctica (2009). Field recording needs a nuanced appreciation of the field, one formed upon a sonic sensitivity along with an incorporation of the discipline’s unique historical, methodological, and aesthetic requirements. Ethnographic fieldwork precedents provide a jumping-off point for this discussion. Reflecting on where the field begins and ends, anthropologist James Clifford outlines the spatial ambiguity of the ethnographic field after watching a television report on the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994.51 In his example, the earth scientist commenting on the event claimed that he had been in the field while observing the disruption brought about by the incident. In fact, the scientist was sitting in a helicopter when surveying the area and was no more in the field than he was above it. Although implied, the field, which is the primary site of investigation, does not necessarily require a physical connection to land or have a defined center point. Clifford asserts the conventional ethnographic field is generally one of open space, considered outside domestic borders or the traditional laboratory, but that it also retains a sense of inside and out. We have come to understand the field in a comparable yet different way during the pages of this book, due to its constructed histories and the nuances of sonic capture. Rather than being a singular point of outdoor provenance, the field of field recording distributes geo-locatable experience across species,



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senses, media, space, and time. It is a multi-scalar event that stretches the extremities of audible range and any consequent knowledge claims. The studio is the field and the field is the studio. Both are inseparable yet require conceptual disentanglement to perceive their function and difference. Visiting notions of inside and out, scholar Irit Rogoff calls for a similar acknowledgment among broader considerations of fieldwork, affirming that the practitioner-researcher must occupy “a dual positionality of being spatially located in an inside and paradigmatically on the outside, or vice versa.”52 Rogoff insists this split allows new interpretations and translations of place. Due to the predetermined and acknowledged focus of a given artistic project, a practitioner can occupy “both inside and outside of the field of activity and its perception.”53 What first seems an untenable demand for artistic labor is a key thinking tool that holds possibilities for practice. It reminds artists to consider how they enter and leave the field as part of any process of recording. To activate this revelation requires the conceptual and imaginative reconfiguration of the field as “contact zones” and “elsewhere fields.” I should stress that this division is an awareness-raising exercise rather than a hard dichotomy. Both, as we shall see, remain part of one another yet are distinct enough to offer pragmatic application. Clifford is known for his use of the term “contact zone” within the museum context. Probing the curatorial end of object display, he negotiates tribal artifacts within Western museums as charged performative assemblages in which historic struggle reverberates power dynamics from the colonial context.54 Clifford borrows the term from postcolonial scholar Mary Louise Pratt’s book Imperial Eyes (1992). Pratt, who also coined the term “autoethnography,” hovers a critical lens over European travel writing from postcolonial Africa and South America, and locates a sense of contact within linguistic encounters and text-based ephemera. Contact “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other.”55 Moreover, contact zones are comprehended in terms of “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radical asymmetrical relations of power.”56 For Pratt, the page itself is considered a contact zone; for Clifford, the museum. For my purposes, the term is transposed onto the outdoor site and recorded encounters between humans and nonhumans. Recognizing asymmetries that allow contact between authors, microphones, and environments dispel the myth that capturing sound is an immersive, friction-free process. Instead, the physical site of recording—contact zone—becomes a charged space where practice

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tensions ascend. Framed as such, the field is a participatory arena where relational dynamics and agential concerns are negotiated and performed. Field recording transforms into an examination that is as much about practice as it is the sites and subjects of its choosing. The microphone, too, even when offering the promise of close contact, translates a fragile encounter between signal and noise: site-based listening and recording therefore unsettle the fidelity of knowledge. Interrogating the truth claims of “being there” sonic experience, through the lens of contact zones and elsewhere fields, enables field recording to reassess its subjects as agential forces rather than benign backdrops or compositional components. Contact is not a zone cordoned off in the literal sense of its meaning. It is a mutable and transgressive space with many appendages. Clifford states, “Fieldwork usually entails leaving home, going elsewhere.”57 This is true for field recording in the practical sense of journeying to and from the contact zone. We come to understand one type of “elsewhere field” by acknowledging the physical borders and thresholds crossed from one site to another. From a recordist point of view, these can be anything from driving to or exiting a designated contact zone-recording site. By noticing and incorporating these fields into the field, recordists admit they do not emerge unfettered from the center of the contact zone, nor do they leave by seamless dissolution. We heard the practical acknowledgment of similar spatial transgressions in the previous example by Winderen in which boat noise intersected the impossibility of an outright aquatic ear. Framed as such, a field recordist enters the contact zone, as a contestable copresence, an index of border crossings that like sound, always begins and ends elsewhere. There are numerous elsewhere fields that field the field: practically, spatially, audibly, conceptually. In addition to physical movements back and forth, there are geopolitical networks and flows that operate through fields; moments of process and technological mediation that often go unheard: the hard drive, edit suite, radio, or publication; there are histories and possible futures that persist through landscapes, the stratification of acoustic worlds and consequent displacements of knowledge, the mindscapes that mean thinking and feeling elsewhere as much as being there. Paradoxically, elsewhere fields are contact zones and contact zones are elsewhere fields; both are part of the same system, recognized at a gestural level as distinct territories. The contact zone is constructed from both within and outside itself, not as one singular place, but a semblance of thresholds among a plurality of movement. It is kaleidoscopic by nature, made up of immediate entanglements



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and elsewhere happenings. Establishing two interchangeable concept spaces provides flint for critical practice. Listening-with the co-constituent dynamics of contact zones and elsewhere fields summons the Noisy-Nonself: the subjective mediatic presence that invites recordists to play and provoke between the field’s contact dwelling and its elsewhere contingencies. The contact zone is, then, a twin place of encounter and production, an enlivened space that constitutes both gathering and dispersal. While in the contact zone, recordists reach a hybrid point of coercion as they are constantly torn between “here” and “there.” The field is transformed through the acknowledgment of its heterogeneity. This double bind is where complicity operates in practice; as anthropological scholar George E. Marcus reminds us, dual awareness “derives from having a sense of being here where major transformations are underway that are tied to things simultaneously happening elsewhere.”58 Contact zones and elsewhere fields, therefore, reterritorialize the field as a conceptually distinct yet relatable time–space of events and relations. The hope of such a proposition is that listening, across a plurality of actors, can strain toward the low frequencies of practice: matters of exchange as opposed to capture, negotiation rather than composition, thresholds instead of immersion.

Ice Checks and balances are read out loud from a numbered protocol. Instruments, weather conditions, doors, engines, lights, flight instruments. Clicks of communication; channels open and close. Radiophonic voices intersect chopping rhythmical noise. There are three people on board; destination, Taylor Valley. A fourth shadow listener is strapped in. I too am ready for take-off. Networks of transmission and reception. Infrastructures and observations. The hum grows. Call and response among a dense shuddering sound. “We did not leave a fuel pump at Round Mountain.” Trembling air. “The landing site should be right around here somewhere.” Water trickles. “There it is right in front of me.” Clicks and static. “The temperature right now is -31 Celsius, over.” We have landed in Taylor Valley, Antarctica. I am listening-with the opening track of Andrea Polli’s Sonic Antarctica (2009). The album blends field recordings, interviews, and data sonifications over ten

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tracks that total just below seventy minutes. Polli produced the work during a seven-week National Science Foundation residency in Antarctica across the 2007–8 season. Liner notes describe the field as “a frontier where borders and nationalities take a back seat to scientific collaboration and cooperation, a place where the compass becomes meaningless, yet, navigation is a matter of life and death. It is an extreme environment that holds some of the most unique species. But it is also an ecosystem undergoing rapid change.”59 Negotiating a helicopter journey into Taylor Valley demonstrates the physical relationship between contact zones and elsewhere fields. I, the elsewhere listener, board with Polli and her scientist collaborators. Spatial thresholds are crossed as we arrive by air. Like Clifford’s earlier example of a reporter being above, rather than in the field, we materialize from a “weather-world.”60 Our auditory movement is part of a supply chain of sites and processes, of decision making toward a place and its elsewhere formations. We are propelled into the field by the frictions of industrial and technical intervention: instruments, engine fuel, and production lines. This is not an immersive expedition or experience built on a monoculture of listening. It is a matrix of disciplinary practices that arrive from multiple movements to and from. Antarctica, the contact zone of Polli’s work, has never been a habitable space, never held indigenous communities. It functions as an atemporal laboratory operated upon by interlocking disciplines across time. As an artist, Polli’s project is concerned with the experience of weather. Her scientific collaborators focus on measuring the long-term effects of climate change. Both practices are produced through modes of embodied fieldwork; both rely on the lab or studio for experimentation and construction; both transmit idiosyncratic representations when communicating to the public; both must balance the informatic and affective codes in all data, quantified or felt. How is weather recorded and performed? What methods of translation are required when the sonic subject is data? What low frequencies are we not hearing within the contact zone of science and art? Haraway critiques the historically abstract and masculinized scientific gaze, knowledge built and claimed from an objectifying distance.61 Her call for an embodied feminist technoscience takes us closer to truths, plural, in order to “reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere.”62 In Sonic Antarctica, female voices, bodies, and perspectives from science entangle Polli’s artistic intervention. The contemporary field appears to accommodate the situated and embodied genders Haraway wished for in 1988,



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yet neither asymmetries, nor truth, are ever resolved as Haraway reminds us that “all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves towards truth.”63 Climate science, like field recording, mixes embodied observation with elsewhere assemblage, simulation, and modeling. The second track, “Taylor Glacier,” drops the listener into this milieu as we hear bleeps and swells of electronic “music” that is in fact the sonic translation of weather data itself. We will dive into the details of such matters soon, but before doing so, it is important to note Polli splices vocal excerpts from the scientific community into sonified data. It is a tactic that gravitates listening toward the ground as much as it does the sky, the human as much as the technological nonhuman. Among interpretive data soundings, a male voice comments that being in the field “provides you with a lot of clues and a lot of bits to think about. If you’re standing outside you feel the gustiness of the wind or you see the way clouds are moving across the sky. There are intangible things that are providing you clues to what may be going on.”64 The field is an enigma that requires embodied sensory participation. Yet, as we know, provenance is never absolute due to the laboratories and simulated sites elsewhere: knowledge is situated and partial. We hear bracing gusts of wind among the data and interviewed voices of Polli’s subjects. Microphone noise reminds us that weather, within the outdoor contact zone, is perhaps best understood through the verb “weathering.”65 Hearing the constant buffeting of technology shakes knowledge; it connects authors to recordings and agitates smooth depictions of meteorological events. Rather than suppress wind, which is the prototypical aim of a field recording, here the microphone is thrown into weather, tumbling its actors and mediators, orientating my listening to relations as opposed to objects. Bodies, affect, and noise must be considered forms of “sensational data” inseparable from the claimed rationality of statistical science.66 This is certainly the case throughout Sonic Antarctica. I am weathering winds that buffet bodies and microphones, bracing conflicts that tussle clothing and equipment. On “Castle Rock” we are most exposed. High prolonged shrieks differentiate strong fluctuating winds that harass the low registers of the signal. Sound is an inference, we notice it through its powers of animation. Set free into the wind I never dissolve in transcendental becoming but remain torn between contact frictions and elsewhere landings. Over email, Polli tells me this particular track captures a combination of “wind harmonics” between the frictions of ice, physical monitoring devices,

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and her recording equipment. The high shrieks I hear are the sound of air contacting land, scientific apparatus, and, of course, Polli, the recordist. Mechanical energies, human and nonhuman, operate at multiple scales as I realize I am listening-with data before it becomes data. As the track nears completion we are also reminded of the human sensor that monitors and moves through environments: Polli and her roaming corpus collaborators break through a pack of ice. It is a dramatic aural shift from the weathering effect which preceded it. An acoustic lacuna comes to the audible fore offering crystalline shelter and brief respite. Laughter and muffled voices tumble into a vast and shattered elsewhere. “Walking on Taylor Glacier” is perhaps the most potent track to locate a weathering sensibility within the overall publication. Polli’s boots crunch across the glacier. Breath expels into the invisible air of my imagination. The lack of reverberation tells me that Polli is in open space, for now at least. Trickling water or the droplets of ice become revealed as her movement stops and starts, Polli begins to play. Snapping ice, scraping surface snow, tearing at the audible environment that wallpapers my ears. The scene is ripped apart and the NoisyNonself, Polli, emerges from its tattered remains: new data is performed, presence inscribed into the auditory picture. Elsewhere fields are located in the stratified acoustic terrain itself. As we have seen throughout this chapter, sound, experience, and knowledge operate at radically different spectrums of audibility, across species and scales. From the seismic pulse of the earth to the communicative clicks of wildlife, infra- and ultrasound challenge human-centered listening. Acknowledging such elsewhere phenomena stretches audition and imagination toward sites unknown, and draws attention to nonhuman agency and the consequent ethico-aesthetic responsibilities for practice-based research. Data itself is the inaudible low frequency within Polli’s work, the elsewhere field that, more often than not, remains unheard within depictions of climate science. Graphs, statistics, complex modeling, and language flood the representational aesthetics of science communication and can lead to an even greater gap in terms of understanding and activism.67 Comprehending the scale and location of a glacier is difficult enough, let alone the chain of causality embedded in its demise. An abstract situation is enhanced by dry data or expert knowledge under lock and key. Data sonification attempts to remedy this situation by providing greater sensorial access. “Sonification is defined as the use of nonspeech audio to convey information. More specifically, sonification is the transformation of



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data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation.”68 Listening-with a recording of the sun from NASA’s audio archive, I do not hear the sun.69 Microphones have no practical use in the turbulent world of solar flares and eruptions. We rely on calculations of the sun’s inner workings, its oscillations and sound waves, which provide nonspeech data to sonify. This process enables helioseismologists to listen to calculations like actuality recordings, routed to a defined outdoor location, yet, as we have come to understand, one that is always interpretive and approximate. Listening-with the sun’s low frequencies, I hear a chain of events and interpretations in which someone (the Noisy-Nonself) has programmed software, selected sound sources, and prioritized transposable coordinates between data and the sound I am listening-with. Translating data into sound requires degrees of decision making between the source content and its final outcome. Raw data generated from scientific experiments can be transformed by artists who assign their own preferences in terms of sound samples, pitch, and tone. A game of show and tell can unfold in the process as scientific measures such as time or frequency are matched by sounds pitched, stretched, and transposed in sequence. Sound becomes an illustrative tool for science that can shift the sensory register for accessing complex information. It also retunes the inaudible elsewhere fields of scientific data into the audible range of human hearing, bringing new perspectives beyond the limits of our fleshy ears. However, as sonification scholars Stephen Barrass and Paul Vickers point out, the key dilemma is whether the sonified outcome does anything more than represent data itself. “Perhaps because of the novelty value in the early days of being able to make data go ‘ping’, many sonifications (including recent ones) have been created that are not particularly useful, usable, or meaningful.”70 The overarching trend in climate sonification is one of elegiac composition as a headline in Wired magazine suggests that “climate change data is being transformed into beautiful, haunting symphonies.”71 The conservation– composition complex stalks any process of sonification as it does the practice of field recording. Applying sound to data is highly subjective, with responsibility falling squarely on the artist and their affective and informatic intentions. The primary test lands on aesthetics and how sound, or more conventional forms of musical transposition, can be effectively arranged to convey climatesensitive subjects without rendering data, like nonhuman phenomena, into anthropomorphic objects of compositional merit.72

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Similar to criticisms leveled at Schafer’s soundscape project in Chapter 2, a study based on subjective notions of beauty and noise, sonification suffers from the same authorial trap that can lead to sublime trophies and romantic depictions of vanishing landscapes, filtered through the all-conquering ear of its human conductor. Hence, the aestheticized dangers fueled by the conservation– composition complex shadow sonic translations of data. Within the contact zone of science and art, the latter is always at risk of being instrumentalized. Polli aligns her sonifications with projects such as acoustic ecology rather than overtly musical contexts and interpretations. Field recordings themselves might have a useful niche to play here in bridging the gap between information and affect, data and music. When I interviewed Polli, she acknowledged the lures of composition and set out her practice-based methodology. “I don’t usually use instrumental sounds at all (except voice), and am much more interested in building new sounds using the data. For example, I’ll start out with white or pink noise and use the data to ‘carve’ the sound into a shape. The data is not only affecting the pattern of sounds but the actual sounds themselves.”73 During the penultimate track “I Don’t Have the Data,” we hear interview excerpts by climate scientists spliced with location field recordings and sonifications generated from weather data. As a male voice discusses the selective nature of science and its responsibility toward data, Polli, the NoisyNonself editor, sculpts white noise sonifications back and forth. It is an extramusical intervention that is neither romantic, dramatic, nor emotional. It affects as a combined sensation of forces designed to push and pull at the experience of listening. The sound does not illustrate data but rather fabricates the sensory assemblage of its production. This is sonification deployed as part of an ecology of mediation where voices, environments, and data relate rather than abstract one another. Listening-with Polli’s sonifications I hear the texture of snow in the white noise she carves and sculpts. Drawing on Chapter 2’s discussions of Foley art, data sonification functions in a similar manner: it is a deliberate strategy that connects to a relevant sound source while acknowledging its artifactual nature. Polli’s work in the edit suite, much like her physical ambulation on Taylor glacier, therefore creates sensory fictions, relations, and new interpretations within the scene of my elsewhere listening. Data becomes sensate but not for the sake of emotion or music alone. It is deployed in order to disentangle the cross-hatching of disciplines, senses, and media that make up the contact zones and elsewhere fields of recording and listening.



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Polli’s work updates Cusack’s proposition of sonic journalism, one that seeks to free itself from the human voice as much as possible. Unlike Cusack’s nonverbal rule, Polli incorporates snippets of human voice as fragments of conversation. This technique holds onto the sensitive task of communicating extreme sites and scales of climate change without falling into outright human commentary. Instead, the human is deployed as part of a mosaic of sensory knowledge rather than at the top or bottom of the data chain. The issue of voice prompts us toward the final elsewhere field that fields the field. Whether it is found in location recordings, human conversation, the sonification of data, or the sensational bodies of artists and researchers themselves, ice must also be considered within discussions of what constitutes the voice of Sonic Antarctica. Glaciers, like rocks, are not the solid immobile things they first appear to be. They slide, shift, encroach, and withdraw. Ice flows outside the scales and rhythms of human time: creaking, cracking, and thundering in slow motion. Field recordists may claim to capture the voice of ice by simply recording such movements and processes. All field recordings, processed or not, are sonifications that interpret non-speech sounds. On one level this statement is acceptable, but it does little to connect the networks or practices entangled within the demands of representing sites under stress. Anthropogenic impact is now an inevitable part of the mutable icescape. Black carbon, the combustion process from fossil fuel emissions, flows in winds and seeps into sea ice, affecting the ability of ice to reflect the sun’s rays: glaciers melt, earth warms. To borrow Schuppli’s term, cited in Chapter 2, ice is a “material witness.” Glaciers are natural media that record time and events along with the cultures and practices needed to interpret such reticent evidence. When glaciers defrost they expose stories: they speak back. The preserved remains of skin, pollen, and clothing give testimony to elsewhere events and times, processes and practices that would remain otherwise unknown. Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank furthers the agential considerations of ice by asking whether glaciers listen. Like Schuppli, Cruikshank examines the longitudinal impact of ice and insists on the consequent collisions of local and colonial knowledge that come together as a result of its evidential relations.74 Both Schuppli and Cruikshank study ice within Alaska, British Columbia, a place where human dwelling and homemaking persist. Antarctica, the site of Polli’s study, differs in that no native culture has ever existed in this extreme climatic territory. Contact is evidenced through the multinational entanglement

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of science and arts, disciplines that operate ice under the guidance of the “Antarctic Treaty” signed by twelve countries in 1959 to ensure only scientific and peaceful activities are conducted. Within this uninhabitable environment ice itself might well be deemed the indigenous voice of the contact zone. We do well to remember that it is an ice core sample from Antarctica that the 1610 Orbis Spike registers evidence of a new epoch called the Anthropocene. The voice of indigeneity, so often erased and excluded, speaks through ice as a low frequency actor locked within the permafrost of time. Ice exceeds human scales; its meaning is made by science and artistic interventions that interpret and construct. Sonified data, sound’s specific mode of translation, functions like Foley field recording. It is a strategy that forms part of an ecology of mediation that can only ever approximate or narrate on behalf of a glacier or environment. The human author is meshed to this task of post-quantitative becoming. The technological elsewhere of the edit suite allows such moves to sensationalize data, to add affective folds into the process of giving voice. However, this sensate shift does not have to take place in isolated postproduction. It can be applied in the contact zone by the performative presence of field recordists. Polli’s interactions with glaciers, therefore, rewrite stories of scientific conquest and challenge the foundations of what constitutes valid data. What comes to matter in Sonic Antarctica is that all these materializations, interpretations, and actions mix and stretch the site of listening: here and there, above and below, with and apart. Stories, practice, and media; presented as interlaced, flood the spectrum of meaning and its audible and inaudible thresholds, its contact zones and elsewhere fields.

Summary: The Responsibility of Listening Field recording in sensitive sites requires an expanded documentary approach across senses and media. Observation can be revitalized as a critical mode of participation in the knowledge that neither site nor sound ever sits still. Listeningwith oilfields, oceans, and glaciers, this chapter has focused on methods of sensory inscription and recordists who write new data into landscapes through their presence and movements, edits and cuts. Following sound’s flow is a process of emplacement and displacement, of making and marking place. Responding to such demands extends listening into the real and imagined, territories that can be bridged by technology. Microphones attached to trees, submerged in oceans,



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or directed at solar winds accommodate the bends of audition. These maneuvers bring with them a plurality of signals. Historical practices of listening are pulled into the low frequencies of meaning. We are no closer to immersion and that is a good thing. Instead, the sounds of shrimps, stars, and data remind us that field recording is a creative process of translation, that the acoustic worlds of humans and nonhumans differ and come into proximate relation, if only fleetingly, through the imaginative strategies of recordists and their pre and post-technological ears. The fragility of this techno-bridge resides in balancing material vibrancy with the urgent necessity of communicating sites and sounds on the edge of extinction. Recordists must wrestle with critical and creative complicity, but this is not their duty alone. Positing the conceptual model of “contact zones and elsewhere fields” has formalized asymmetries that make up the immediate recorded encounter, but it has also connected such experiences to a multitude of times and events that matter elsewhere. For the recordist, this might induce practicebased friction in the movements into and away from the site of recording. For the elsewhere listener, auditioning field recordings must be considered a double act of creative and critical complicity. We, human auditors, are embroiled as participant-observers and consequently enter into a tacit contract of careful noticing. The ethical assemblage of listening is multiple, its impact always falls in and out of the field. Reassessing recordists and elsewhere listeners, through the concept of contact zones and elsewhere fields, allows the current condition of entanglement to be productively loosened, to draw out responsibility toward its specific actors and positionalities. Listening-with differences across species, locations, disciplines, and acoustics disrupts universal truth claims and prompts the continued question: what am I not hearing? It brings focus toward the lacunas of sound, inspires a pedagogical imperative to audition elsewhere, and questions whether knowledge is better left in the air or sea. Perhaps the most potent way to think about a critical practice of field recording is therefore through scale. We need to imagine the unimaginable gradations of site and sound if we are to comprehend the deep time of planetary change and environmental damage. These are not musical scales but material, political and imaginary ones, located in the speculations of art practice and the infrastructures of technological modernity. Negotiating the multi-scalar demands of the auditory productively anchors flights of fancy to socio-ethico ties. We do well to remember that sound may well be an inference, noticed through its powers of animation, but the contacts which expel mechanical

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energies through environments, bodies, and air are always propelled by actions, infrastructures, and resources: the frictions of geopolitical life. We have examined elemental agents such as oil, sun, ice, and data throughout this chapter, not as metaphorical whims but as material entities that harbor complex processes. A supply chain of sites is unveiled as we follow the collision of the human and nonhuman, audible and inaudible, airborne and infrastructural; field recording becomes a multi-scalar practice that operates across infra- and ultrasound, contact zones and elsewhere fields. Where else might listening end up if we follow the flow of actors and infrastructures enmeshed in gripping a microphone? What footprints can we speak about other than the situated presence of recordists? If we climb the elastic demands of listening, what new practices might emerge?

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The global breadth of any signal transmission has already been trafficked in the transportation of materials, labor, and goods, within which innumerable energies are expended at every point in the process. In minerals, fossil fuels, and manufacturing alone, the materiality of any contemporary communications device spreads to the four corners of the earth, mirroring its messaging.1 Walking step by step through an environment is an indelible part of field recording, whether captured in the audible signal or not. Heels press down, toes unfurl, contact is made, energy is produced. Sound expels between the heel, air, and earth. Vibration, medium, and pressure mingle in the thin sliver of these relations. One of my favorite exercises when field recording focuses on this triangulation of frictions: not walking or moving through a landscape in the traditional sense of a soundwalk but listening-with the heel, air, and earth as a sustained process of learning. Take six slow steps across seaweed. Point the microphone toward your feet. Listen through headphones. Repeat three times, each sweep being slower than the last. Duplicate this method on concrete, sand, pebbles, steel, on artificial grass, in shallow water, up plastic, across wood, and down gravel. Lay on your back with your feet in the air. Begin to walk. Listen. This final chapter follows the multi-scalar footprints of field recording. The word “footprint” has many applications and is synonymous with thinking and acting sustainably. It is a measurement, often spatial, and connected to a sense of presence and its consequence. Carbon emissions and waste are prominent prints we would like to erase. A footprint is, by its nature, a demarcation of territory. It leaves traceable evidence if only for a short while in the case of a literal footprint, depending on surface and environmental conditions. To notice a footprint, no matter the type, requires an inversion of form and a sensory attunement that

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“responds to the felt necessity of trying to listen to that which insists, obscurely.”2 Bodies, breath, and technological noise are residues to listen-with; they are equivalent to the pawprints of animals for whom the nature tracker follows. Also known as “spoors,” humans identify the imprints of nonhumans for hunting and scientific purposes. The knowledge required is practice-based and in the field: get on the ground, sketch, sniff, touch, follow. Trackers are sensitive to the depth and shape of imprints and can read direction, time, and size in such marks. The negative space between animal paw pads is as informative as the literal print itself. Listening After Nature, the binaries of the human and nonhuman are mixed; it becomes urgent to critically and creatively follow the footprints of practice across its multiple sites, materials, actors, and absences. We must learn to track ourselves with all the imaginative and ethical responsibility such a task might require. The ecological mantra of “leave no trace” is in ruins. Humans are a geological force imprinting a future stratum with plastics and technofossils. An irrevocable and omniscient footprint is being trodden as deep as copper mines, as fluid as acidified oceans, and as invisible as polluted air. Although environmental prints are often obscure and transboundary, they can be noticed and followed. Artists might have to switch to an ethos of “examine your trace” as an imperative for critical practice. The demand for the sonic agent is perhaps greatest due to the myth that the medium is dematerialized with little impact or consequence. This book has troubled such narratives and invited you, the elsewhere reader, to listen-with your own trace as part of the journey. Footprints have always been entangled with evidential contexts. The contact zone of a crime scene has been cast, analyzed, and presented in legal proceedings since forensic scientist Edmund Locard claimed that “every contact leaves a trace.”3 When environmental crimes are so vast and distributed, how do we narrow the scene? When the footprint is so evasive and obscure, how do we analyze its tracks? When sound is the medium, how do we attend to its materiality? And if feet and fingers leave prints, what about the ear of the contact recordist and its superimposed, elsewhere listener? Now more than ever is the time to notice and learn from the obstinate imprints of practice, to reimagine the future of the field. Disciplinary overlaps and analogous metaphors help this pursuit in allowing the imagination to conjure the improbable footprint of sound. Such thought experiments can be operated in practice with the help of an “eco-sonic” impetus.4 It requires the



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already stratified ear to reorient once again toward the resources, infrastructures, labor, and waste produced in the plural scenes of listening and recording. At its most basic point of inquiry, footprint calls into question the role of global aviation in facilitating the bodies and kits of globetrotting recordists. Capturing the sounds of a vanishing planet, while participating in its demise through carbon dioxide emissions, is a neat loop to consider. But this is the contemporary predicament; it is an era typified by ironic feedback. I have strived throughout this book to disentangle such knots rather than claim polemic positions. In other words, we can point to the complicity of boarding an airplane to record sounds from the field, but it should not lead to a culture of segregation or staying within one’s locale as justification for a more authentic or ecologically sensitive practice. This is not a tenable position or credible aim, the reason being that an eco-sonic footprint is part of any mediated signal due to the technological apparatus itself. As we shall see, natural resources, mined from the earth, allow microphones to record; plastics protect their inner workings; geological extraction, labor, waste, and environmental degradation make holding a microphone possible. When considering the footprint of field recording, we must broaden the scope beyond recordists and air miles by following the flow of energetic materials. Now is the moment to finally capture the capturer. It is time to shift focus onto the microphonic actor that contributes its own idiosyncratic footprint. Where do field recordists end up when they follow such flows? What practices are possible in the ear prints of media, materials, and infrastructures? This chapter unfurls such questions over three phases of writing in which the microphone is positioned as a constant agitator. The first iteration, “Microphone Check One,” focuses on the natural resources that make sound recording possible. I synthesize media ecological perspectives and microphonic analysis with a soundwork by Fernando Godoy in which the artist records and represents a copper mine in the Chilean Andes. The chapter deploys a “patchwork ethnography”5 style of research: simultaneously situated, remote, and performative. As in previous chapters, pedagogy is brought in to reflect on the ways in which critical audition can stretch and test the field. The second phase of the chapter, “Microphone Check Two,” digs deeper into where sonic media comes from and where it might end up. I physically deconstruct a microphone while researching its life cycle. Due to the Pandora’s box effect of technology, this process is a circumnavigation of truth and fact. The third and final phase of the chapter, “Microphone Check Three,” transmits critical microphonic research into the practice-based realm of contemporary

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field recording. Issues of extraction and waste are related through a series of soundworks that follow future fields of renewable energy. Wind turbines propel discussions on the infrastructure of air and help navigate a journey of extraction, consumption, and waste throughout; they ventilate the materials and practices that make field recording possible. Before embarking on these sections, a brief sketch of the eco-sonic scene.

Eco-Sonics Media historian Jacob Smith calls for an “eco-sonic” approach to sound culture and practice. Smith wants to counter the “rhetoric of virtuality and dematerialization that has long been encouraged by the technology industries and that often functions to conceal the ecological costs of the media.”6 To evidence sound’s impact, Smith examines analog carriers such as the phonograph or shellac disc. In the case of the latter, a popular format during the early to midtwentieth century, the disc was made by mixing the secreted resin of female lac beetles with synthetic formulas. Animal, mineral, and vegetal actors blend with chemical solutions to form “medianatures,” theorist Jussi Parikka’s term that recognizes the inseparability of media and natural resources.7 What are we not hearing when we place a needle on a shellac disc? The beetle, the forest, the chemical formulae, chains of labor and economic livelihoods embroiled in the production, import, and export of materials that end up vibrating the ear of an elsewhere listener? As vinyl replaced shellac and polymer plastic began to infiltrate all sonic formats, a larger footprint impressed itself. Musicologist Kyle Devine traces this impact within a political ecology of music, where a supply chain of cause and effect is located in the production and consumption of sonic media rather than the music. Devine’s analysis focuses on the raw materials that make music possible, the planetary and human health consequences of media production, and its waste. We do well to remember that vinyl is unbreakable. Unlike shellac, it cannot be recycled; its chemical trace leaves toxins in soils and bodies of those disproportionality burdened with its disposal.8 To follow such flows is to end up back in the elsewhere ear of audition and to the question of what we are not hearing in the noise of the signal. Devine’s answer is thus: The occupational hazards of oil drilling, the planetary problems of petroleum, and the political plights of petrocapitalism are known: people suffer, communities



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scatter, oils spill, environments suffocate, wars storm, empires soar. These are the conditions that define the production of petroleum, and they spiral into existence every time the needle glides through a groove.9

Eco-sonic approaches such as Devine’s or Smith’s tend to locate their studies on analog carriers of sound, the ossified products of human and nonhuman labor. Audition is more pragmatic when listening-with formats such as shellac or vinyl as the context of noise becomes audible. We hear material artifacts: collisions of beetles, poly-chemicals, and diamond styluses. Noisy actors, often hidden and distributed in unequal ways, tremble the low frequencies of listening. Smith’s project looks to the early acoustic era as inspiration for a lighter sonic footprint. Drawing parallels from literary scholar Nadia Bozak,10 who highlights the energy-intensive cycles of production behind the filmic image, Smith suggests that acoustic technocultures—hand-cranked devices—can fold back onto sound pedagogy and “green the curriculum,” the argument being if we retrieve preelectric user knowledge, sustainable new practices might emerge. Ironically, as plastic replaced shellac and digital downloads replaced CDs, each step carried an additional cost that betrayed the culturally coded message that sound was becoming less dependent on material resources. As Devine points out, in 2016 the use of plastic fell to its lowest number due to online streaming, yet at the same time greenhouse gas emissions spiked because of the energetic metabolism of data centers.11 Invisible media enacts a shadow footprint with each step toward sustainability. When the carrier is digital we must imaginatively and critically stretch listening across the multi-scalar imprints of extraction, production, and waste. Practice follows with a new mandate to track, record, and recode the materials, infrastructures, and sites involved in the construction of environmental sounds. No matter the format, no matter the material, there is always a cycle of resource entrapment fueled by the consumption of recordists, technologies, and elsewhere listeners.12 Eco-sonic investigations reveal energetic flows by tracing natural minerals embroiled in technological devices, infrastructures that sustain and support the circulation of goods and communication, and the sites of electronic waste where media ends up. These are the footprints of media that entangle human and planetary health as part of a present yet obscure trace. Eco-sonic analysis builds from strands of media studies known as “ecomedia” or “media ecology.” These movements derive impetus from theorists Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s inquiry into the “myriad ways that media technology consumes, despoils,

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and wastes natural resources.”13 This emphasis looks beyond semiotics and traditional ecocriticism by zooming into the life cycles of resources, labor, and waste involved in the production of the image itself. Eco-sonics does likewise but with the added caveat that sound has already escaped the frame and therefore demands an extra sensorial push. Field recordists follow these flows as part of a critical response. Ears and microphones shift toward cables, magnets, and minerals that allow recorded capture to take place, and to global infrastructures and waste sites that facilitate such matters. So far, eco-sonic projects have listened-with analog and digital formats to develop greener, more sustainable practices, materially and culturally. The crosshairs of my inquiry shift to apparatus and to the microphone itself. This is my contribution to impart causality and consequence into the field, and to reaffirm that neither field recording practice nor its technologies or sonic documents can ever be neutral or separate from the geopolitical resources, networks, and effects that allow signals to be captured in the first place.

Microphone Check One Soft drones, noticeable rhythms, frequencies pulse. A guiding line sends listening downward. Automated beeps lure my descent. Acoustic scenery folds, interlinks, and transitions. Movements come and go as depths are crossed and breached. No human voice, not yet at least. Just a sustained journey, soothing, ominous, falling, and fading into the energetic depths of a shifting structure. Tremors tickle. Echoes excite. Immersion hides knowing but not for long. Automation pierces the bubble of listening. A vast process is underway as mechanical events scalp into one another among a deep and constant boom. Open channel static bursts into life. Radio chatter moves back and forth, instructions are sent and received. Something is being navigated and controlled collectively by humans, possibly at great distances. Sirens signal risk and puncture radiophonic noise. The boom goes on. Listening plows through the shuffle of bodies and rhythms, not musical scales but stratified actions and collisions. Mechanical squeaks and vibrations infer a process of extraction that shifts and sifts those scales as a consequence. A network is blasting, removing, and processing inside some substrate of the earth, which after approximately twenty-five minutes of entombed pressure finally breaks. Ascent is slow and takes place amid dripping drops of liquid. By the thirty-minute mark, I emerge from my auditory shift.



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I have been listening-with Fernando Godoy’s field recording work titled “Cu” (2015), broadcast as part of the artist-led “Remote Series” on ABC Radio. Godoy’s recordings document El Teniente, one of the world’s largest underground copper mines eighty kilometers south of Santiago in the Chilean Andes. Cu is the chemical symbol for copper, a natural metal and resource extracted for its thermal and electrical properties. The mine has been in manual operation since 1819 and shifted ownership from Spanish colonizers to the Guggenheim art family before coming under state ownership by the Codelco mining company in 1971. Its scales are multiple: 7,500 feet above sea level, over 10,000 workers, 3,000 kilometers of tunnels, and 465,000 tons of copper produced in 2018 alone. Ten percent of the world’s annual reserves are found in the mine’s depths, which were formed across the late Miocene and Pliocene eras when volcanic rock and boiling liquids formed and cooled over one million to three million years.14 Copper is fundamental to a history of sound recording and the move from acoustic to electrical capture. The first transatlantic message was sent in 1858 with the help of subsea copper cables. Alexander Graham Bell’s discovery of the telephone (1876) relied on copper wire as the electrical conductor and sent demand rocketing. Whether it is a microphone or cable, recording device or speaker, sonic communication depends on this material. Electricity passes through copper with high efficiency, allowing travel over great distances. It is relatively inexpensive compared to alternative conductors such as silver or gold and has the malleability to bend when transmitting signal without loss. Copper can do all of this while being thermally resistant. Raw materials vary for every microphone, but the voice coil and cable are, more often than not, made from copper wire. When I press record, a supply chain of natural resources conducts and transforms the sound of an environment. Captured at 48 kHz and 24 bits per second, the field is stored temporarily on a polyvinyl chloride SD card. Inside the microphone, a diaphragm made from thin plastic transduces sound waves (pressure vibrations) and begins the process of converting acoustic into electrical energy. The copper coil responds and voltage is produced. Rare earth minerals such as cobalt or neodymium surround the coil to create a magnetic field and allow electrical current to flow.15 Plastic enshrines all materials and helps to create a technological Pandora’s box. Open any book on microphones and it will describe the physics and technicity of sound capture, not necessarily the materials that make it possible for one or the other.16 The full recipe list for how field recordings become field recordings is immense. We must consider

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a network of actors from microphones, cables, recording devices, SD cards, and batteries. Copper, neodymium, polyvinyl chloride, rubber, silicon, silver, gold, palladium, aluminum, zinc, and manganese are just some of the natural resources that facilitate digital capture and storage.17 What are the consequences of such entanglements? What are we not hearing when we grip the casing of a microphone? What footprint is going unheard? The El Teniente copper mine documented in Godoy’s recordings is haunted by a single catastrophic incident in 1945, which led to the loss of 355 workers who died from carbon dioxide poisoning after a fire spread smoke through the mine’s deep tunnels. Until 2005 it was the single-largest mining accident ever recorded. The grim number of deaths was exacerbated by inadequate health and safety conditions. The town of Sewell, originally constructed for families of workers, was left empty by the 1970s. I browse Google Earth for the mining site and its adjunct, unoccupied town. I remember Avery Gordon’s mantra, “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.”18 In sympathetic resonance, to study eco-sonic media we must confront the spectral frequencies of a signal always haunted by its sociopolitical context. Scrolling over a satellite image of El Teniente I glimpse the surface markings of machines, buildings, and patterns of extraction upon the landscape. Navigating the digital interface of a laptop produces another ironic loop of feedback based on the mineral codependencies that make my research possible. Scholarly inquiry adds another layer to the mining process, but not in metaphor alone. My laptop is full of natural media. So, too, are my microphones. I check the manual of a handheld digital recorder. There is no material information, no elemental inventory of the earthly components that built this machine, let alone how those components came together and ended up in my hand. On the back of the device reads “Assembled in China.” I am left wondering where specifically and under what conditions? I must dig a little deeper. Mining is a notorious industry that damages human and environmental health. Geoforensic scholar Godofredo Pereira unearths these relations and the materials, events, and consequences that Chilean copper mining buries. The process of extraction and refinement produces vast quantities of toxic waste that is run off and stored in tailing ponds, contaminating land, water networks, and air. Arsenic, a by-product of copper mining, is particularly harmful to the bodies of smeltery workers at the front end of material transformation.19 Along with copper, rare earth magnets such as cobalt or neodymium, which make electrical



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current possible inside microphones, are mined extensively from sites such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to Amnesty International, over 50 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the DRC with forty thousand children classed as artisanal, hand-based miners.20 Hazardous conditions, human rights violations, and health effects to renal, nervous, and reproductive systems make sound capture possible.21 We do well to remember that Congolese communities have been historically enslaved by European colonizers. Belgium King Leopold II’s brutal oppression of the DRC was leveraged upon forced labor in mines and rubber plantations, extracting and exporting natural wealth out of the country in ways that persist through technological colonialism.22 None of these ghosts are audible in Godoy’s work. They are part of the low frequencies, the geopolitical time-bending specters that haunt all recorded signals. I hear them as part of my elsewhere audition and research. They become imaginable in response to the constant question: what am I not hearing? Opening a new browser tab, I type “Fernando Godoy El Teniente” into the search engine and click on “images.” Clothed in orange overalls, hard hat and head torch on, I find Godoy recording in the contact zone of the mine. His sophisticated microphone set up points toward an anonymous piece of machinery: a recording device hangs from his neck. Godoy places his hands over the headphones that cover his ears, the suggestion being that he is monitoring the amplified signal of the environment. Perhaps the recording device is not even on? One cannot be sure. Whether for camera or not, field recording is always in performative mode. What is more intriguing in the image is the allusion to auditory health. In Godoy’s case, headphones encourage sound into intimate relation within the context of his sanctioned three-day fieldwork. Conversely, for miners who work over years, not days, headphones are worn to keep noise out, to protect and care for their longer-term labors in sonically strenuous sites. “The Miner’s Ear” (2008), an essay by Rosalind C. Morris, explores this context within histories of mining in South Africa, brought about by British and Dutch colonizers. Morris underscores the importance of mining as a pivot point for internal displacement, land acquisition, wealth, and extortion, as well as a site of anti-colonial resistance and protest. Diamonds and gold are the natural resources many workers have toiled and died for. The essay is framed by accidents that are not really accidents: sinkholes or fires that kill laborers, no more by misfortune as they do by way of systematic health and safety negligence, low wages, and poor living conditions. “To understand the history and nature of

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gold mining—in South Africa and elsewhere—one must listen for both different and false or ‘accidental’ resonances, the mere coincidence of frequencies that amplify each other.”23 Like the low frequencies of this book, the stories Morris seeks are found in webs of causality and consequence, heard or not. One of the primary impacts of mining is located in the ear of the miner. Morris claims that the miner is always in the process of going deaf. The quality of hearing recedes slowly among a combination of noise, time, and repetitive acts of labor, the irony being that future risk enhances as sounds that signal warning become obscured. “The miner’s ear is attuned to the sounds of catastrophe: sirens, rumbling, explosions, a gush of water where only a dripping should have been heard, coughing, the burble of fluid in the lungs … or too much silence.”24 Deafness becomes a double injury whereby the immediate damage to auditory health is complicated by the consequent vulnerability to detect future signals that may or may not save one’s life. Morris demonstrates the complex ethics of auditory health by reminding us that ear defenders, designed to cancel noise, inadvertently put miners at greater risk as workers no longer have the ability to hear dangerous sonic signs. The impossible choice for the miner’s ear is one of immediate risk versus the longer-term erasure of hearing.25 Godoy, like many field recordists, wears headphones to monitor sound for technical and aesthetic reasons. As the Noisy-Nonself, he is embroiled in the soundscape but not necessarily heard as part of its capture. If we transpose the health and safety paradox of the miner’s ear onto Godoy, we can ask: what does the field recordist encourage yet cancel? Certainly, headphone monitoring allows for real-time audition of an amplified site. It produces a heightened state of attunement as the fleshy ear becomes a technological hybrid. Listening is on steroids when signal is boosted, yet there is always a negotiation of what can and cannot be heard, what presences we choose to limit within the intensified state of electric audition. With this dilemma comes the risk of turning a deaf ear toward matters of authorship and subject relations in favor of the sonorous object, bracketed exclusively in and of itself. The danger is that any site-sensitive context evades inspection. Yet there is always the elsewhere space of audition, where you and I rehear Godoy’s listening. It is another link in the chain that produces the El Teniente copper mine. Rick Altman reminds us that any audio document “is not the sound event as such but a record of a particular hearing, a specific version of the story of the sound event.”26 I listen-with Godoy’s listening. El Teniente mixes with the sound of my room and the click and clack of my fingers as I type these



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very words. The story of Godoy’s listening is an amalgam that includes the edit suite in which his authorial ear cuts and transitions events with precision and deliberate intention. We locate, however difficult the task, the Noisy-Nonself in the elsewhere of the studio as much as the contact zone of the mine. The phantom editor performs presence as we are moved from one auditory scene into another. For Godoy’s version of the mine, he escorts the elsewhere listener with long transitions and crossfades rather than hard cuts. It is a technique that lures sensation through slow ominous change, never quite centered, always moving. I feel the effect of events and scales, actions, and auditory strata that once more demand slow listening. Godoy spent one day outside the mine recording the transportation of minerals, and two days on levels five of eight, where a network of trains moved through the labyrinthine space. Notes on the website give detail: Godoy’s acoustic experience of the mine was marked by the repetitive and constant sound of machinery but also by the sound of rocks, metal, the drone of tunnels, its electricity system and the low frequencies of sounds traveling through the tunnels. Cu was made exclusively with mine field recordings, with no sound manipulation during the composition except equalization and layering.27

Stating an artwork has no sound manipulation is a common trend in tethering a sense of authenticity to an event. It is a badge of honor that endeavors to locate objectivity within the act of recording and editing. Yet both ends of the field contain manipulations. In the contact zone, basic selections and erasures occur all the time, from equipment choice to microphone placement. In the elsewhere field of the edit suite, building blocks of recorded sound are repositioned, filtered, and faded to create one of many possible versions. My elsewhere listening superimposes both fields and only heightens the plural process of interpretation. As this chapter aims to show, however, the myth of neutrality can be challenged before any of these fields begin, by and with the microphone. No recording is impartial. No recording is clean. The chain of accountability starts when a microphone is gripped and a tacit connection is made. Inaudible low frequencies of natural resource extraction and exploitative labor practices graft onto the process of capture and initiate a chain of distortion that veils as much as it pertains to amplify. I cannot hear the cough of a damaged lung in the DRC caused by inhaling cobalt dust, but it must be imagined as part of the media relations that make field recording possible. Like the body of a lac beetle

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that is somewhere in the crackle of a shellac disc, or the Noisy-Nonself that lurks in the margins of audibility, the responsibility of elsewhere listening demands an ethics of the imagination as much as pragmatic research skills. I cannot hear radioactive materials such as thorium or toxic waste being pumped back into local dams in Baotou, China, but I can imagine them at the very least as part of an ethical commitment to sounds unheard, to the lives, places, and environments being disproportionately affected by the contemporary lust for digital technology. Sound capture will always capture more than sound. Whether audition resides in the miner’s ear, recordist, or elsewhere listener, there is a substratum of the signal we cannot know or identify, yet it must be part of critical field recording practice. These low frequencies, the sociopolitical ghosts of the signal, orientate listening toward matters of construction rather than sonic symbols. They drag the ear away from sonorous immersion and the pleasures of sound objects. How can we attend to the difficult task of noticing low frequencies, the sites, subjectivities, and sounds we may not even know, let alone hear? Teaching and learning is one place where I explore this conundrum. The studio or classroom is a context loaded with media and technology, yet rarely are its eco-sonic trajectories heard. Maxwell and Miller claim that academic contexts “rarely address where texts and technologies physically come from or end up.”28 The arena of learning must recode its tools as part of any process of critical audition. Through an eco-sonic deconstruction of field recording, one that listens-with media as much as acoustic events, I am interested in testing the limits and possibilities of listening, together. I do this with students. We begin with critical and imaginary analysis of Godoy’s work. What knowledge can we glean from listening-with acoustic, experiential, geographic, and time-based effects, along with intentionality, media, and editing decisions in both contact zone and elsewhere fields? What positions can we hear in the recording? If we graft our ears onto a perspective from within the soundscape, how does it change what we are listening to? Are we still hearing as a human, or has the ear become something more-than? What are we not hearing? Following group analysis and discussion, the second phase moves into a workshop scenario. The room is split into groups, with each group designated a task. Using one laptop per group, students search for information we cannot hear in the audio recording. This includes researching the natural resources that enable microphones to function, investigating the historical background of copper mining and the El Teniente site, searching where technological waste



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ends up, and exploring sustainable protocols of microphone manufacturers. Each team has an electromagnetic coil attached to their laptop. The live signal is sent back through the PA system. Inaudible noise from digital workstations is amplified and cloaks the room in electronic crackle: pedagogy becomes sensational. The groups present their findings and by the end of the session we have crowdsourced the low frequencies of practice, the sociopolitical webs that make sound capture possible. We listen back to Godoy’s work, noting the difference in reception from the original discussion. Listening is thickened by sonic pedagogy.29 Knowledge iterates with each act of interpretation. Together, we produce another form of sonic journalism, one based on the audition of sound and the co-constructed assemblage of its meaning. The footprint of listening is multiple. From the contact zone of the mine to the elsewhere fields of the edit suite, armchair, or classroom, an assemblage of impressions takes place. A field recording is a recoding of perspectives, written and rewritten by and with the listening ears and contexts of others. Low frequencies are lost and found along the way, but Listening After Nature, when the binaries of the human, technological, and environmental are dissolved, they exponentially fuse the signal, whether heard or not. Listening-with the El Teniente copper mine brings us closer to the ghosts of technological colonialism embroiled in human and planetary health. We may not be able to fully hear them, but we listen-with them in intimate ambiguity. It is the responsibility of listening, across all sites of audition, to find creative and critical ways to reanimate the lossy data of sonic events and the material resources that allow capture to take place. Enabled by the metabolic efficiency of technology, field recordists plunder locations; they consume the sounds of place with ravenous appetite. In Godoy’s soundwork, the microphone eats itself. It feasts on the very environment that allows its function in the first place. We capture and are captured by earth’s elemental media. Hard drives and batteries are the gates to such extraction, but they too enact more dependencies, more consumption. Lithium, for example, is the timekeeper of field recording. It forms the basis for batteries used in the field where no power extension is possible. Duration is marshaled by this alkali metal, found in abundance in Chile and created through chemical processes of distillation and refinement.30 Enhancing the Pandora’s box of the microphone, windshields offer a final material that matters to signals both lost and found. Any microphone is rarely

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positioned without its windshield in an outdoor setting. Fluffy grey fabric resembling a sock is wrestled onto the onboard microphone, or unzipped and placed over the plastic casing of a high-grade protective “blimp.” As the name would suggest, windshields are used to suppress wind noise. Without one, the slightest change in air pressure will be heard. They are commonly referred to as “fluffys” or “dead cats.” Smaller versions are known as “dead kittens.” Windshields silence bodies, environments, and, crucially for this discussion, technology. Placing a fluffy over a microphone ensures that you or I do not hear wind as it buffets the plastic casing of a microphone capsule. The shield mutes the material presence of the microphone and an awareness that an object, a point of contact and friction, is mediating the field. Similar to the Noisy-Nonself, microphones operate in the low frequencies of practice. The absurd sight of a fluffy sock being pointed at a tree makes technology apparent on a visible scale, but the opposite effect is found in the recorded trace. No audible sign of technology is present. We cannot hear the mineral-dependent microphone and its petroleum plastic partner, the portable recorder, slicing the acoustic scene at forty-eight thousand samples per second. Within the audio file itself, the windshield provides acoustic camouflage for the microphone. Hanging in plastic, foam, and rubber-dependent materials, encased in more plastic and synthetic fabric, the primary technological actor slips by unnoticed. All this baffle takes the ear further away from magnets and minerals, the natural media, which transform acoustic events into electrical currents. Hence, windshields, like microphones, are not benign or inanimate tools. They translate sonic events, mediate and distort air, bodies, and technology. All subjects are softened into an absorbent milieu that runs the risk of erasing the frictions and performatives that comprise the field. Windshields enhance the fabrication of place at the aesthetic and ecosonic level of their material status. Fluffys are made commercially from fake fur, synthetic fibers that include plastic polymers and acrylics, chemical formulae dependent on coal and petroleum among other natural resources.31 Real animal fur was, and still is, used by some DIY enthusiasts and pro-audio recordists. Wolverine fur is the most sought-after animal hair that keeps wind off the recording while bringing the sounds of nature to the ears of an elsewhere listener. The irony is delicious but it is also another serious feedback loop that underscores how matters of extraction and preservation, conservation, and consumption are matted into the minerals and fur of sonic media. Field recordists are not, therefore, the only type of footprint that can be tracked. Microphones also impact. Their trace is barely audible and is actively



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silenced with the help of windshields and editing preferences, but attention must be brought to such matters. Media scholars Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg remind us that “if we want to claim media can make a difference in mitigating the ecological crisis, then we need to begin with the media technologies themselves.”32 Rather than being the aesthetic enemy of field recording, wind noise can become a critical ally. It helps notice media apparatus and in doing so prompts listening-with a combination of atmosphere, technology, and practice: a noisy web of relations that amplifies methods over composed soundscapes or high-fidelity sound objects.33 Godoy’s work offers much on both the audible and inaudible scales of audition. Situating practice within a mine that recording technology is so dependent upon provides provenance for the microphone. We attune to the deep subterranean effect of mass extraction and the machinic industrial scale of events that allow microphones to become microphones. We do not hear the low frequencies that surround health and safety, the labor conditions, or global networks embroiled in the production of digital culture. We do not hear the microphone itself as it is securely placed inside the protective blimp casing, and, of course, we do not hear Godoy. The apophenia of listening summarized in Chapter 1 returns, only this time we are emphasizing eco-sonic patterns in the absence of clear meaning. We lean toward devices and the labors of fieldcraft along with the mineral dependencies that make recording possible. The intersection of the human and nonhuman is accentuated with the reminder that as copper is tied to cultural and material cartographies of microphones, it is also fused with the bodies of recordists. Copper is in our hearts and lungs. It allows the human body to develop red blood cells that help specific functions such as bone health and immunity. Listening After Nature, we humans must be accountable within the multi-scalar supply chain of copper: socially, politically, geographically, and corporeally. The task is to notice and attend to this elemental recipe list across the human and nonhuman, the minutiae and the massive. This demand stretches across the contact zone of recording and elsewhere fields of audition. Listening within the classroom setting, described as part of this section of writing, has the potential to become another part of the chain. Sonic pedagogy can further the assemblage of meaning and drive the stakes for critical field recording practice. The studio or workshop is another field in which the barely noticeable footprints of sound, bodies, and technologies can be made more sensate, if only for a fleeting moment. Hence, an eco-sonic filter is not just a material analytical tool but a prompt for practice and critical

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audition. It encourages artists to follow the flow of energetic materials, including their own bodies, and the multi-scalar sites, impacts, and consequences when Listening After Nature.

Microphone Check Two Sitting at a table, with a selection of screwdrivers, I try to disassemble a Røde-NT4 microphone. I begin toward the very end of its complex five-pin cable input. No joy. Near the top of the fixed X-Y stereo condenser microphone is a silver ring. After some force, it begins to turn. Thrill and fear bubble as two parts of the microphone unfasten from one another. Carefully detaching the top capsule, an array of colorful wires and a circuit board reveal themselves. Inside, the soldering is meticulous. I stare at its electrical guts for a while, spellbound. A drink of water, a nervous smile, and then paranoia sets in: how will I get these pieces back together? There is no further way up into the microphone head and no way down, from here at least, into the digestive system. I manage to reconnect the two parts and slowly tighten the silver ring: the microphone returns to its former self. With renewed confidence, I notice a join in the casing. There is nothing to unscrew but I hold both ends of the microphone and give a sharp counterclockwise twist of the lower portion: it comes loose! Pulling back the casing I sense the microphone’s weight. It has a presence that makes the whole process somewhat terrifying, as if I am operating on a patient, knowing full well I do not fit the job description. As the outer shell slides away, I turn into a bomb disposal expert; holding my breath, waiting for the worst possible outcome. Thrill and fear bubble back as the lower casing falls off. It leaves a hollow, vulnerable body strewn on the tabletop. The section is empty because it is where you can place two nine-volt batteries. Inside is a printed label that states “Made in Australia” and a handwritten serial number. In all the years of having this microphone, all the environments, architectures, and animals it has sampled, I had never used the battery function. Growing in confidence, I unscrew the top section again. Staring at the separated head and body, a few cables, a circuit board, and an empty section for batteries, it is striking how little there is inside. The outer casing is robust and heavy, it provides armor for the precious materials and processes within. Sound capture needs a fortress of protection, but at what cost? Now, with the lower



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portion of the outer shell removed I can see one tiny screw that attaches the very bottom section where I tried to begin this dissection, the five-pin connector. Hope turns to despair when I realize the screw is too small and I cannot go any further: I reassemble the microphone. With all the parts clicked back into place, a final wave of relief crashes over me. I take my operation online and search for a YouTube video on how to deconstruct a Røde-NT4 microphone. There is always a video, right? Wrong. Hitting a dead end, I visit Røde’s company website and locate various documents about the NT4 microphone. Its datasheet tells me the weight is 480 grams, heavier than most microphones. The usual technical numbers are listed: frequency range, sensitivity, dimensions, output impedance, and directional pattern. There is no mention of material composition, no directory of the metals and minerals inside, or the casing that surrounds it. I find the “conformity certificate” and hope it offers details beyond data. Wrong again. A one-page document states the device has a ten-year guarantee. The declaration ensures the product meets safe voltage and compatibility standards in compliance with EU electrical directives. It is signed by a chief engineer, dated November 27, 2003. The most curious information I find is about the brand and location of Røde, hinted at in the comment that it is “proudly designed and manufactured in Australia.” The name “Freedman Electronics” and not “Røde” heads the page. Opening a new browser tab, I type the address at the top of the document into Google Earth. Minerals and magnets heat and cool in the elsewhere fields of cloud computing. I find myself hovering above what looks to be an industrial business area flanked by the “Duck River” and two or three large warehouse structures. I am closer yet more estranged than ever to my microphone and its chain of production. Street View allows me to “ground truth” my location. Barbed wire is on part of the outer walls. Maintenance fencing surrounds much of the site. Zooming through the front gate, an Australian flag, frozen in motion, confirms I am in the right country. “Røde Microphones” signage tells me I am in the right place. I notice the “receiving” end of the premises but cannot go further. Scrolling back through the time trail, from 2019 to 2009, there is nothing to be gleaned other than new weather conditions, cars, and people with blurred faces. Røde has a cross-hatched history, hinted at in the intersecting “ø” of the brand name. The company website tells me business began after Henry and Astrida Freedman migrated from Sweden to Australia in 1967 as “Freedman Electronics,” selling speakers and amplifiers among other electrical goods. The move into microphones came after Henry’s son, Peter, visited Shanghai in

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1981 and purchased a replica Neumann U87 microphone. After galvanizing interest in the microphone, he returned to China ten years later, bought twenty of the same model, and disassembled, customized, and reassembled them for sale. The first Røde-NT1 was a Chinese-Australian hybrid, surreptitiously hacked and modified for consumption. Peter Freedman returned regularly to China, visiting manufacturers and obtaining samples. Soon the NT2 arrived with an updated circuit board, based this time on another brand, the German manufacturer Shoeps. Røde launched itself on the back of the NT2 and has since gone on to be a global leader in the market of low-cost high-quality microphones.34 Røde microphones are built out of material and geographical hybridity. The brand name is also a historical amalgam. The strikethrough in the ø is not of linguistic value but was inserted as an aesthetic alignment toward a Northern European origin and, with it, the implication of high-definition audio engineering.35 The NT series itself has a more curious origin myth. According to anecdote, the microphone was nicknamed “rodent” due to the expectation that it would sell as quick as a “rat up a drain pipe.”36 When it came to marketing a viable product, a hyphen was inserted to break the mammalian reference. Coupled with the strikethrough ø, a credible brand slipped into the market rather than a pestilent actor. The RØDE-NT was born. Through eco-sonic analysis, we come to understand that nonhumans are embroiled in the production of technology and media. Across material, metaphoric, and linguistic scales, animals and geologies are appropriated and hacked as part of technoculture. The microphone is no more an innovation of the human as it is of the nonhuman. Smith’s investigation of the lac beetle within the material history of shellac is a pertinent example of such entanglement. Parikka also makes clear that language matters within such relations and is evidenced in medianature vocabularies such as “swarms,” “hives,” and “webs.”37 It would be remiss of me here not to mention that microphones are commonly referred to as “bugs.” In the contexts of surveillance and espionage, biology and technology are part of an assembly of relations and power rather than opposing tracks.38 To some extent, I have modified the study of insects—entomology—with the study of words—etymology—for similar ends. In either case, we are knee-deep in the knowledge that a mix of humans and nonhumans produce the materials and myths that underpin digital culture. Of course, a rodent is not an insect, nor is a microphone a rat. Rodents are common mammals that derive their name from the Latin “rodere,” which is “to



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gnaw.” Species such as rats have teeth that continuously grow, hence their need to constantly chew away at bone or other hard surfaces. This context enables orientation of the microphone once more, from medianature actor to conceptual chimera, one that chews on sonic environments and phenomena. The maw of the microphone facilitates the Noisy-Nonself ’s hungry listening; it feeds on sound’s excess. Framed as a metabolic pest, it not only eats but also spreads. Much like a virus, the microphone, the bug, the RØDE-NT is a contagious performer. As with any species that can cause disease, so too, then, can we say the microphone, as a pestilent actor, has the potential to infect and impact as much as it pertains to capture and preserve. Such performative agency was recognized as early as 1878 in an article in the New York Times that lambasted the invention of the microphone as an “atrocious instrument … devastating in its effects” and capable of the “destruction of human society.”39 Critical microphonic debate lags under the weight of its normative application as a tool of high-fidelity servitude. My own analysis hopes to trouble passive readings of technology as impartial or man-made. It is a reading that merges humans, nonhumans, and media histories across material and metaphor. The point of all this creative and critical play is to claim that field recordings, the by-product of microphonic gnawing, reiterate a pathway toward monstrous potentiality rather than any singular notion of the real. The illusion of immaculate sound capture, enabled by hands in dirt-free labs, obfuscates the murky elsewhere fields that resonate a supply chain of signal: the natural resources and exhausted landscapes of where technology comes from and where it ends up. The Røde-NT4 manual promises immaculate stereo detail. Peter Freedman goes to great pains to stress the clean labs and sterile environments in which Røde microphones are produced and assembled.40 Yet, under the guise of purity lurks sullied stories, from hacked materials to intellectual property to hybrid animal branding. After extracting knowledge and materials from China, Freedman wanted Røde to be a self-sustainable operation with in-house processing and assembly at the center of its manufacturing culture. Today, production consists of a team of more than 250 employees across design, electronics, quality control, acoustics, and much more.41 Where the natural resources come from is a little more veiled. Copper, neodymium, or petroleum start in the ground. These elements are not grown in a lab; they arrive from elsewhere environments, hands, and machines. China is the most abundant global site of rare earth magnets such as neodymium, found inside microphones.

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I search Google Earth again and fly from Røde’s warehouse in Sydney, Australia, to Bataou, inner Mongolia. It is an area well documented in rare earth journalism, a toxic environmental site of extraction and devastation for both humans and nonhumans.42 I gaze down upon the landscape etchings of the Bayan Obo mining district and zoom into and away from what looks like mixed media paintings composed of monumental carvings and deep dark cylindrical spirals. This is industrial “art” created by consumer demand. I am in the elsewhere field and its ironic signature sound is the whirring fan of my laptop. I can only imagine the mechanical site-specific soundscape: diesel engines and the hum of generators. These fields are full of speculation and circumnavigation, not immersion and fact. They are the low frequency zones of field recording, the subspaces and sounds of a patchwork ethnography, both intimate and remote. Perhaps Røde’s in-house policy is a proxy way of saying its natural elements are mined from Australian mineral-rich deposits? Rare earths are in plentiful supply in Northern Australia, as is copper. I type “Lynas Corporation’s Mount Weld Mine” into Google Earth and soon I am flying again, this time over scorched earth, ochre-colored and isolated from human habitation. Is this really where my microphone comes from? It is a landscape of pockmarks and lunarlike craters, far removed from anywhere I could ever imagine being, let alone hearing. Microphonic research is not reducible to neat facts or defined objects of study. Meaning is made through a milieu of sites, scales, and senses, of limits and excess. Anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston claimed that “research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”43 Bruno Latour would say I am closer to “matters of concern, not matters of fact.”44 Latour’s claim emerged among a personal reassessment in which he reflected on years of criticizing scientific certainty, only to understand that the real task of scholarly inquiry is to be in relation to so-called fact rather than disavow truth claims altogether. Throughout this book, and specifically within this techno-task, I have also tried to stay within earshot of the sensitive sites, agencies, and subjects at stake. It requires imagination and attentiveness toward the low frequencies of research. It is a sensibility that strives to keep sound at useful degrees of distance rather than being fully immersed in the medium itself. Exploring matters of concern, Latour implies a subsequent turn to matters of care. So, too, it is my hope that by doing such research we might care about how and why microphones matter. But let us be clear in matters of fact for one moment. Rare earth minerals are not rare at all. The number of natural resources inside a microphone is minimal,



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and for most quality manufactures such as Røde, planned obsolescence is not the end game. Nevertheless, the point here is to demonstrate that microphones do not exist in autonomous independence. They do not arrive as benevolent devices that human innovation and high-fidelity sound capture would have us think. Microphones rely on batteries and hard drives, cables and headphones, circuit boards and speakers, not to mention ears and lungs. A network of materials and minerals, geographies and bodies intersect when we follow the flow of microphones. It is a flow that requires another orientation, this time away from where technology comes from to where it might end up. The image of a traditional garbage landfill is being replaced by the reality of towering heaps of electronic waste (e-waste): household appliances such as laptops, fridges, toasters, and televisions instead of rotting food. More and more items such as smartphones, laptops, and speakers are entering the chain. According to a World Economic Forum report, global e-waste production is close to fifty million tons each year.45 With each upgrade comes another disposal, and with each seamless innovation we get further away from self-repair.46 Past products are very much involved: “cathode ray tubes from old televisions and computer monitors, VHS tapes and DVD players, many with toxic compounds, such as lead, still making them hazardous and problematic.”47 Sonic media is an irreducible part of the e-waste network. The lifespan of a microphone is relatively long compared to smart technology, but the ecology of physical media needed to sustain practices such as field recording cannot be ignored. Headphones, hard drives, batteries, SD cards, speakers, circuit boards, and their intrinsic metals and plastics all end up somewhere, out of sight, out of mind. Media and environmental scholar Jennifer Gabrys frames this context as a “natural history of electronics.”48 Here, natural history refers to the earthly resources needed to make electrical goods as well as how technology will leave a fossil legacy. Items that do not break down will be unearthed in future archaeological digs. Like artifacts from a bygone era, media such as microphones and hard drives will leave a lasting and literal imprint. For Gabrys, such technofossils are not just markers on a record to come; they indicate a plurality of entanglements across a political ecology of humans and nonhumans. Gabrys states, “Electronics are not only ‘matter,’ unfolding through minerals, chemicals, bodies, soil, water, environments, and temporalities. They also provide traces of the economic, cultural, and political contexts in which they circulate.”49 The sites of global e-waste tell their own story of how political and economic power is enacted. Obsolete, damaged, and discarded electronic goods from

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industrialized regions such as Europe, North America, and Asia inevitably end up in areas like Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the largest and most notorious e-waste site in the world.50 The movement of e-waste and its disproportionate effect on communities and landscapes in the global south is a process environmental scholar Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” Discussing a range of chemical and toxic traces leached by the richest nations onto the poorest, Nixon defines the term as one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”51 E-waste is exported and dumped elsewhere. Its chemical afterlife seeps slowly and invisibly into lungs and rivers, affecting bodies and communities, soil and systems.52 The elsewhere field may be out of mind for some, but it is also the contact zone for others. Where might my own field recording equipment end up? Where are the batteries and broken hard drives I no longer have? Are they in the land or lung? And what of this curious device, the Røde-NT4? How can I get inside this eco-sonic black box? I open another browser tab and type “Agbogbloshie” into Google Earth. With one click I fly from Australia to Ghana in two seconds. The soundscape is dominated again by the whir of my laptop fan. I hover across a more inhabited space than my previous searches. There are houses and living areas within a stretch of grey land, speckled by cream pixels. Close to a river edge, I notice a pile of burning waste. Smoke billows into the sky and I cannot help but think of slow violence as electronic ashes float into the atmosphere: inhaled across bodies and frozen in screen time, the pixelated image offers me a longdistance pause to notice that which slips by. Following such flows means field recordists will inevitably end up down mines and in waste. How artists operate with critical and creative complicity will continue to haunt any such investigation. Jacob Kirkegaard’s Testimonium (2021) is a useful cautionary tale here. Known for his evocative field recordings of sites such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Kirkegaard recorded the process of waste management across Denmark, Estonia, and Nairobi. These are not e-waste sites but are nonetheless born from an artistic curiosity of where things come from and where they end up. The work is an audio-visual installation and it makes sense why. Listening to the sound alone I am left with an uneasy sense of awe. This is the eternal dilemma for critical audition whether it happens in or out of the field. Like Peter Cusack’s dangerous sounds project in Chapter 3, the real threat at the heart of field recording-based work is that situated meaning becomes overwhelmed by sound’s sonorous charms. When waste becomes



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beautiful, context is outsourced. Site-sensitive subjectivities, including author recordists, get subsumed into the spatiotemporal drag of slow violence. Recalling Latour, the point is not to stray too far from matters of fact, particularly when the planetary stakes are so high. This involves an acceptance of the limits of listening and the constant reminder that flipping to sound-centered knowledge does not reconcile matters of concern over fact. If anything, the black box condition of technology is enhanced with the deployment of sound practice. Not only are we estranged further from health impacts across human and nonhuman scales, but we may also fail to amplify white savior recordists as they plunder neocolonial waste. Pedagogy and practice become two vital arenas where we can surface and transform such issues. Critical listening sessions help web the sonority of sound with interpretative discussions and revelations, based on the structured and iterative process of asking what am I not hearing. Practice itself must attempt to hear matters of causality and power yet resist fixing them into new categories of truth. The waste site is one in a chain of many that can add meaning when auscultated, together. Eco-sonic media, transformed by critical practice, therefore instigates a modulation of our constant question from what am I not hearing to what do I not want to hear? Whether it is pointing a microphone or making a cut in the edit suite, aesthetic judgments exclude as much as they include. Waste is consequently a decision-making problem for any recordist. Sonic detritus, so often consigned to digital trash, is reclaimed as part of a critical field recording practice.53

Microphone Check Three Issues of extraction and sustainability are not limited to sites of mining and waste. They are not only evidenced through visual marks and readable images. Acoustic ecology’s focus on disappearing species teaches us that sound is impacted too, that nonhuman voices are disappearing in a time after nature and that silence has become an earcon to notice and interpret. But what about practice, what about methods and cultures that treat the soundscape as an infinite resource, its bounty plentiful and self-replenishing? What of sonic extraction? The labor of recording is conducted under the premise that there is always more, that capturing sound does no harm and that the medium will never be scarce. It is an economy based on supply outstripping demand. The field is consequently a site of disequilibrium as sound is critically devalued due to its

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perceived abundance. Noisy-Nonselves and their innocuous technologies can feast all they like. Whether it is for an archive, publication, composing a film score, radio production, or recording for games, sound is the gift that keeps on giving. I have unpicked these myths, asymmetries, and erasures of the field along with its practice-based muscle memory and discursive traits. Sound capture always captures more than sound. Recording is connected to an assembly of natural resources, labor, and waste. Listening is more than what we hear. Field recording effectively mines the sounds of a place. The de facto position of limitless sound capture impacts practice-based cultures: the medium becomes a resource waiting to be drained. Sonic agency, and its performative potential, are relegated in favor of taxidermied sound objects, at the whim of human-centered desires and designs. Perhaps an experimental culture of finitude should be engineered into critical practice as a conundrum for artists to encourage eco-sonic concerns. Is there such a thing as a sustainable microphone or XLR cable? Can recordings use solar or wind energies rather than electric or battery? How can field recordists work with concepts of scarcity without turning to essentialized forms of listening that disavow technology? How can we move toward something more circular as a practice and culture, and what are the future sites of sustainable audition? Scholars Beatrice Ferrara and Leandro Pisano’s “Manifesto of Rural Futurism” offers an interesting route for field recording in light of these questions. Listening After Nature, the rural idyll is being replaced with decaying socioeconomic sites on the margins of urban living, vulnerable to the economic shocks of the Anthropocene. Rural futurism argues for a situated, critical, and perhaps hopeful vision, with and through practice. The manifesto locates field recording at the heart of its cause, which seeks to understand the field as “complex spaces actively immersed in the dynamism of encounters, flows and fluxes of contemporary geographies.”54 A shift away from rarefied nature is intimated; explorations of the interzones between cities and designated sites of wonder are encouraged. These interstitial fields, existing across and between the urban–rural dichotomy, “become places of experimentation, performativity, critical investigation and change.”55 As we have come to appreciate, one of the dangers of field recording is located in the aesthetics of sublime sound objects. The lure of environmental ruination means monumental compositions might be sounded rather than heard. From oilfields to copper mines, e-waste to ice, field recording plays a game of cat and mouse, balancing sound’s powerful ambiguity and the geopolitical context of its



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making. Recordists follow such flows, and in doing so, we leak back into Latour’s conundrum: the negotiation of matters of concern with matters of fact. Given acoustic ecology’s historic disavow of technology, it is compelling to see Ferrara and Pisano’s manifesto doing the opposite. Technoculture sits across issues of community and heritage along with the material and infrastructural characteristics of place. Wind energy is mentioned in the manifesto as part of this new ecology of relations and implies microphones of the future will be pointed at renewable sites as much as the exhausted derelictions of modernity. Field recordist Philip Samartzis operates this nexus in a work produced as part of the Liminaria residency program that Pisano founded in 2014. Perpetual Motion (2017), a work by Samartzis, clocks in at just under forty minutes and weaves acoustic recordings of wind turbines, electromagnetic static, contact microphone transductions of infrastructures and boundaries, the sounds of birds and environments, and the sparse narrative voice of Chiara Costanza.56 Samartzis, the Noisy-Nonself, sits somewhere among a network of sounds, unheard yet present in both contact zones and elsewhere fields. At times I hear somebody whistling, at times I hear hammering within the sound of swifts. Perhaps this is Samartzis playing with absence and presence? A mix of sharp cuts and slow transitions place him simultaneously in the studio. Authorship, intention, and presence are heightened but never fully disclosed. Streaming the work via my laptop, I become a layer of listening, caught in the ongoing cycle of auditioning a work about sustainability while plowing greenhouse gases to get there. The work offers another iteration of sonic journalism, one that does not rid the voice entirely, and one that chooses future sites of renewable energy as its locus of listening. Wind farms are aesthetic frontiers within the exhausted landscapes of the Anthropocene. Field recordist Linda O’Keeffe’s work Silent Spring (2019) explores similar green energies and infrastructures. Headphones on, I listenwith stridulating insects that resonate my throat and jaw. Bumps infer a microphone is being positioned; the Noisy-Nonself has declared its presence. Birdsong and human voice coalesce. Interior and exterior are weaved as spatial signatures fill the bandwidth of listening. Headphones vibrate with pressure. Sound flows to the brim and is assembled into a nonlinear presentation of space and time. I notice a cutting motion. Air is being sliced by giant hands. Insects continue their high-frequency pulse; the scene builds across multiple actors and scales. This is a heterogeneous space for listening, a world made possible by the imagination and edit suite. I am in many places at once and with many things at

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once. Fragmented human voices come and go. Those giant hands gradually take over. For a short while, there is nothing else: no birds, no insects, or voices. Just the sound of air being carved over and over before a quick fade out. O’Keeffe’s work takes its cue from Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring originally published in 1962. Carson shifted environmental science into public consciousness. Her text traced ecological impacts produced from synthetic pesticides and their deliberate obfuscation by chemical industries. As the title suggests, Carson predicted a bleak future defined by human activity and the consequent silencing of nature. In her liner notes O’Keeffe writes, “The introduction of wind turbines has changed the natural soundscape, with the constant presence of their whirring sound. The crickets are louder, the bird’s quieter, the change in economic practices from farming to wind turbine systems on the landscape has resulted in fewer jobs for young men and women with a radically reduced agricultural economy.”57 The sonic scene I listen-with pivots around the introduction of wind turbines into the mountainous landscape of the Tera Alta region in northern Spain. O’Keeffe made the recordings during a residency in 2015 as part of a work that both documents and speculates on turbine impact, across local ecologies, human and nonhuman. O’Keeffe acknowledges the recurring danger of recording sublime monuments and their rarefied sound effects.58 Such a focus would deny the ecological relations that turbines initiate, on habitats and individual species such as bats, who suffer fatalities through turbine collision as echolocated signals are scrambled by the artificial disturbance of air.59 The sonic demand of turbines press upon humans too as the promise of green futures makes old hands obsolete. For every sustainable move there is another footprint that must be considered in the realm of rural futurism. Turbines themselves are made from rare earth metals among many elements. Ecology thickens with the political implications of economy and the supply and demand context of financial energy markets.60 Wind turbines produce electricity and require no fuel to do so, hence the shift toward them as a more sustainable infrastructure for generating electricity than traditional nonrenewable resources. The movement of air, which microphones are so dependent upon, is produced by the push and pull of turbines that excite in all directions. O’Keeffe claims the introduction of renewable technology inscribes a novel keynote sound into the environment. Turbines are forging new sounds into an unprecedented era of human activity. The monotonous sound of spinning blades carves a sonic niche into the soundscape. Acoustically,



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turbines impact the local ecology of Tera Alta. Species such as birds and crickets adapt: some become less audible, others find yet more sonic niches. O’Keeffe’s investigation battles the dilemma of being drawn into technological noise while at the same time trying to reconcile its impact within the context of acoustic ecology. The predicament is made acute by the discipline’s insistence upon categories based on the source of sound rather than what it may or may not do. The sounds of the earth “geophony,” nonhuman biological life “biophony,” and man-made activity “anthrophony” are neat placeholders, but such classifications become somewhat redundant beyond show-and-tell sound science. Within the entangled epoch of the Anthropocene and the proposition that humans are now a geological force, can we really separate the sound of waves, birds, and humans? How can technology and infrastructure be brought into a more knotted appreciation of relations rather than standalone sonic taxonomies? As Chapters 1 and 2 proposed, the field, along with its nonhuman actors, is part of cultural and technological networks. Nature, since the advent of its documentation and mediation, through recorded sound has always been embroiled in the man-made anthrophony. O’Keeffe’s work acknowledges this to some extent and in doing so nudges acoustic ecology into a reassessment of its own biases and media naivety. The sound of air being carved might just be the right type of noise for traditional soundscape studies to accept. Listening-with O’Keeffe’s work, I want to set practice in dialogue with critical infrastructure studies as part of an eco-sonic reading. Infrastructures are understood as physical systems, architectures, and networks that allow transport, commodities, resources, and waste to flow and be stored. Water pipes, roads, and phone lines are just some of the physical elements of infrastructure. Scholar Brian Larkin states that infrastructures are “present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around. We often see computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not pipes and sewers.”61 Infrastructures are necessary for local and global economies, yet the material web of how things become things, how they move, and where they end up is often obscure. Infrastructure occupies the backstage to life, yet it is fundamental to the performance going on out front. In the contemporary realm of cloud computing, physical systems are further obscured. Data is stored in the desert; internet searches are facilitated by subsea cables. Wireless and smart devices, dependent on orbiting satellites, further our estrangement to the sites and resources that create digital footprints. Media

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scholar Rahul Mukherjee suggests that such infrastructure exists as much in the data center or satellite as it does in the air itself. Microwaves from cell phone towers “radiate” the invisible and inaudible consequences of anthropogenic impact, altering human and planetary health.62 Virtual communications are also physical systems. Whether a pipe, cable, or electromagnetic atmosphere, contemporary infrastructures collapse the notion of background and foreground. The correlation of material engineering and its elsewhere effects ensure infrastructure is never either-or. In the case of O’Keeffe’s work, we can discuss wind turbines as infrastructures in terms of the sound they produce, the energy they generate, the disturbances to local wildlife and human forms of land management, and natural resources, materials, and labor that go into the construction and transportation of turbines. We can also consider air as a manufactured site. Recording and storing its flows is mimicked at a smaller, more personal scale by the field recordist herself. Capturing the natural flow of air is big business. The investment management company Black Rock, for example, owns an extensive region of wind farms in southern Norway. The electricity produced is used to cool data centers in Sweden.63 The cloud, like nature, and the field, is a constructed and distributed site, physically situated in a Swedish hard drive ventilated with electricity generated by air in Norway. These are “ambient infrastructures”64 as Larkin calls them, political, sensory, and aesthetic networks that shape space and place. Jonathan Sterne reminds us that “if you call something a medium then it has an infrastructure.”65 Air is the primary medium field recording depends upon, and like its microphones, authors, and sites, it is anything but benign. Contemporary air is a political interface webbed to power in terms of energy, physical bodies in terms of health, and social justice in terms of who has the right to breathe.66 The infrastructure of air forces the contact recordist, O’Keeffe, and you and I, the elsewhere listener, to diversify attention away from all that is solid in the turbine itself. Critical practice compels us to follow the media and medium of air in all its eco-sonic potentiality. When air pressure varies, environments vibrate the diaphragm of a microphone, and copper conducts and is magnetized by rare earth magnets. Squeezing the plastic pistol grip, I point and record; I plumb the air. Practice is made possible by a string of resources, sites, and subjectivities that are embroiled in the production of acoustic space. As media scholar Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible.”67 The invisible processes of air stir critical practice, transform, and multiply its meaning. We examine these fragile imprints



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by turning once more to the low frequencies of apprehension and the constant question: what am I not hearing? In the work of O’Keeffe, we do not hear the resources that make turbines possible: rare earth elements such as neodymium, the same magnet inside the microphone. O’Keeffe’s recording battles literal feedback with the help of the windjammer, the extra-material actor enmeshed in critical practice. Perhaps, most tellingly, we do not hear the site or space in which the electricity generated ends up. We do not hear the flick of a light switch or the tick of an electrical meter within the domestic elsewhere field. The limits of listening, along with the microphone and its synthetic windshield, mute matters of inspection and always risk outsourcing critical content beyond the recesses of sensory reception. This is the same game of hide and seek that architecture scholar Keller Easterling calls “extrastatecraft,” whereby infrastructure is always tied to politics of the visible and invisible, amplified or silenced.68 Wind turbines sound the promise of a more sustainable future. A green new sublime awaits practitioners of the sonic Anthropocene with its infrastructures of renewable technology, defined by the rhythmical sound of air being chopped and churned. Larkin claims infrastructures bring both political and poetic meaning.69 Infrastructural form is located not so much in the turbine but in the assembly of relations it mediates, both real and imaginary. The medium of sound is expertly placed to host this investigation as it is not so much tied to its source as it is to the networks it vibrates, whether heard or not. O’Keeffe manages to steer clear of the turbine in and of itself and instead keeps the ecology of capture open to different spaces, times, and actors in which infrastructure emerges. Her work reminds us that field recording can do more than capture sonic signs. The goal for the contact recordist and elsewhere listener is to actively seek out the inaudible structures that suture the air. They might manifest in the physicality of the turbine itself in terms of material vibrations, but they also exist in the elsewhere fields of the eco-sonic imaginary. The clue to such practicebased operations is in the name itself. The “infra” of the structure must always be kept in mind. Philosopher François J. Bonnet reminds us that “the infra-world is no less effective for being hidden. It generates effects, it reverberates through our sensations, our decisions, and our actions. It shapes our social and emotional lives.”70 Orienting toward the scales, networks, and actors embroiled in contemporary infrastructure ensures that eco-sonic approaches must apply the imagination of practice-based research. It involves tuning the ear to that which we cannot hear,

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and to that which may otherwise be deemed waste: materially, geographically, aesthetically. Breakdown, redundancy, and malfunction are useful words to reclaim here. I do not perceive the internet until my router disconnects. Sound is recorded until my lithium dependent batteries run out. When things fail or cease a network of relations emerge, learning is heightened. Listening After Nature, we must notice the glitch as much as the signal, the interference as much as the so-called source. Animals are often at the epicenter of such moments. Eagles collide with prospecting drones, birds disrupt power lines, sharks chew internet cables, jellyfish shut down nuclear power plants. The coming together of humans, nonhumans, and technologies echolocate infrastructural arteries for a brief time. Listening and recording can be said to generate a similar process of disturbance and revelation. In O’Keeffe’s case, turning the microphone toward a turbine intentionally distorts the smooth operating system of infrastructural ambiance. Allowing wind noise onto the recording helps glitch the field. Capturing becomes an act of inversion; it draws awareness to systems and sites integral to life, and to the impacts of practice that so often go unheard. Discussing an electrical blackout, Bennett demonstrates the multi-scalar networks that resonate beyond the electrical grid, a site “better understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood.”71 This quote alone demonstrates the plethora of sonic subjects worthy of study outside the grid itself. Each occupies the low frequencies of practice-based research; each operates the field at different scales of action, orientation, and perspective that exceed the human alone. The field differs in relation to the size and perspective of its actors. A cricket or turbine may share a similar space, yet the two operate from distinct points of view. The recordist herself is part of the multi-scalar events that vibrate the field and ensure it remains a site of mutability. Infrastructures, therefore, invite sonic ethnographies of the human and nonhuman that stretch beyond recording the object in and of itself. They lead recordists into new sites and aesthetic territories. The wind turbine is not simply a physical monument to point at and record. Permeable systems and events stretch the audible signal out of immediate sensory range and invite an ecosonic imaginary practice. Listening, recording, and editing rupture and reveal footprints so obscure and distributed that they must be inverted to be noticed. Sounding infrastructures becomes like casting a footprint. We pour listening



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into the negative space to decipher the actors and agencies at stake; we interpret knowledge with and through the recorded artifact of listening.

Summary: Circular Listening This chapter activates an eco-sonic emphasis that enables material investigations of technology as well as infusing practice-based approaches to site and sound. Focusing on the microphone and its consequent impacts upon practice, I began at the very start of a media supply chain that webs resources, fields, and subjectivities into the low frequencies of signal. Microphones, like NoisyNonself recordists, all too often slip by unnoticed in the contact zones and elsewhere fields of audition. We cannot practically hear their presence or impact, but they do exist, and they can be tracked. The improbable process of deciphering sonic footprints is entangled in research, pedagogy, and strategies of critical audition, both in the field and its elsewhere constituents. These contexts are full of irony and paradox, guided by the improbable knowledge that we hear more than sound. Maxwell and Miller claim critical enquiries “cannot stand outside the realities of planetary decline, in particular when some of the very technologies we admire and study are significant contributors to the crisis.”72 I have deployed a patchwork ethnographic approach to microphonic research, blending remote study with situated tasks, along with the critical process of listening-with artistic works. It has initiated a final recoding of the field. Like the contact zone recordist, the elsewhere ear operates within media infrastructures and multi-scalar geographies. Critical audition, whether in the field, classroom, or armchair, demands a response that is galvanized through the constant question: what am I not hearing? Echoing this query helps reverberate social relations and ensures footprints remain detectable even when they are not seen or heard. Sound capture is always connected to material political processes and impacts, in the site and studio. Hungry recordists must examine their trace as they operate contact zone asymmetries. New territories of audition open up in a time after nature, and, with it, the microphone and its phantom hand, float toward future fields. Fresh footprints are inscribed into the air. Wind turbines carve sonic niches into the acoustic ecology of place: the sound of technoculture is being drawn closer into the contemporary signal. Recording becomes a consequent act of inversion; it makes an approximate representation of a passing

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phenomenon. Sonic extraction is therefore also sonic incursion; we take but we also mark. Counterpoint issues of waste enmesh critical field recording practice. As soon as the hand grips the microphone, we plug into natural resources, labor, and health impacts. A network of relations, heard and unheard, transform back onto aesthetics and practice through a set of provocative questions: what might it mean to encourage wasteful listening, a mode of critical audition that listenswith leftovers and surplus, as both a site and aesthetic design strategy? In the same way that fossil fuels are being called to be kept in the ground, what about leaving sound in the air? Should we be encouraging lossy forms of practice that focus more on circulation than capture, fallibility as opposed to composition, letting go instead of accumulation? As we have seen in the four chapters of this book, consumption pervades all aspects of field recording. Even down to the pestilent maw of the microphone, practice is hungry. It eats thanks to the apparent limitless metabolism of technology and abundant supply of sound. But if we practice with a sensibility of finitude, might things change? Somewhere in the sonic futures of wind turbines, is there a lesson that encourages a circular economy of recording and listening, a responsive critical practice that focuses on the material processes and impacts of sound capture, routed through the ties of medianatures, a practice that pushes imaginative and aesthetic modes of engagement across all contexts of audition? Aesthetic waste, for example, would be reclaimed and reused by an eco-sonic practice. Moments of creative despair and malfunction would be part of a signal-to-noise cycle rather than ratio. Hence, the infrastructure of practice, the methods, modes, and machines of making are what is at stake here. If nothing else, this book has worked to break down and reuse the myths, identities, and materials that make up the field. I have tried to disrupt patterns of behavior and taken-for-granted assumptions in the hope that Western fields might begin to listen, record, and audition otherwise. What sites and sounds are we not hearing among the inaudible slow violence of ecological emergency? What new imprints will be cast between the frictions of heel, air, and earth?

Conclusion: Pressing Record and Pressing Play: On Suspicious Listening and Affirmative Ethics

FADE IN: you are kneeling beside a babbling stream, headphones on, microphone pointed toward water. Ears flood with the amplified rush of liquid. A light breeze flickers the leaves of a birch tree, everything shimmers. For a brief moment, you enter into watery cohabitation that threatens to submerge all practical, emotional, and intellectual registers. Looking down into the streambed you notice a luminous trail of oil snaking its way around the metallic legs of your tripod. You cannot hear oil through the headphones, but it is there. In this moment of adjustment, you listen carefully, examining whether you can hear the creak of your knee or rustle of clothing; the encounter becomes somewhat disturbed. Further downstream, you notice a mass of foam gathering within a rocky enclave. You listen with intent but cannot hear the frothy fizz among rushing water as it scoops and sculpts stones. The battery symbol begins to flash on the recorder; it is time to pack up. CROSS-FADE: you are sat at a desk, laptop open, edit suite loaded, sound files imported. You top and tail quickly, editing out the preamble of set up and positioning. You listen to a vocal descriptor, confirming it is the sound event you remember, and then cut that too. In the bubble and babble you remember the oil and froth. You know they are part of the signal, somewhere. More listening, and with time you begin to sense those presences. The auditory real and imagined become blurred. Attention drifts. Why was oil there? Why was foam collecting around rocks? You take your fieldwork online; Google Earth levitates you over the recording site. There are tourist car parks and traces of mining close by, a series of dams pinch at the landscape. More online investigation uncovers environmental reports. There may be heavy metals in the water, a consequence of run-off from nearby tailing ponds. That watery sound sounds less watery by the second.

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CUT: Equalization and filtering draw out the spectral qualities of the signal. In the play of audition, you notice an airplane that you have no memory of. At first, you think it is outside the room you are editing in until you hear it again and again with each loop of playback. It can only be the same airline that also brought you here. Taking out a notebook, you write: what does water archive beyond the audible? What stories from the upstream make the downstream? LONG CROSS-FADE: the following morning you make a new plan with new locations. You decide to record the site of the car park and to explore the dam and mining system. This may take another day or two, but that’s OK, you are here for two weeks. You pack a hydrophone in the hope of capturing the fizz of froth this time. You load batteries, cables, portable recorder, microphones, and windshields. You’ve got this down to one decent-sized rucksack and carry a tripod in hand. Before leaving, you turn on the tap for a glass of water. Staring at the ease with which it arrives you start to think the whole process is a circle; perhaps this is the site you need to record? CUT TO SILENCE. I want to begin and end with this true-fiction to exorcise the tropes of field recording. The babbling brook that is polluted, the human intervention that lies out of earshot; the processes of interpretation and loss, personal and technical, that guide the gathering, retrieval, and replay of recordings; the signals that are not heard; the thresholds crossed when entering and leaving the field; the assembly of relations that defy objectivity; the equipment packed in habits of routine; the prompts to record otherwise in the audio itself. Field recording is a paradoxical practice. We do not have to record archetypal subjects such as rivers, mines, oil, and ice to hear anthropogenic impacts. Causality is wired into the circuits of practice itself, no matter the locus or scale. Relations and counterpoints, what is heard and what is not, are enacted through the subjectivity of recordists and the medianature entanglements of technoculture. Whether the context is domestic, monumental, rural, quotidian, architectural, celestial, oceanic, or urban, the field is fabricated by those who point and press record: this is the paradox of practice that never goes away. To critically field record one must therefore carry an ear of suspicion. Whether in the contact zone or elsewhere field, there is always more to hear than sound, more to know than what is audible. Listening-with has recognized the double bind of recording and audition, as it often leaves us without: without facts, without replicas, without comprehensive knowledge. Suspicion galvanizes both ends of the spectrum and initiates an investigative sensibility all the way down. It is a practical invitation to hear beyond the signal and

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prompts a research process that emphasizes authors and technologies as prime interlocutors of meaning. Bodies and microphones are an irreducible part of practice. So, too, are natural resources and cycles of extraction, consumption, and waste. Suspicion can be leveraged as a guiding sensibility within the elastic demands of site, sound, and scale. It is a critical substitute for projects steered by ornamental curiosity. As we have seen in Chapter 2, chasing sound objects can lead to neocolonial trophies. Rather than bathing in the phenomena of the sonic, suspicion pulls listening toward its limits, the low-frequency edges of audibility that can initiate post-anthropocentric practice. It helps focus on relations rather than soundings; it animates the presence of reticent authors and is responsive to histories, subjectivities, and infrastructures often obscured. In other words, there is much to hear in the noise of the signal. This book has leaned in that direction as a constant tactic. Simple questions orientate suspicious listening. I have inverted norms that often evade inspection and unpicked universal claims to find complex answers. What is the field? Can nature be represented without musical analogy? How does technology accommodate and foreclose knowledge? Where do microphones come from and where might they end up? These lines of inquiry have established the ground for debate. They have invited critical discourse fueled by a skepticism that the field is a benevolent space, that the quietude of recordists is always empathetic, that the capture and composition of sonic nature is inconsequential, that technology is neutral. Another modest question that has been addressed is what a field recording is. It permits investigation into the documents of practice, what they are and what they do, how they are auditioned within everyday life, or the expanded spaces of teaching and learning, the studio or digital workstation. It is a question riddled with possible answers. I have come to understand field recordings, the artifacts of listening, as one version of many possible versions. They are representations based on the decisions and presence of authors, whether heard in the audible signal or not. Technical choices mediate the field: positioning, perspective, sample rates, and microphones orientate the contact zone of recording. Cuts, fades, plug-ins, compression, and layering filter the elsewhere field of the edit suite. There is a processual chain of interpretation involved in how field recordings become field recordings, passing through human, nonhuman, and technological gates along the way. There are events heard and there are those that remain out of reach.

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From the alterity of nonhuman sonic worlds to the historical—low frequency— epistemes that haunt technologies and infrastructures of contemporary culture, a field recording is evidence of a shape-shifting journey, full of silence and noise that accrues across methods and disciplines. This is not to say a field recording is an alternative fact, based on a practice that disavows truth. Rather, a field recording presents a complex palette of possible and plural meaning. Chapter 3’s example of hydrophone listening demonstrates that a recording has multiple functions due to the interpretative qualities, or truths, of its nonlinguistic capacity. Field recordings are mutable documents, yet as we have seen throughout, veracity matters, particularly when sensitive sites and subjects are at stake, and specifically when the context of meaning engages histories so often erased. Sonic knowledge offers much in terms of spatial description, media-specific metadata, and adds flesh to the bones of linguistic convention. Field recordings can be used for activism, evidential proof; as music, sonic trophies, or archival memories: they are part of a mosaic of applications. A field recording may contain novel qualities geared toward sound, but it always passes through an assembly of multisensory, technological, and contextual production, noise that prompts interpretation rather than ossification. Once again, a field recording is less a singular stamp of time and place, and more an index of the process of its making. It may reflect an environment or situation, but it is also a catalog of pre- and postproduction, whether audible or not. Field recordings, then, are vulnerable conduits of knowledge; their partial and perforated status leaves them open for use and abuse. To lean on suspicion is not to advocate a paranoid practice but to orientate production toward the backstage of listening: culturally, technologically, and subjectively. There is still much play to be had in the throes of uncertainty. This may sound strange given the scope of the climate crisis, but the practices I have examined all contain aspects of performative intervention in contrast to the traditions of sonic postcards: spectrograms, sonified models, or elegiac soundscape compositions. The examples I have drawn upon add another node in this representational mix. They are related yet offer a different pathway for practice. It is a route littered with utterances and shuffles, mistakes, and mishearing. Critical practice lurks in the bumps and frictions of production, relaying the context of construction as much as traditional signs. Hence, affirmation resides in the undoing and reassembly of hearing: practice-based knowledge leaks from the process of listening-with and without.

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What constitutes a critical field recording practice, accountable to the demands of the present, turns suspicion toward the self, the Anthropos, and its manifold footprints. Here, we arrive at another simple question: how to listen back? This can be approached by splitting the query in two: how to press record and how to press play? Let’s take the first part of that deliberate hard cut. To press record is to locate discussions in the site of encounter, or contact zone, and the entanglements of humans, animals, and technologies, based on asymmetrical relations of capture. I want to stress the importance of pressing record. It is necessary to ensure signals remain complex and conflictual. Prioritizing listening over recording is not for me. This type of dichotomy leverages yet another obfuscation myth: that the ear is somehow noninvasive and nontechnological. Of course, fleshy listening is useful for establishing practice over media dependency, but as Chapter 1 argued, colonization and ecocide have been built from visual and aural cultures, with and without the use of technology. To listen back, in the field, means the blinking red light of recording must continue to be released. With this acceptance, we invite the monstrous presence of the Noisy-Nonself, the conceptual figuration summoned in Chapter 1, which fed-forward across all proceeding chapters. It is a protagonist that embodies the traumas that field the field: the inaudible transparencies that mediate the power of pointing a microphone. We must press record to include this artifactual presence as a cipher to decode later, in the other end of the spectrum, when pressing play. As we have seen, there is ample opportunity to animate NoisyNonselves in the field. Methods can be mixed into the contact signal through performative soundings, the dilemma being how to do so in ways that do not become an overbearing material or conceptual trope. Either way, pressing record captures the capturer as well as the subjects at stake: bodies of authors, whether heard or not, are part of any project that claims a site. To listen back is to engage in a horrifying process of revelation filled with echoes, lacunas, and feedback. The past folds into the present as an out-kilter shadow of the real rather than entirely mimicking its shape. The epochal impact of humans is a loop that demands a renegotiation of the Anthropos, now a geological force and complicit actor in the unfolding cataclysms. This book has stressed gradations of culpability throughout any mention of the Anthropocene without getting bogged down in the niche-making game of what type of “cene” we are in. Reflecting on specific field recording examples, I have transposed questions of the Anthropos back and forth, between environments and authors, nonhumans and technology. To consider

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the actions of its makers means field recording must attend to inaudible specters: the shuffles of bodies and hiss of media; hands, wind, and footsteps; artifacts and anomalies that reside in the margins of signal. Pressing record is vital in the enactment of responsibility it brings; it commits to the serious play of recording otherwise. It does not resolve the field but agitates and mixes its actors and staging. Accountable fieldcraft is therefore one that listens back as part of an ecologically valid practice, not in nostalgia, but as a seething version of what it means to be ethically present. And so we arrive at pressing play: auditioning elsewhere. I have pressed play in several situations throughout my analysis. On the bus, in the library, at home, in class, alone, together, over speakers or headphones. The site in which playback occurs is another field that fields the field. One cannot claim to hear a recorded environment in isolation. The site of listening is like a superimposition, always multiple, always more than, always a construction of sites, stretched and often on the move, reiterating and melding rather than residing as a static object. To listen back, we need strategies to hear that which may not be apprehensible. Tina Campt’s interpretative methodology, of tuning toward the low frequencies, has facilitated such a demand. It enacts a mesh for gathering elusive remnants, the obscure and inverted remains that shadow sonic signs. It is a receptor I have operated with the help of a constant question: what am I not hearing? The mechanical thresholds of audibility, infra- and ultrasound, are part of this residual container. So too are the cultures, subjectivities, and technological epistemes that are hidden within recorded signals. These have included histories of colonization, situated and site-sensitive knowledges; they have included the media ecological web of causality that makes recording possible in the first place. None of these low frequencies are necessarily evidenced as signal, but they persist in playback as part of the pedagogical assemblage of meaning. To some extent, low frequencies can be thought of in the conventions of context, as informatic knowledge that thickens sound itself. Sound studies, the cultural-historical arm of sonic practice, has facilitated this mix along with literature from postcolonial scholarship and the environmental humanities. However, I would claim none of these fused contexts clarifies meaning. Searching, researching, and rehearing cultural fault lines only troubles knowledge further. This is due to the demands placed on pressing play. To listen back with layers of information compounds the process of interpretation; it does not close the case. A critical new question emerges as a consequence: how has my listening changed? The case of bird mimicry in Chapter 2 is a useful

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example to remember here. The uncanny sounds of a magpie mimicking sirens in the context of anthropogenic change glitches knowledge, makes meaning all the more anxious, all the more multiple. As Donna McCormack reminds us, “our ethical responsibility is to listen to what we cannot understand, as well as the familial and the comprehensible.”1 To seek out the low frequencies, to listen back, is therefore a search for impossible signals that stubbornly persist. We discover them through staged auditory analysis, mixing acoustic, spatial, and technical interpretation with cultural analysis elsewhere. We investigate and discover more than sound, and more than sense, by listening again and again: what am I not hearing morphs into how has my listening changed? This process of questioning, and the back and forth of incremental inquiry, has been reflected by the pedagogical sensibility across this book, practically with people and methodologically in terms of my own multimodal research. The point is not to affix learning back into a canonical framework but to steer critical practice toward issues of responsibility, ethics, and impacts, facilitated by a productive sense of suspicion: toward the self, toward the medium, toward technology and media. Capture begins before capture. Listening leaks as sound precedes recording and propagates long after we press stop, never mind play. Materials and minerals, histories and cultures, bring sound to ears through chains of accumulation, distortion, and approximation. This is why we need Campt’s low frequency strategy, to account for all that is around and between pressing record and pressing play. In this sense, field recordings are ripe for critical audition. Chapter 1 discussed attempts at hearing absent authors, Chapter 2 described listening to bird mimicry, Chapter 3 reflected on the tensions in site-specific knowledge, and Chapter 4 performed a geopolitical deconstruction of the microphone. I have come to view the arena of learning as a place in which field recordings have huge purchase. Listening back in the context of teaching situates the recorded document much like a text, to critically analyze and interpret. Suspicion is a vital tether for this context of listening, albeit an elastic one that must bend and flex with the paradox of practice. During the introduction of this book, I flagged a gap in hope that can often freeze students and lecturers alike. This is a fissure brought about by despair at the seemingly insurmountable inequalities, extractions, and losses inflicted upon humans and nonhumans in the face of anthropogenic climate change. I also mentioned how neither this book nor field recording could plug that gap. I still believe this to be true, but now, as I reflect on the preceding chapters, it is

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clear that critical practice pushes ethical responsibility, whether pressing record or pressing play. Drawing attention to the Western myths and constructions that field the field, I have endeavored to recode rather than record, to upturn in the hope that new shoots might emerge. Much of this study involves bending practice back onto itself. It requires an investigation into the transparencies, silences, and erasures that allow capture to be deemed inconsequential, the field to be presumed separate, nature to be plundered as infinite, and technology to be practiced as anonymous. Even the most discreet aspects of field recording such as the flicking decibel meter have been queried; its legacy trail within eugenics measurement provides a low frequency counterweight to what appears banal decision making. This is why suspicion is important. Hope may not be the right word in this context; it may well be out of sight, but it is still needed. If it is too distant a project, too rose-tinted by its utopian tracks, perhaps Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “affirmative ethics,” which I explicate soon, can exorcise the eco-grief that threatens to subsume minds, bodies, and practices. Of course, melancholia and mourning are not merely negative passions; they too can generate solidarity. Clearly, I am not advocating a shiny, happy practice. The examples I have given often border on the absurd and monstrous, flawed and fragile. But in this moment of conclusion, I am preoccupied with the classroom as a sustainable space for field recording, a place that can nurture and probe practice as a critical and shared endeavor. I am interested in the student body unable to comprehend political inertia amid mass extinction and the aspiring field recordist who may not have access to resources, or who might be experiencing geopolitical traumas first hand. I am thinking about well-being across scholarly and artistic contexts, and the need to record for the purpose of connection, of hope. Wrapped around all of this is the need for community. Listening After Nature, it is necessary to keep pressing record and to keep pressing play. Braidotti claims affirmative ethics is the “collective practice of constructing social horizons of hope, in response to the flagrant injustices, the perpetuation of old hierarchies and new forms of domination.”2 These lessons persist in the horrifying knowledge that colonization leaks back and forth across practice and time. As Saidiya Hartman so eloquently states, the afterlife of slavery is more one of “temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement.”3 Among the ongoing traumas of colonization, McCormack claims the “need for a listening community is

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central.”4 The postcolonial remit of witnessing the unspeakable means aural “responsibility is a shared endeavor.”5 Hope finds flight in the responsibility of attention, in noticing all that is often obscure and inaudible. This is not stable or recognizable ground; it is felt and full of friction and unease, of suspicion and ambiguity. For Susan Sontag, hope arrives out of such uncertainty; it “is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”6 bell hooks, known for her pedagogical work on hope and community, demonstrates the need to go beyond negative critique in research: “When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away.”7 As each chapter in this book brought its critique upon the field, nature, site, and technoculture, each corresponding practice provided an affirmative counterweight. My task has been to weave the horrors that field fields without resigning practice to a nihilistic loop of representation, one that denies hope or repair. It is one thing to hear unhearable pasts and future frictions, but it is another to treat sites, bodies, and technologies as condemned to dereliction and despair. The affirmative task of ethics is to take responsibility: in recording, listening, and representing more-than-human worlds. Chapter 3 argued that this is not the sole concern of practitioners. Duty of care falls across an assemblage of actors that generate and audition works. Sound demands rehearing; its meaning is made by pressing play as much, if not more, than pressing record. The shift I want to make, then, as I enter the final stages of this book, is from listeningwith to practicing-with. What would a community of critical practice look like within the context of learning? Braidotti claims that “affirmative relations are achieved through the praxis of reaching adequate understanding of our conditions by reworking together the negative experiences and affects that enclose us.”8 As Chapter 1 upturned the field, the attentive reader may have noticed that twothirds of contemporary practice analyzed were projects in which multiple recordists featured in a single work, this being a rare occurrence among a history of solitary and self-silent authorship. Community and shared responsibility can therefore begin, in the field, by practicing-with others. This is an invitation to expand the one-to-one traditions of subject–observer relations; it would be more than claiming field recording already practices-with nonhumans. These conventions and presumptions are structured by a multitude of problems, as we have seen. What I am interested in here is building a critical community of

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practice able to rehear itself among a web of asymmetrical actors, not for balance but for the acknowledgment of its own footprints, no matter how ghostly or audible. There must be scope for projects that reach beyond a monoculture of authorship, when pressing record and when pressing play. Antye Greie and David Michael’s respective works in Chapter 1 highlight the collective potential of the field. More examples exist and more can be made by practicing-with.9 Field games, hide and seek, call and response, and recording the recorder are all pedagogical interventions that encourage collaborative experiments that help unsettle the field. These are the types of exercises I do with students. They trouble the privilege of reticent individual capture and ensure authorship remains accountable. They help prepare the field and understand the position of the Anthropos within practice. The balance is always fine, the risk being that humans flood the signal. The critical and affirmative task is not to assert the Anthropos but to shake its status as a singular maker of meaning. In Chapter 2 I discussed the sonic rights of nature. Why not practice this topic as part of field pedagogy? Here is an example I use: working in pairs, discuss the ethics of recording, between humans and nonhumans. Write five to ten bullet points that read like a manifesto for ethical sound capture. Swap your document with another group and record under the guidance of that team’s direction. Did the task change how you listened or what you recorded? Did it hamper or facilitate? Did it clarify when and why you might press record or stop? This is not meant as a moral code of conduct but instead as an ethicospeculative tool for practice and debate, a method to acknowledge arrival and departure along with the perspectives, rights, and sensory diversity that stratify any recorded encounter. There are many exercises available. Here is another. As absurd as it might sound, why not consider the soundscape a finite resource: each time you record you take something away. Get in pairs. Each pair is limited to collecting two recordings, one per person. Discuss what you will record and why. Once you have made your recordings, come together as a whole group to discuss overlaps and differences: tally what sounds, if any, remain of the soundscape. In the context of pedagogy, community is perhaps best understood through collaboration, enacted by participative intervention. Practicing-with is more realistic in the scene of learning, as opposed to the solitary path of a solo artist or individual researcher. We still need such listeners, but there is ample opportunity, given the context I am discussing, to harness the powers of a field pedagogy that works together rather than alone. Haraway suggests that moving away from

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self-actualizing modes of knowledge production is required for staying with the trouble of increasing political and ecological crisis. Her emphasis rests on the term “sympoieses,” describing it as “a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing.”10 Haraway goes on to say sympoiesis “is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it.”11 Collaboration is a form of practicing-with; it is shared, relational, and cannot exist in and of itself. We learn this lesson through sound. As a medium it needs contact, friction, and the coming together of things to exist even at the mechanical level. Contrary to its individuated histories, field recording harbors a latent potential for practicing-with. Communities have exclusions like all systems, but in the context of learning, the point is to build a critical ecology of practice from the bottom up, to practice-with the thresholds of meaning, with other humans and other animals. This work must carry through to elsewhere fields such as the studio. The space of solitary editing can be reworked as a collaborative event for decision making, if and when projects are practiced-with. Pressing play, we diffuse those documents into the arena of critical audition, coming together to analyze and propel the following questions: what am I not hearing? How has my listening changed? Communities stretch across the field, studio, and playback environment: the contact zones and elsewhere fields that demand collective response. Field recording has community in terms of audience and following, but it is rarely practicedwith as a constant critical intervention, when pressing record or pressing play. Perhaps it is through such community, built on pedagogical and collaborative intervention, that affirmative ethics can enter the scene. If there is to be an ecology of practices, practices must not be defended as if they are weak. The problem for each practice is how to foster its own force, make present what causes practitioners to think and feel and act. But it is a problem which may also produce an experimental togetherness among practices, a dynamics of pragmatic learning of what works and how. This is the kind of active, fostering “milieu” that practices need in order to be able to answer challenges and experiment changes, that is, to unfold their own force.12

Practice unfolds critically, as Stengers claims in the preceding quote, when it comes together. Stengers’s writing is aimed at the cross-disciplinary potential of collaboration, something field recording accommodates through its application in subjects such as geography, social science, engineering, and anthropology. But

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an intra-ecology of critical practice is what I am offering here. It is not without its limits and it does not plug the gap in hope. It arrives slowly and quietly among the performative lacunas of technology, presence, sound, and site. Within these obscured relations, critical imagination searches to hear that which is not necessarily audible. Coming together to do so as part of a community of practice, facilitated by pedagogical experimentation, can generate affirmative ethics and help maintain buoyancy. Encouraged by the productive, not paranoid, force of suspicion, practicing-with might ensure the myths that propagate the field do not go unchallenged.

Notes Introduction 1 I capitalize “Nature” to emphasize its rarefied conception as a separate or pristine object in Western ontology. From here on it is written in lowercase but the emphasis remains. It will only be capitalized when the title Listening After Nature appears in the body of the text. 2 Kathryn Yusoff claims current Anthropocene debate whitewashes the fact that people of color have been living and dying through extinction in relation to historic and contemporary legacies of slavery. Yusoff frames this context through what she calls “double dispossession,” a term that concatenates the displacing effects of slavery and the consequent construction of race. See Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Listening After Nature does not examine or add to the various “cenes” that have been ascribed across the environmental humanities in terms of culpability. 3 For historic contextualization, see Joeri Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). For artistic themes, see Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, eds., In the Field: The Art of Field Recording (Devon: Uniform Books, 2013). For a critical deconstruction, see Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 87–121. 4 Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21 (2) (2015): 230–5. See also Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2 (1) (2013): 20–34. 5 “Post-natural” is a term that arrives as a consequence of the proposed Anthropocene era. It refers to the irrevocable impact humans have had upon nonhuman species and phenomena and indicates nature can no longer be conceptualized or practiced as separate from human culture; see Mark Peter Wright, “Post-Natural Sound Arts,” Journal of Sonic Studies (2017). Available online: https://www.resear​chca​talo​gue.net/view/292​319/292​320/0/0 (accessed August 2019).

160 Notes 6 I capitalize “Field” to stress the fabricated nature of its making. Chapter 1 discusses this context at length in terms of its historic constructions and contemporary impacts. Although the term often refers to a disciplinary context, it is used primarily in this book when discussing a location or site in which a recorded encounter takes place. From here on it is written in lowercase but the emphasis remains. 7 I capitalize “Ear” for the same reasons I do in the first uses of nature and the field. Once again, this is to emphasize the Western ear that has constructed a universal listening position. From here on it is written in lowercase but the emphasis remains. 8 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 2. 9 Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture & Society, 26 (7–8) (2009): 159–81. 10 Ibid., 160. 11 Gus Stadler, “On Whiteness and Sound Studies,” Sounding Out, July 6, 2015. Available online: https://sound​stud​iesb​log.com/2015/07/06/on-whiten​ ess-and-sound-stud​ies/ (accessed August 2019). For analysis of sound and technology in the relation to race and constructions of knowledge, see Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015); Marie Thompson, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies,” Parallax, 23 (3) (2017): 266–82. 12 Poet and scholar Claudia Rankine emphasizes the importance of studying Whiteness as part of anti-colonial work. Rankine teaches a class called “Constructions of Whiteness” where she traces various acts of legislation in which the natural subject was deemed white. Her students are encouraged to interview white people on campus to gauge awareness of the histories and prejudices tied into supremacy and privilege. Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (London: Penguin, 2020), 13–55. 13 Mark Peter Wright, “The Noisy Nonself: Towards a Monstrous Practice of Morethan-Human Listening,” Evental Aesthetics, 6 (1) (2017): 24–42. 14 Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 20. 15 Ibid., 6. 16 For more on the hope gap in media and journalism, see Robert A. Hackett et al., Journalism and Climate Crisis: Public Engagement, Media Alternatives (New York: Routledge, 2017), 188–95.

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1 Recoding the Field 1 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 12. Haraway’s quote is an improvisation on Marilyn Strathern’s work that aims to understand knowledge through the relational lens of the ethnographer-maker herself. 2 Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (London: Pelican Books, 2018). 3 Lewis and Maslin propose several chronological suspects for the Anthropocene epoch. These include fossil fuel burning industrialization (late eighteenth century) and the great acceleration period defined by the imprint of radioactive materials (mid-twentieth century). However, both propositions are preceded by what they call the 1610 “Orbis Spike.” This was the time of the Columbian Exchange, in which old and new worlds collided and fifty million people died in the Americas because of disease and famine introduced by European colonists. A dip in carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice cores during the same year is the geologic evidence Lewis and Maslin identify as the origin marker for the Anthropocene. 4 Lewis and Maslin draw on geology as the key discipline in which to evidence the material markers of the Anthropocene. Using this lens to track epochal change is ironic: it cannot be separated as a neutral process of measurement when it too is embroiled in histories of colonization by way of the natural sciences. Writing with the production of culture rather than scientific evidence, Sylvia Wynter preempts Lewis and Maslin’s time frame and epochal marker. Wynter identifies the collision of new and old worlds as the moment in which the de facto Western-Euro image of the human was established through genocide and ecocide, a moment that consigned any other form of life as undesired and disposable. Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57. Kathryn Yusoff extends Wynter’s argument for a critical Anthropocene reading beyond the science of the geological imprint, one that considers broader inscriptions of race and slavery that have led to multiple and ongoing extinctions for Black lives throughout time. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 5 I use the term “nonhuman” throughout this book to refer to animals, environments, technologies, and phenomena. It is a pragmatic device to distinguish humans and other beings for the purpose of clarity. It is not an ontological statement, separation, or philosophical position on my part. 6 Colonization is referred to throughout this book in relation to its modern time frame, from the sixteenth century and throughout the postcolonial period of

162 Notes

7

8

9

10

11

12

the mid- to late twentieth century, as well as acknowledging the continuance of its operations, legacies, and impacts in the present through a neocolonial mix of culture, economics, and infrastructure. For definitions of the colonial and postcolonial, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–19. For critique of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, see Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 9–105. See also Rutledge M. Dennis, “Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, and the Metaphysics of Race,” Journal of Negro Education, 64 (3) (1995): 243–52. Bell helped organize the first international conference on eugenics in 1912 and promoted legislative measures rather than sterilization as a means to prevent “undesirable ethical elements.” Within this context, the decibel system (dB) for sound measurement can be read as a tool of exclusion and erasure rather than benign technical numbering; see Eugenics Archive, “Alexander Graham Bell.” Available online: http://euge​nics​arch​ive.ca/disco​ver/tree/512ee​d473​4c53​99e2​c000​ 001 (accessed February 2020). For analysis of Galton and measurement, see Subhadra Das, “Francis Galton and the History of Eugenics at UCL,” UCL Blogs (October 22, 2015), https:// blogs.ucl.ac.uk/muse​ums/2015/10/22/fran​cis-gal​ton-and-the-hist​ory-of-eugen​ ics-at-ucl/ (accessed September 2019). Jim Holt, “Measure for Measure: The Strange Science of Francis Galton,” New Yorker (January 16, 2005), https:// www.newyor​ker.com/magaz​ine/2005/01/24/meas​ure-for-meas​ure-5 (accessed September 2019). Latimer (1848–1928), the son of fugitive slaves, was an electrical pioneer and patent draftsman who worked with Bell and Edison; see Brentin Mock, “Meet Lewis Latimer, the African American Who Enlightened Thomas Edison,” Grist (February 11, 2015), https://grist.org/clim​ate-ene​rgy/meet-lewis-lati​mer-the-afri​ can-ameri​can-who-enli​ghte​ned-tho​mas-edi​son/ (accessed September 2019). To remind the reader, I use the term “low frequency” in relation to Tina Campt’s method for noticing that which exists beyond the frame of a subject, the edges and margins of representation. Although low frequencies, in the context of sound practice, might immediately refer to sounds below the mechanical range of human hearing, its use here focuses on noticing the histories, actors, and contexts that might otherwise be deemed inaudible. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall makes clear that the West is a historical concept, not a location, that has enabled the systemic and categorical separation of nature and culture, the developed and developing. Stuart Hall, “The West and the

Notes

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26

163

Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Essential Essays: Identity and Diaspora Volume 2, ed. David Morley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 141–84. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 26. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. Ibid., 17. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 319. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993), 6. Carl Stumpf, quoted in Eric Ames, “The Sound of Evolution,” Modernism/ modernity, 10 (2) (2003): 320. Bernth Lindfors, Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1999). Ames, “The Sound of Evolution,” 301. Technologies that facilitate the electrical capture of field recordings compound the pervasive reach of colonization. Sound scholar Jacob Smith shows how sonic formats and media were dependent upon nonhuman agents such as the Lac Beetle, which formed the resin for shellac disc production. Natural resources including rubber, resin, and copper, ingredients so vital to the communication industry, were part of the colonial extraction project. Mined from the ground or gum of trees, such elements helped build media and recording technologies that practices such as ethnomusicology and, later, nonhuman field recording would come to rely upon. Jacob Smith, Eco-Sonic Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). I attend to the material footprint of field recording specifically through the microphone in Chapter 4. Kofi Agawu, quoted in Radano and Olaniyan, Audible Empire, 338. Manifest Destiny was an ideology and system that underpinned claims by white Americans that they had the divine right to settle in the continent of North America via the erasure and removal of native populations. For a situated reading of indigenous displacement and the cultural erasures of settler colonialism, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (London: Penguin, 2020), 16–21. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 50. John Wesley Powell, quoted in Mikey Harte, Songcatchers (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2003), 25. For a historical analysis of Powell, see

164 Notes Curtis M. Hinsley Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology 1846–1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 125–43. The quote is comparable to another from acoustic ecology pioneer R. Murray Schafer, speaking in relation to sound preservation: “Which sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or destructive sounds will become conspicuous enough and we will know why we must eliminate them.” R. Murray Schafer, Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 2nd ed. (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), 205. 27 Within this Western line of inquiry, it is important to note that anthropologists and scholars of color such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alain Locke were involved in the production of their own identity via fieldwork. “African American scholars were attracted to anthropology during the Harlem renaissance because they saw the discipline as a way of documenting and celebrating their African heritage” (Baker, From Savage to Negro, 143–4). 28 Roshanak Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 19. Author Teju Cole also speaks of the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” a contemporary industry fueled by sentimentality and slacktivism. Discussing the film Kony (2012), in which its American filmmakers attempted to raise awareness around the enforcement of children as soldiers in parts of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cole suggests the white savior parachutes in thanks to its privileged distance while denying the agency of people situated in complex sites of displacement and trauma; see Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things (New York: Faber & Faber, 2016), 340–9. 29 For context on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, see Human Zoos, “The World Comes to St Louis.” Available online: https://humanz​oos.org/2018/01/01/ the-world-comes-to-st-louis/ (accessed September 2019). 30 Wikipedia Creative Commons, “Frances Densmore Recording Mountain Chief.” Available online: https://comm​ons.wikime​dia.org/wiki/File:Frances_Densmor​e_re​ cord​ing_​Moun​tain​_Chi​ef2.jpg (accessed September 2019). 31 Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear, 33. 32 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 271–313. For analysis of the Mountain Chief image, see Joan M. Jenson and Michelle Wick Patterson, eds., Travels with Frances Densmore: Her Life, Work, and Legacy in Native American Studies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 409–20. 33 Library of Congress, “Voices from the Dustbowl.” Available online: http://mem​ory. loc.gov/cgi-bin/amp​age?col​lId=afcts&fileN​ame=cor​001/cor​001.db&rec​Num=4

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(accessed March 2020). In addition to making surreptitious recordings of subjects, Lomax developed the method “cantometrics” to categorize folk songs within their social context of production rather than pitch, timbre, or stylistic Western attributes. Employing a five-point scale, folk field recordings could be measured or profiled into a system for archival and interpretative purposes. For analysis of this controversial system, see Patrick E. Savage, “Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics Project: A Comprehensive Review,” Music & Science, 1 (2018): 1–19. 34 Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field, 8–9. For more on the implications of technologies such as the spectrogram, see Rachel Mundy, “Birdsong and the Image of Evolution,” Society and Animals, 17 (2009): 206–23. 35 Albert R. Brand, quoted in Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 135. 36 Signal-to-noise is a measurement in science that compares the signal or source of a sound to its level of background ambiance or noise. The desire in most applications is to get as high a signal as possible. 37 The term “ghost species” refers to animals that have been outlived by their environments. They function as spectral entities due to the impossibility of their future. For further analysis, see Robert Macfarlane, “Ghost Species,” Granta, July 7, 2008. Available online: https://gra​nta.com/ghost-spec​ies/ (accessed September 2019). 38 Listen to the recording and view metadata, see The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Northern).” Available online: https:// maca​ulay​libr​ary.org/asset/6784 (accessed September 2019). 39 Ludwig Koch received much acclaim within wildlife sound recording contexts. His “sound pictures,” which combined wildlife recordings, texts, and imagery were distributed across the UK through publications in addition to a weekly BBC radio broadcast during the 1940s. Along with the likes of Jeffery Boswell, Albert R. Brand, and Jean Claude-Roche, Koch tapped into the enthusiastic vein of natural historians, wildlife experts, and hobbyists along with scientific and archival communities. Ethnomusicology’s focus on man-made music was replaced with the music of nature. See Julian May, “Ludwig Koch and the Nature of Music,” BBC, 2009. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/pro​gram​mes/b00jn​4m2 (accessed February 2020). 40 To remind the reader, I use the term “listen-with” as a mode of auditioning sounds both within and outside the field. It is a sensibility that steers my listening across a plethora of subjects, rather than listening “to” or “for” sound as an object. 41 David Michael, “Microphones Are Not Ears,” Carbonmade, 2016. Available online: https://davidm​mich​ael.car​bonm​ade.com/proje​cts/6553​880 (accessed February 2020).

166 Notes 42 Ibid. 43 Ernst Karel, “Occupational Sounds: Michael Rockefeller’s Tapes from Netherlands New Guinea, 1961,” Points of Listening, June 22, 2015. Available online: https:// points​ofli​sten​ing.wordpr​ess.com/2015/06/22/pol-17-occup​atio​nal-sou​ndsmich​ael-rocke​fell​ers-tapes-from-neth​erla​nds-new-gui​nea-1961/ (accessed September 2019). 44 Spivak, quoted in Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006), 164. 45 For analysis, see Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest (New York: HarperCollins, 2014); and Michael Maher, “Cannibal Mystery: New Evidence in Michael Rockefeller Disappearance,” BBC, April 17, 2014. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/av/magaz​ine-27053​172/canni​bal-myst​ery-new-evide​nce-in-mich​ael-rock​efel​ ler-disapp​eara​nce (accessed September 2019). 46 Gerard Zegwaard, “Headhunting Practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea,” American Anthropologist, 61 (6) (1959): 1020–42. 47 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 32–9. See also, Iain Findlay-Walsh, “Sonic Autoethnographies: Personal Listening as Compositional Context,” Organised Sound, 23 (1) (2017): 121–30. 48 In the CD liner notes, Westerkamp refers to gatherings of humans as equivalent to a “meat salad.” See “Kits Beach Soundwalk,” in Transformations [CD] (Montreal: Empreintes Digitales, 1989). Available online: https://electr​ocd.com/en/ piste/imed_1​031-1.3 (accessed March 2020). 49 See https://arch​ive.org/deta​ils/SonicW​ildC​ode-rec​ordi​ngs (accessed December 2020). 50 Netta Norro, “Hybrid Landscapes, Ecology and DIY in the Wild,” Hybrid Matters, October 11, 2015. Available online: https://fie​ldno​tes.hybrid​matt​ers.net/posts/hyb​ rid-lan​dsca​pes-ecol​ogy-and-diy-in-the-wild (accessed March 2020). 51 Antye Greie-Ripatti et al., “(sonic) Wild Code,” Hybrid Matters, October 11, 2015. Available online: https://fie​ldno​tes.hybrid​matt​ers.net/posts/sonic-wild-code (accessed December 2020). 52 Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 8. 53 For a historical and contemporary analysis of Sami context, see David Crouch, “Sweden’s Indigenous Sami People Win Rights Battle against State,” The Guardian (February 3, 2016), https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/world/2016/feb/03/swe​denind​igen​ous-sami-peo​ple-win-rig​hts-bat​tle-agai​nst-state (accessed March 2020) . 54 Further examples can be found in works such as Mumbai Diaries (2010) by Bettina Wenzel, who layered her vocal song into the landscape. Wild Protest (2016) by

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Thomas Tilly and noise artist Junko Hiroshige also utilize the nonlinguistic voice as a locative device between bodies and environments. 55 Pettman, Sonic Intimacy, 74. 56 Haraway’s essay insists on treating nature without reification and instead recognizes its radical alterity. In glimpsing knowledge rather than claiming absolute certainty, new “effects of connection, embodiment and responsibility” can be made. Her monstrous focus resides in diffractive methods of knowledgemaking, emphasizing the disruption of linearity, identity, and meaning. Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295–337. 57 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (2) (Winter 2009): 197–222. 58 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M2. 59 Ibid., 2–3. 60 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Social Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7. 61 Ibid., 8. 62 Ibid., 22. 63 Jeffrey J. Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), ix–x. 64 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3. 65 Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 218. 66 Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” in The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 79. 67 Maria Beville, The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film (New York: Routledge, 2014), 65. 68 Cohen, Monster Theory, 20. 69 Marie Thompson, “Productive Parasites: Thinking of Noise as Affect,” Cultural Studies Review, 18 (3) (2012): 19. 70 Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin, “From Intersectionality to Interference: Feminist Onto-epistemological Reflections on the Politics of Representation,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 41 (3) (November 2013): 171–8.

168 Notes 71 Theodor Adorno, quoted in Richard Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 297. 72 David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds., Keywords in Sound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 129–30. 73 Schafer, Soundscape, 4. 74 Ibid., 132. 75 For an analysis of noise via philosopher Michel Serres, see Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 41–85. 76 Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer,” in Ciné-ethnography, ed. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 100. 77 Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), 139. 78 Cohen, Monster Theory, 5. 79 Christopher DeLaurenti, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop [CD] (New York: GD Stereo, 2015). 80 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. 81 Joshua Comaroff and Ker-Shing Ong, Horror in Architecture (New York: Oro Editions, 2013), 122. 82 Ibid. 83 Among its many present-day uses, the site hosts an acoustic lab and facilitates film shoots. 84 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound Affect and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), xiv. 85 Philosopher Timothy Morton uses the term “hyperobject” to describe anthropogenic materials such as nuclear waste or plastic. For further analysis, see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

2 Constructing Nature 1 Hildegard Westerkamp, “Speaking from Inside the Soundscape,” in The Book of Music & Nature, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 149. 2 Foley sound was historically employed in film and radio productions. It now covers a range of contemporary contexts including game design and theater. Jack Foley

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is credited with propelling the art during the post-silent film era, a time when many films needed sound to be reproduced back onto the silent images of the previous era. For analysis of this context, see Benjamin Wright, “Footsteps with Character: The Art and Craft of Foley,” Screen, 55 (2) (Summer 2014): 204–20. 3 For analysis of industrial farming, see Yuval Noah Harari, “Industrial Farming Is One of the Worst Crimes in History,” The Guardian, September 25, 2015. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/books/2015/sep/25/ind​ustr​ial-farm​ ing-one-worst-cri​mes-hist​ory-ethi​cal-quest​ion (accessed February 2020). 4 Schafer, Soundscape, 4. 5 Schafer developed the categories “lo-fi” and “hi-fi” to order and group environmental sounds. He strived for hi-fi soundscapes, those with a greater signal-to-noise ratio. For Schafer, low-level ambiance or background noise within less populated, less industrialized areas were favored as they provided greater clarity for discrete and specific sounds to emerge. Contrary to this were “lo-fi” areas, where the signal-to-noise ratio emphasized background ambiance, muddied the acoustic perception of foreground sounds, and were therefore deemed erasable. 6 For a critical analysis of Schafer’s work, see Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound, 87–121. 7 Jonathan Sterne, “The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio,” in Sound Souvenirs: Studio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and José Van Dijck (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 55–65. 8 A. C. Isenberg, “The Moral Ecology of Wildlife,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 60. 9 For an analysis of this specific example, see Miguel Isaza, “Sound, Memory and Environmental Awareness, an Exclusive Interview with Cheryl Tipp,” Sonic Field, September 16, 2013. Available online: http://son​icfi​eld.org/sound-mem​ory-andenviro​nmen​tal-awaren​ess-an-exclus​ive-interv​iew-with-che​ryl-tipp/ (accessed February 2020). 10 Sterne, “The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio,” 55. 11 Ibid., 58. 12 I scare-quote “we” to acknowledge there is no singular universal human being or one geographic location. With the differing stakes and accountabilities of the Anthropocene, it is vital to acknowledge “we” as a stratified marker of power and positionality. Dominic Pettman’s writing on the Nasa Voyager Disc is a useful and playful way to animate this point within the preservation paradox context; see Dominic Pettman, Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 123–7. 13 It is worth noting that along with Schafer, original members of the WSP included all male composers Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, and Barry Truax.

170 Notes 14 Emily Doolittle, “Animal Sounds or Animal Songs,” Journal of Music, July 9, 2012. Available online: https://jou​rnal​ofmu​sic.com/focus/ani​mal-sou​nds-or-ani​ mal-songs (accessed February 2020). 15 Doolittle states, “Whereas animal song imitations by earlier composers typically stand in opposition to their usual musical language, for Messiaen, birdsongs were at its core. In Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1958), a 165-minute work for solo piano, for example, each movement is based on transcriptions of the song of a single species.” Emily Doolittle, “Crickets in the Concert Hall: A History of Animals in Western Music,” Trans-Transcultural Music Review, Trans 12 (2018). Available online: https://www.sibetr​ans.com/trans/artic​ulo/94/crick​ets-in-the-conc​ ert-hall-a-hist​ory-of-anim​als-in-west​ern-music (accessed February 2020). 16 Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (London: Profile Books, 2012), 9–10. 17 The contemporary field presents this irony through the work of Krause and acoustic ecology, books including Animal Music Sound and Song in the Natural World (2015), and the work of artists such as David Rothenberg, a professor and jazz composer who frequently performs and improvises with animals such as whales and birds. See artist website for more information: http://www.davi​drot​ henb​erg.net/ (accessed February 2020). 18 Acoustic Ecologist John Drever proposed that compositions, made from environmental sound recordings, can be considered sensory forms of ethnographic representation; see John Drever, “Soundscape Composition: The Convergence of Ethnography and Acousmatic Music,” Organized Sound, 7 (1) (2002): 21–7. Barry Truax put forward a critical methodology for composing environmental sounds; see Barry Truax, “Soundscape Composition as Global Music: Electroacoustic Music as Soundscape,” Organized Sound, 13 (2) (2008): 103–9. 19 For the competition winner, see BBC, “Sir David Attenborough’s Archive Recordings Get the Trance Treatment,” October 31, 2019. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entert​ainm​ent-arts-50248​158 (accessed February 2020). It is interesting to note that field recording’s relationship with music was cemented during the 2019 Glastonbury Festival in which ocean sounds, recorded by Chris Watson, were broadcast on the main stage before Attenborough’s public address. 20 For the competition call, see Eoin Murray, “David Attenborough Seeks Remixes for His Old Field Recordings,” DJ Mag, May 8, 2019. Available online: https://djmag. com/news/david-atten​boro​ugh-seeks-remi​xes-his-old-field-rec​ordi​ngs (accessed February 2020). 21 For specific examples and discussion, see Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear, 41–50.

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22 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 150. 23 Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!),” 26. 24 Ibid., 23. 25 Paulo Tavares, “Nonhuman Rights,” in World of Matter, ed. Inke Arns (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 51. 26 For the rights of nature, see Global Alliance, “What Are the Rights of Nature?” Available online: https://www.garn.org/rig​hts-of-nat​ure/ (accessed December 2021). Two related examples can be found in politics and media. See Rainforest Rescue, “Plaintiff to BP for Nature’s Rights in Ecuador’s Constitutional Court,” November 26, 2010. Available online: https://www.rai​nfor​est-res​cue.org/ news/3237/plaint​iff-to-bp-for-nat​ure-s-rig​hts-in-ecua​dor-s-con​stit​utio​nal-court (accessed March 2020); see Jeffrey Boswell, “The Ethics of Wildlife film Making,” BKSTS Journal, 64 (1) (1998). For more on nonhuman witnessing and rights, see Christopher Stone, “Should Trees have Legal Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review, 45 (1972): 450–501; Elizabeth Povinelli, “Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Politics of Apprehending Australian Aboriginal Labor,” American Anthropologist, 97 (3) (1995): 505–18. 27 Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). 28 See European Union Intellectual Property Office, “Trade Mark without Text/005170113,” 2008. Available online: https://euipo.eur​opa.eu/eSea​rch/#deta​ils/ tra​dema​rks/005170​113 (accessed February 2020). 29 Raven Chacon, “Xwélalà:m, Raven Chacon’s Report,” in Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 107. 30 Although Cox advocates a global exoticism of sound, he does acknowledge the quotidian. The book begins with an anecdote about being in a sewer, for example, an experience he describes as repulsive. The subterranean journey is only engaging for Cox when he brackets sound from vision, and smell, to focus on the sonority of the space rather than its multisensory ecologies. 31 Trevor Cox, Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 17. 32 Ecotourism is a form of tourism motivated by the travel and witnessing of fragile ecosystems or biodiverse regions. 33 Cox, Sonic Wonderland, 179. 34 Trevor Cox, “15 Musical Wonders to See—and Hear,” National Geographic, August 5, 2019. Available online: https://www.nat​iona​lgeo​grap​hic.co.uk/tra​vel/2019/08/15musi​cal-wond​ers-see-and-hear (accessed February 2020).

172 Notes 35 See New York Times, “Travel Sound from the World,” September 21, 2018. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/inte​ract​ive/2018/09/21/magaz​ine/voya​ges-tra​ vel-sou​nds-from-the-world.html?mtr​ref=www.goo​gle.com&gwh=8D799​9EB9​ E9FA​55A3​57BC​05F0​562C​4D5&gwt=pay&assetT​ype=REGIW​ALL (accessed February 2020). 36 Bruyninckx, Listening in the Field, 11. 37 For “Dark Ecology” analysis see, Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press), 2016. We can understand the term in relation to Michael’s discussion through the following quote: There is no metaposition from which we can make ecological pronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the sunny, affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest ecological art would linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference. With dark ecology, we can explore all kinds of art forms as ecological: not just ones that are about lions and mountains. (Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 17)

38 Chris Watson, “Cracking Viscera,” in Outside the Circle of Fire [CD] (London: Touch, 1998). For a related yet entirely different encounter with nonhuman sonic intimacy, see, Annea Lockwood, Tiger Balm [LP] (Sydney: Black Truffle, 2017). 39 Chris Watson and Z’ev, East African Nocturne [CD] (London: Touch, 2010). 40 Louise Du Toit, “The African Animal Other: Decolonizing Nature,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 24 (2) (2019): 135. 41 Joanna Klein, “It’s One of North America’s Quietest Places. Along Came a Bear,” New York Times, October 16, 2017. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes. com/2017/10/16/scie​nce/quiet​est-place-north-amer​ica-bears.html (accessed February 2020). 42 Leyland Cecco, “French Musician Killed by Bear in Canada,” The Guardian, August 20, 2019. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/world/2019/aug/20/fre​ nch-music​ian-jul​ien-gauth​ier-kil​led-by-bear-in-can​ada (accessed February 2020). 43 Smith, Eco-Sonic Media, 13–41. 44 The 1960s CIA-led project “Acoustic Kitty” was an infamous case where a special agent cat had a microphone surgically implanted in its ear, a transmitter in the base of its skull, and wire entwined through its fur. For GoPro-wearing spy dolphins, see Madeline Roache, “A Beluga Whale Is Allegedly a Russian Spy. There’s a Long History of Marine Mammals in the Military,” Time Magazine, May 3, 2019. Available online: https://time.com/5582​694/russ​ian-spy-whale-hist​ory/ (accessed February 2020).

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45 For analysis of the media historical context of animals and tracking devices, see Etienne Benson, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and Making Wilderness (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2010). 46 Mike Masnick, “Moral Panics of 1878: NY Times Warns People about the Evils of Thomas Edison’s Aerophone,” Techdirt, October 8, 2014. Available online: https://www.techd​irt.com/artic​les/20140​922/1803​5428​602/moral-pan​ ics-1878-ny-times-warns-peo​ple-about-evils-tho​mas-edis​ons-aeroph​one.shtml (accessed February 2020). 47 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 140. 48 It is interesting to note that Shukin also connects elephant ivory to the material production of early-twentieth-century cellulose film. Furthermore, Shukin notes that Topsy the elephant was said to have killed three of her trainers over the duration of her incarceration. Ibid., 150–2. 49 The original “Oh Susanna” track contains racist lyrics. The song has had various translations since. For further analysis, see John Spitzer, “Oh! Susanna: Oral Transmission and Tune Transformation,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 47 (1) (Spring 1994): 90–136. I am grateful to Angus Carlyle for this source. 50 William Weir, “How ‘Jingle Bells’ by the Singing Dogs Changed Music Forever,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2010. Available online: https://www.thea​tlan​tic.com/entert​ ainm​ent/arch​ive/2010/12/how-jin​gle-bells-by-the-sing​ing-dogs-chan​ged-musicfore​ver/68273/ (accessed February 2020). 51 Musique concrète utilizes everyday sound as material for composition and combines technological processing and effects in order to transform such sounds into objects of study, in and of themselves. 52 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 53 The conservation–composition complex haunted the WSP in a way that often contradicted the ecological remit of the research group. Hildegard Westerkamp’s quote at the very beginning of this chapter highlights the point: extracting sounds and composing with them does not automatically equate to a sustainable or environmentally responsible practice. 54 David Rothenburg, “Nature’s Greatest Hit: The Old and New Songs of the Humpback,” Wire Magazine (September 2014), https://www.thew​ire.co.uk/in-writ​ing/ess​ays/ natur​e_s-great​est-hit_​the-old-and-new-songs-of-the-humpb​ack-whale (accessed February 2020). Cary O’Dell, “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” Library of Congress (2010). Available online: https://www.loc.gov/sta​tic/progr​ams/natio​nal-record​ingprese​rvat​ion-board/docume​nts/humpb​ack%20wha​les.pdf (accessed February 2020).

174 Notes 55 Denise Russell, “Capturing the Songs of Humpback Whales,” in Captured the Animal within Culture, ed. Melissa Boyd (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 116. 56 Drew Daniel, “All Sound Is Queer,” Wire Magazine, 333 (November 2011). Along with Drew Daniel it is worth noting Karen Barad’s use of the term as a deconstructive process, a method of inquiry that opens new possibilities for identity, time, space, and matter. For Barad, queering agents are found at the molecular level. Amoebas, atoms, and cells are her subjects of choice, everyday phenomena that intra-act and reterritorialize norms. Sound may well be another useful actor to add in this agential soup. See Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 19 (2) (2011): 121–58. 57 Kodwo Eshun, “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” Frieze, June 6, 2007. Available online: https://fri​eze.com/arti​cle/songs-humpb​ack-whale (accessed February 2020). 58 Mack Hagood’s extensive analysis of the Environments Series includes an in-depth reading of the artwork and ephemera that was part of the record’s appeal. Characterizing Tiebel, Hagood states he “combined the listening skills and sensitivity of a musician with the technical orientation of a scientist and the carnival claims of a snake-oil salesman.” Mack Hagood, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 121. 59 For analysis of technical processing and context around Bell Labs see, Mike Powell, “How a New Age Hustler Sold the Sound of the World,” Pitchfork, January 2017. Available online: http://pitchf​ork.com/featu​res/cover-story/rea​der/natu​ral-select​ ion/ (accessed February 2020). 60 Peter Marler, “Science and Birdsong: The Good Old Days,” in Nature’s Music: The Science of Birdsong, ed. Peter Marler and Hans Slabbekoorn (London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004), 35. 61 I am grateful to scholars Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Timothy Smith for introducing me to verbatim technique as part of their research into the method and its application in pedagogy and workshop settings. 62 Indigenous Melanesians (3000 or 2000 bce) inhabited the country until Spanish and Portuguese (sixteenth century) and, later, German and British Colonizers (nineteenth century) claimed its territory. In 1906, British New Guinea transferred powers to Australia, who controlled the majority of its regions throughout the Second World War. In September 1975, Papua New Guinea proceeded to full independence. 63 Donna McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 2. 64 Ibid., 27.

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65 Ibid., 20. 66 Ibid., 193. 67 Andrew Whitehouse, “Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World,” Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015): 53–71. 68 Gregory Andrews, “Australian Magpie Mimics Emergent Siren during NSW Bushfires,” The Guardian, January 2, 2020. Available online: https://www. theg​uard​ian.com/envi​ronm​ent/video/2020/jan/02/aus​tral​ian-mag​piemim​ics-emerge​ncy-siren-dur​ing-nsw-bushfi​res-video (accessed February 2020). 69 See BBC Studios, “Amazing! Bird Sounds from the Lyre Bird—David Attenborough—BBC Wildlife,” February 12, 2007. Available online: https:// www.yout​ube.com/watch?v=VjE0​Kdfo​s4Y (accessed February 2020). The mention of Sasquatch is a deliberate mapping onto my practice-based project that framed field recordists as elusive crypto characters similar to that of the mythos identity, Bigfoot. For analysis of the work, see Tom Jeffreys, “I the Thing in the Margins,” Learned Pig, October 23, 2015. Available online: http:// www.thelea​rned​pig.org/mark-peter-wri​ght-i-the-thing-in-the-marg​ins/2964 (accessed February 2020). 70 See Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Archive of New Zealand, “Re-creation of Huia Calls.” Available online: https://ngatao​nga.org.nz/coll​ecti​ons/catalo​gue/catalo​ gue-item?record​_id=198​333 (accessed February 2020). 71 Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 203. 72 It is worth noting here that silence is often the marker of extinction. Krause’s longitudinal work gathers its potency as environments become more and more silent. In this example, McIntyre’s practice plays with the potential of silence as a material agent for new stories rather than an elegiac signpost of extinction. 73 See Sally Ann McIntyre, “Huia Transcriptions,” 2012–13. Available online: http:// every​leaf​i san​ear.blogs​pot.com/2012/04/huia-tra​nscr​ipti​ons.html (accessed February 2020). 74 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018. 75 Helen Mirra and Ernst Karel, Map of Parallels 41ºN and 49ºN [CD] (Lisbon: Shhpuma 2015). 76 Helen Mirra, “Maps of Parallels 41ºN and 49ºN,” Shhpuma, March 2015. Available online: http://shhp​uma.com/prod​uct/helen-mirra-and-ernst-karel-maps-of-parall​ els-41on-and-49on-2/ (accessed March 2020). 77 Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 75.

176 Notes 78 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 109. 79 Ibid. 80 Robert Mendick and Edward Malnick, “BBC Accused of Routine ‘Fakery’ in Wildlife Documentaries,” The Telegraph, December 18, 2011. Available online: https://www.telegr​aph.co.uk/cult​ure/tva​ndra​dio/bbc/8963​053/BBCaccu​sed-of-rout​ine-fak​ery-in-wildl​ife-docume​ntar​ies.html (accessed February 2020). 81 For an in-depth analysis of Foley sound and wildlife documentary, listen to the podcast “Sounds Natural,” 99% Invisible, April 18, 2017. Available online: https://99p​erce​ntin​visi​ble.org/epis​ode/sou​nds-natu​ral/ (accessed February 2020). 82 Jack Shepherd, “Planet Earth 2: Viewers Complain about ‘Fake’ Sound Effects Despite BBC Explaining the Technology Isn’t Available,” Independent (November 25, 2016), https://www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/arts-entert​ainm​ent/tv/ news/pla​net-earth-2-bbc-sound-effe​cts-fake-a7438​336.html (accessed February 2020). 83 Jem Collins, “BBC to Pull Parts of David Attenborough Documentary after Animal Sounds Mix-Up,” inews (November 17, 2019), https://inews.co.uk/cult​ ure/bbc-to-pull-parts-of-david-atten​boro​ugh-docu​ment​ary-after-ani​mal-sou​ nds-mix-up-1184​944 (accessed February 2020). 84 Bret Mills, “Towards a Theory of Documentary Representation for Animals,” Screen, 56 (1) (Spring 2015): 102–7. 85 Stephanie Rutherford, Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 10. 86 Craig Eley, “When It Rains, It Pours,” Smithsonian Folkways Magazine (Fall/ Winter 2012). Available online: https://folkw​ays.si.edu/magaz​ine-fall-win​ ter-2012-when-rains-pours-sou​nds-tropi​cal-rain-for​est-amer​ica-birth-scie​nce-ser​ ies/nat​ure-world/music/arti​cle/smit​hson​ian (accessed December 2021). 87 For a review of the exhibition in 1953, see Meyer Bergen, New York: A Great Reporter’s Love Affair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 15. 88 Krause, quoted in David Toop, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004), 70. 89 Rick Altman, Sound Theory Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–31. 90 Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics, 11 (1) (Spring 1989): 75. 91 Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 101.

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92 For analysis of environmentalism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration politics, see Susie Cagle, “Bees, not Refugees: The Environmentalist Roots of Anti-immigrant Bigotry,” The Guardian, August 16, 2019. Available online: https://www.theg​ uard​ian.com/envi​ronm​ent/2019/aug/15/anti (accessed February 2020). For analysis of eco-fascism, see Richard Smyth, “Nature Writing’s Fascist Roots,” New Statesman, April 3, 2019. Available online: https://www.newst​ates​man.com/cult​ ure/books/2019/04/eco-fac​ism-nat​ure-writ​ing-nazi-far-right-nostal​gia-engl​and (accessed February 2020). 93 Decolonization being the historical process of overturning colonialism, repatriating territories, and people as sovereign subjects. The United Nations claims decolonization as its first success, see: https://www.un.org/dppa/dec​olon​izat​ ion/en (accessed December 2021). Author T. J. Demos illustrates the multitude of entwined projects needed to decolonize nature across politics, finance, philosophy, art, and scholarship, see T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 7–30. 94 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1) (2012): 1–40. 95 Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 29 (1) (2016): 4–22. 96 Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 59. 97 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 98 Leandro Pisano, “The Third Soundscape,” Third Text, 29 (1–2) (2015): 76. 99 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” 159–81. 100 For more on aesthetic imaginaries in the context of climate change and pedagogy, see Bob Jickling et al., eds., Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 101 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventure in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 1. 102 McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives, 193. 103 Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Ear Witness Theatre (2018) shifts Foley field recording into the realm of journalism. Using interview transcripts from former detainees of Saydnaya military prison in Syria, Hamdan was able to transpose a physical archive of Foley materials from witness testimony. As prisoners described a punch being like the sound of a smashed watermelon, Hamdan assembled an archive of

178 Notes related objects into Chisenhale Gallery, London, where the work was exhibited. Within the gallery context, infra-ordinary sculptures became politically charged agents tied to their sonic associations. Hamdan’s work draws an important level of detail toward the materials used in Foley practice and the significance of choosing one object over another. Further artistic examples include the work of Julie Rose Bower, Matmos, and Maria Chavez. 104 Robinson, Hungry Listening, 47. 105 Ibid., 72. 106 Haraway, When Species Meet, 300. 107 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 9.

3 Stretching Site 1 McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives, 194. 2 “Longer gaps between the events have been edited out so this track is not quite realtime. Otherwise the sounds and their order are as originally recorded.” Peter Cusack, Sounds of Dangerous Places [CD Book] (Berlin: ReR Megacorp, 2012), 55. 3 Ibid., 23. 4 “Sonic journalism occurs when field recordings are allowed adequate space and time to be heard in their own right, when the focus is on the original factual and emotional content, and when they are valued for what they are rather than as source material for further work as is often the case for sound art or music.” Ibid., 23. 5 “Non-cochlear” is a term coined by scholar Seth Kim-Cohen to describe a conceptually driven practice of sound art that does not rely on sound itself as the only material form of sonic practice; see Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Towards a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Continuum, 2009). 6 Cusack, Sounds of Dangerous Places, 53. 7 Peter Cusack, “Field Recording as Sonic Journalism,” Sounds from Dangerous Places. Available online: https://sou​nds-from-danger​ous-pla​ces.org/sonic-jou​rnal​ ism (accessed March 2020). 8 Steven Feld, “Doing Anthropology in Sound,” American Ethnologist, 31 (4) (2004): 463. 9 Ibid. 10 Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 11 Steven Feld, “Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 12. 12 Ibid., 13–14.

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13 Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 59. 14 Ibid., 111. 15 Ibid., 60. 16 Ibid., 201. 17 Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures,” in Oil Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 70. 18 See Ranken Energy Corporation’s list of petroleum products: https://www.ran​kenene​rgy.com/index.php/produ​cts-made-from-petrol​eum/ (accessed March 2020). 19 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 18. 20 One only needs to compare the bird’s eye oilfield photography by Edward Burtynsky to appreciate the differential demands that sound and image place on the receiver. Burtynsky is known for his epic portraits of manufactured landscapes captured from above. The format and perspective fix the site as an object, erasing the event-based nature of place along with the agencies and relations that unfold in such environments. 21 Hackett et al., Journalism and Climate Crisis, 10–13. 22 For analysis of truth within contemporary documentary practice, see Erika Balsom, “The Reality-Based Community,” E-Flux, #83 (June 2017). Available online: https://www.e-flux.com/jour​nal/83/142​332/the-real​ity-based-commun​ity/ (accessed March 2020). 23 John Grierson, “The First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary, ed. Hardy Forsyth (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 147. 24 In the postcolonial sonic context, Ogboh repurposes observation from a situated perspective. Field recording generates from within rather than outside. For more on this project, see: http://lagos​soun​dsca​pes.com/ (accessed January 2019). 25 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 188. 26 Slow cinema is a genre of filmmaking typified by long durational takes, reduced montage techniques, or edited cuts and transitions. Time, events, and subjects are allowed to emerge from this open style. For analysis, see Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 27 Since 2017, the DAPL has been fully operational. However, the dispute continues in the courtroom as environmental reviews are ordered; see Lisa Friedman, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Wins a Victory in Dakota Access Pipeline Case,” New York Times, March 25, 2020. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/2020/03/25/clim​ate/ dak​ota-acc​ess-pipel​ine-sioux.html (accessed March 2020).

180 Notes 28 Raven Chacon, “The Drum Not to Be Heard,” The New School. Available online: http://www.gid​est.org/fgwl-7-raven-cha​con (accessed November 2020). For more context on the DAPL in relation to indigeneity, art, and the field recording work of Raven Chacon, see Hyperallergic, “The Roles of Art and Artists at the Pipeline Protests in North Dakota,” December 3, 2016. Available online: https:// hypera​ller​gic.sim​plec​ast.com/episo​des/the-roles-of-art-and-arti​sts-at-the (accessed March 2020). 29 This anecdotal field note is based on a project I conducted between Poland and the UK (2009–11) concerning the lives of Holocaust survivors. As well as human stories, the work focused on environments, spaces, and nonhuman actors as part of an ecology of witnessing. The description of recording a tree with a contact microphone was based on direct experience at Radegast Bahnhof, Łódź, Poland, the railroad station from which Jewish prisoners were transported to concentration camps. Mark Peter Wright, Where Once We Walked [CD] (Windermere: Another Space, 2011). 30 For historic and pedagogical analysis of the stethoscope, see Anna Harris and Melissa Van Drie, “Sharing Sound: Teaching, Learning, and Researching Sonic Skills,” Sound Studies, 1 (1) (2015): 98–117. 31 For a brief history of the geophone, see New Zealand History, “Listening Underground with a Geophone,” Ministry for Culture and Heritage, March 22, 2017. Available online: https://nzhist​ory.govt.nz/media/photo/listen​ing-with-ageoph​one (accessed May 2020). 32 Also known as the Sound Fixing and Ranging (SOFAR) channel, this section of water is approximately 1,000 meters below the surface depending on location. Acoustic energies propagate efficiently in the SOFAR channel with low-frequency sound waves traveling thousands of miles. For analysis, see Robert P. Dziak, DelWayne R. Bohnenstiehl, and Deborah K. Smith, “Hydroacoustic Monitoring of Oceanic Spreading Centers: Past, Present and Future,” Oceanography, 25 (1) (2011): 116–27. 33 For analysis of recordings and declassified evidence, see William J. Broad, “Scientists Fight Navy Plan to Shut Far-Flung Undersea Spy System,” New York Times, June 12, 1994. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/1994/06/12/us/sci​ enti​sts-fight-navy-plan-to-shut-far-flung-under​sea-spy-sys​tem.html (accessed May 2020). 34 I am grateful to Sasha Engelmann for reminding me of feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis’s work in this area. Neimanis discusses accountability and knowing in relation to water as part of a leaky politics of location, both embedded and embodied, while circulating in the flows of politics, economics, and colonization. Neimanis states we should “note water’s logic of unknowability—its capacity to

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safeguard infinity, and serve as a limit to mastery.” Astrida Neimanis, “Feminist Subjectivity, Watered,” Feminist Review, 103 (2013): 32. 35 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 19. 36 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), viii. 37 Arriving out of the historical philosophy of Henri Bergson, Frederick Nietzsche, and Baruch Spinoza, new materialism’s modern-day context can be traced to feminist and post-humanist discourses that critique binaries of mind and matter, nature and culture. Such philosophies propose that humans are one of many bodies or material forces coexisting among a distributed network of subjectivities and power relations. 38 TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working Beyond the Human/Not Human,” 230–5. 39 Val Plumwood, “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 12 (4) (2001): 16. 40 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 113. 41 Susan Hekman, quoted in Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism through the Arts (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. 42 For a critical analysis of OOO, see Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 178–88. 43 Barrett and Bolt, Carnal Knowledge, 3. 44 Rosi Braidotti states the critical post-humanities “position terrestrial, planetary, cosmic concerns as serious agents and co-constructors in processes of collective thinking and knowing. These include the conventional naturalized non-human entities like animals, plants and the technological apparatus.” Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 102. 45 Schuppli, Material Witness, 108. 46 Ed Yong, “The Astonishing History Locked in Whale Earwax,” The Atlantic, November 21, 2018. Available online: https://www.thea​tlan​tic.com/scie​nce/arch​ ive/2018/11/asto​nish​ing-hist​ory-loc​ked-whale-ear​wax/576​349/ (accessed May 2020). 47 An additional example of nonhuman acoustic warfare is found via moths that deploy ultrasonic countermeasures to help baffle and reduce the efficiency of predatory bats. For analysis, see Gillian Sales and David Pye, Ultrasonic Communication by Animals (London: Chapman and Hall, 2016). 48 Spectral (2003) is the original stereo soundtrack from a video installation made in collaboration with artist David Haines and remastered at Arcadia St Studios,

182 Notes Coogee, Australia. There is no editing or composition in the postproduction sense of intentionality. 49 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 78. 50 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 37. 51 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 52–3. 52 Irit Rogoff, “Geo-Cultures: Circuits of Arts and Globalization,” Open! Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, 16: 111. 53 Ibid. 54 Clifford, Routes, 188–219. 55 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 56 Ibid. 57 Clifford, Routes, 58. 58 George E. Marcus, Ethnography through Thick & Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 118. 59 Andrea Polli, Sonic Antarctica [CD] (Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder, 2009). 60 Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s term “weather-world” speaks to the connections of earth and air, and how knowledge is produced as a form of interconnected movement between walking and breathing. Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6 (1) (2010): 121–39. 61 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14 (3) (1998): 575–99. 62 Ibid., 581. 63 Ibid., 576. 64 Andrea Polli, “Taylor Glacier,” in Sonic Antarctica. 65 Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton define the term “weathering” as a “way of understanding how bodies, places and the weather are all inter-implicated in our climate-changing world. Weathering describes socially, culturally, politically and materially differentiated bodies in relation to the materiality of place, across a thickness of historical, geological and climatological time.” Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, “Open Space Weathering,” Feminist Review, 118 (2018): 80–1. 66 I use the word “sensational” in relation to educational scholar Stephanie Springgay’s work that emphasizes sensory knowledge as legitimate, made by action and doing, see Stephanie Springgay, “The Chinatown Foray as Sensational Pedagogy,” Curriculum Inquiry, 41(5) (2011): 636–56. Elizabeth Ellsworth’s work extends sensational pedagogy. Her emphasis is on relations and affects as part of an

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68 69 70

71

72

73

74

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assemblage of meaning rather than distinct objects of knowledge or individuated data points, see Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2004). Harriet Hawkins and Anja Kanngieser, “Artful Climate Change Communication: Overcoming Abstractions, Insensibilities and Distances,” Climate Change, 8 (5) (2017): 1–12. Gregory Kramer et al., “Sonification Report: Status of the Field and Research Agenda,” Faculty Publications, 444 (2010): 4. See NASA, “Sun Sonification,” Souncloud. Available online: https://sou​ndcl​oud. com/nasa/sun-sonif​i cat​ion (accessed May 2020). Stephen Barrass and Paul Vickers, “Sonification Design and Aesthetics,” in The Sonification Handbook, ed. Andy Hunt, John G. Neuhoff, and Thomas Hermann (Berlin: European Cooperation in Science and Technology, 2011), 154. Alexandra Simon-Lewis, “Climate Change Data Is Being Transformed into Beautiful, Haunting Symphonies,” Wired, June 19, 2017. Available online: https://www.wired. co.uk/arti​cle/clim​ate-symph​ony-data-sonif​i cat​ion (accessed May 2020). Effective sonification delivers an “information aesthetic,” sensuous experience both scientific and sonically arresting. See Barrass and Vickers, “Sonification Design and Aesthetics,” 152–66. Mark Peter Wright, “Andrea Polli,” Ear Room, January 2, 2010. Available online: https://earr​oom.wordpr​ess.com/2010/01/02/and​rea-polli/ (accessed May 2020). Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, & Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005).

4 Following the Flow 1 Douglas Khan, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 19. 2 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 19. 3 In forensic science, Edmond Locard’s principle of “every contact leaves a trace” acknowledges that the perpetrator of a crime will always leave evidence of their involvement no matter how visible to the senses, fingerprints, footprints, hair, and clothing fibers being some of the microscopic elements included in what might be deemed accountable evidence. 4 Jacob Smith deploys the term “eco-sonic” to investigate the relationship between sonic media and the environmental crisis. Smith’s project seeks to “green media”

184 Notes by focusing on historical (pre-electric) practices and technologies that may offer a guide to a less energy-intensive footprint than current technologies. For further analysis, see Smith, Eco-Sonic Media. 5 Patchwork ethnography is a methodological approach and concept developed in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It recognizes the multiple spaces, subjectivities, and mediations involved in the production of site-based research that is, by necessity, remote. “Patchwork ethnography begins from the acknowledgement that recombinations of ‘home’ and ‘field’ have now become necessities.” Günel Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe, “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, June 9, 2020. Available online: https://cula​nth.org/ fiel​dsig​hts/a-manife​sto-for-patchw​ork-ethn​ogra​phy (accessed June 2020). 6 Smith, Eco-Sonic Media, 16–17. 7 Medianatures is a neologism that blends media devices and natural resources, each being inseparable from the other. For further analysis, see Jussi Parikka, Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste (Open Humanities Press, 2011). 8 Electronic waste (e-waste) is propagated by Western cultures that export discarded and obsolete electronics to “developing” countries primarily in the Global South. E-waste, through its toxic decay and intimate local and bodily encounters, produces “invisible” and ongoing geo-health inequalities. For analysis, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For analysis and reading resources on technological colonialism, see Beatrice Martini, “Decolonizing Technology: A Reading List,” Beatrice Martini—Blog, May 10, 2017. Available online: https://beat​ rice​mart​ini.it/blog/decol​oniz​ing-tec​hnol​ogy-read​ing-list/ (accessed January 2020). 9 Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 7. 10 Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 11 Devine shows that from 1977 to 2000, prior to the advent of digital downloads and streaming, greenhouse gas emissions from the music industry remained constant at around 150 million kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. By 2016, with downloads and streaming presumably reducing the stress on physical resources, production, and energy, the figure counterintuitively spikes upwards to at least 200 million kilograms of carbon dioxide per year. The storage, process, and transmission of digital content places increasing strain on energy resources and infrastructures. For further analysis, see Devine, Decomposed, 155–60. 12 According to a United Nations report in 2018, approximately 48 percent of the global population was estimated to still be offline. The West and so-called

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developed countries had the highest usership, confirming the disproportionate environmental strain of digital production and consumption. Europe has the largest share of use with almost 80 percent. Africa’s internet usership is 24 percent. See UN News, “Internet Milestone Reached as More Than 50 Per Cent Go Online: UN Telecoms Agency,” United Nations, December 7, 2018. Available online: https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/12/1027​991 (accessed January 2020). 13 Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. 14 For and in-depth geological analysis of the El Teniente site, see Charles R. Stern, M. Alexandra Skewes, and Alejandra Arevalo, “Magmatic Evolution of the Giant El Teniente Cu-Mo Deposit, Central Chile,” Journal of Petrology, 52 (7–8) (2011): 1591–617. 15 There are seventeen rare earth elements in the periodic table that are mined from the earth’s crust and form an intrinsic part of digital technology and green infrastructure such as wind turbines. For further analysis in relation to media, see Jussi Parikka, “Rare Earth Lecture,” Museum of Natural History Vienna, May 20, 2015. Available online: https://vimeo.com/128747​006 (accessed January 2020). 16 An example of this can be found in a microphone dictionary by the manufacturer DPA. The A–Z list notates everything technical about microphones but not the natural resources that allow such technology to function. See DPA, “Microphone Dictionary.” Available online: https://www.dpa​micr​opho​nes.com/mic-dic​tion​ ary#contai​ner-N (accessed January 2020). 17 For a useful list of elements used in contemporary electronics, see Maxwell and Miller, Greening the Media, 93. 18 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7. 19 Godofredo Pereira, “Geoforensics: Underground Violence in the Atacama Desert,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 591–603. 20 Amnesty International, “Is My Phone Powered by Child Labour?.” Available online: https://www.amne​sty.org/en/lat​est/campai​gns/2016/06/drc-cob​alt-child-lab​ our/ (accessed January 2020). 21 For a list of health-related effects, see Jussi Parikka, Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 95. 22 For an analysis on technological colonialism in terms of extraction, waste, and sovereignty, see Anjuan Simmons, “Technology Colonialism,” Model View Culture, September 18, 2015. Available online: https://model​view​cult​ure.com/pie​ces/tec​ hnol​ogy-colo​nial​ism (accessed January 2020). 23 Rosalind C. Morris, “The Miner’s Ear,” Transition, 98 (1) (2008): 98–9. 24 Ibid., 96.

186 Notes 25 Ibid., 105. 26 Altman, Sound Theory Sound Practice, 24. 27 Fernando Godoy, “The Remote Series II: Cu,” ABC Radio National, February 13, 2015. Available online: https://www.abc.net.au/radion​atio​nal/progr​ams/archi​ved/ sou​ndpr​oof/the-rem​ote-ser​ies-cu/6075​212 (accessed January 2020). 28 Maxwell and Miller, Greening the Media, 10. 29 I apply the term “thicken” in relation to Clifford Geertz’s development of the word in the context of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. Geertz claimed that meaning becomes “thick” through interpretive layering and analysis that folds context and subjectivity into ethnographic accounts. Rather than transmitting facts, knowledge is consequently thickened as truth claims move beyond sound bites and authorial hierarchy, and instead entangle the multiple actors, scales, and perspectives operating within the participation and mediation of place or community. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 30 For related work from a lithium mine, see Anna Friz and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, Salar: Evaporation [audio-visual installation] (Graz, Austria: ESC, 2020). 31 How Products are Made, “Fake Fur.” Available online: http://www.made​how.com/ Vol​ume-3/Fake-Fur.html#ixzz6S​9pda​7cH (accessed January 2020). 32 Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg, Media and the Ecological Crisis (New York: Routledge, 2015), xi. 33 Anthropologist Marina Peterson frames wind noise as a mode of touch, one that brings technology and mediation to the audible fore; see Marina Peterson, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 126. Composer Michael Pisaro’s reflections on microphones and wind noise via field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda’s practice is another important resource; see Michael Pisaro, “Membrane-Window-Mirror,” Surround, February 2015. Available online: http://surro​und.noq​uam.com/membr​ ane-win​dow-mir​ror/ (accessed January 2020). 34 For historical information on the material production of Røde microphones, see Paul White, “Peter Freedman Røde Microphones,” Sound on Sound, August 2005. Available online: https://www.sound​onso​und.com/peo​ple/peter-freed​man-rodemicr​opho​nes (accessed January 2020); see also Christopher Holder, “The Name behind the Name,” AudioTechnology, 33 (2012): 56–61. 35 Wikipedia, “Origins of Røde,” https://en.wikipe​dia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8de_​ Micr​opho​nes#Origi​ns_o​f_R%C3%B8de (accessed January 2020). 36 Jaron Schneider, “Behind the Business: Where Did the Name Røde Come From?” Resource Magazine, May 4, 2015. Available online: http://resour​cema​gonl​ine. com/2015/05/beh​ind-the-busin​ess-where-did-the-name-rode-come-from/51925/ (accessed January 2020).

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37 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 38 I have written about this relationship previously; see Mark Peter Wright, “The Thing about Microphones.” Leonardo Music Journal, 26 (December 2016): 60–3. 39 Masnick, “Moral Panics of 1878.” 40 White, “Peter Freedman Røde Microphones.” 41 Holder, “The Name behind the Name,” 60–1. 42 Tim Maughan, “The Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech Lust,” BBC, April 2, 2015. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/fut​ure/arti​cle/20150​ 402-the-worst-place-on-earth (accessed January 2020). 43 Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1942), 127. 44 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, 30 (2) (2004): 231. 45 World Economic Forum, “A New Circular Vision for Electronics: Time for a Global Reboot,” January 2019. Available online: http://www3.wefo​rum.org/docs/WEF_A_ New_Circ​ular​_Vis​ion_​for_​Elec​tron​ics.pdf (accessed January 2020). 46 Caroline Haskins, “AirPods Are a Tragedy,” VICE, May 6, 2019. Available online: https://www.vice.com/en/arti​cle/nea​z3d/airp​ods-are-a-trag​edy (accessed January 2020). 47 World Economic Forum, “A New Circular Vision for Electronics,” 10. 48 Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 5–13. 49 Ibid., 7. 50 Mari Shibata, “Inside the World’s Biggest E-Waste Dump,” VICE, June 11, 2015. Available online: https://www.vice.com/en_us/arti​cle/4x3​emg/ins​ide-the-wor​ldsbigg​est-e-waste-dump (accessed January 2020). 51 Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 52 Jussi Parikka and Garnet-Hertz claim physical media never dies. Hence, their term “zombie media” is deployed as a way in which to comprehend the ever-living capacities of technology. Electronics have a lifespan that persists beyond obsolescence through waste, recycling, and reenactment; in terms of health impacts as well as creative artistic strategies that seek to reclaim and reuse materials. For further analysis, see Parikka, Geology of Media, 141–53. 53 An interesting example to audition concerning the fallibility of media and practice is Thomas Tilly’s A Semiotic Survey (Paris: Ferns Recordings, 2019). The liner notes describe an album of “field recordings, electronic sounds and microphone dysfunctions.” Instead of representing nature as technologically separate, Tilly allows mediation and malfunction into the sonic scene.

188 Notes 54 Beatrice Ferrara and Leandro Pisano, “Manifesto of Rural Futurism,” Rural Futurism (2019). Available online: https://ruralf​utur​ism.com/ass​ets/temp/ Manife​sto_​eng.pdf (accessed January 2020). 55 Ibid. 56 Philip Samartzis, Perceptual Motion [digital stream] (Rural Futurism, 2017). Available online: https://www.ruralf​utur​ism.com/ (accessed January 2020). 57 Linda O’Keeffe, Silent Spring (London: Flaming Pines, 2019). 58 Linda O’Keeffe, “Listening to Ecological Interference: Renewable Technologies and their Soundscapes,” paper presented at Balance Unbalance Conference, Plymouth University, 2017. 59 Paul Cryan et al., “Behavior of Bats at Wind Turbines,” PNAS, 111 (42) (2014): 15126–31. 60 For a succinct analysis of wind turbines in relation to finance, environmental, and societal impacts, see Helene Gaudin, “Implications of the Use of Rare-Earth Elements in the Wind Energy Market,” Sustainalytics, July 11, 2019. Available online: https://www.sus​tain​alyt​ics.com/esg-blog/impli​cati​ons-rare-earth-windene​rgy-mar​ket/ (accessed January 2020). 61 Brian Larkin, “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (2013): 329. 62 Rahul Mukherjee, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment and Cultures of Uncertainty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). For further analysis of electromagnetic radiation in the context of art, see Mark Peter Wright, “Go Live in the Middle of Nowhere Obviously,” Unlikely Journal, 6 (2020). Available online: https://unlik​ely.net.au/issue-06/mid​dle-of-nowh​ere (accessed November 2020). 63 This specific example is linked to a personal experience of recording the Tellenes Wind Farm in southern Norway as part of a practice-based project in the area. It is also the site pictured on the cover image of this book. For corporate information on the site, see Norsk Vind, “Tellenes Wind Park.” Available online: https://www. vin​dene​rgi.no/proje​cts/telle​nes-vindp​ark (accessed January 2020). 64 Brian Larkin, “Ambient Infrastructures: Generator Life in Nigeria,” Technosphere Magazine, November 15, 2016. Available online: https://techn​osph​ere-magaz​ine. hkw.de/p/Ambi​ent-Infr​astr​uctu​res-Genera​tor-Life-in-Nige​ria-fCg​tKng​7vpt​7otm​ ky9v​nFw (accessed January 2020). 65 Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 17. 66 Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Critical Inquiry, April 13, 2020. Available online: https://crit​inq.wordpr​ess.com/2020/04/13/the-univer​sal-right-tobrea​the/ (accessed November 2020).

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67 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Penguin, 2008), 68. 68 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2016). 69 Larkin, “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure,” 327–43. It is useful to note the example of the DAPL from Chapter 3 here. The infrastructural site, recorded by Raven Chacon, was not so much the object of the oil pipeline as it was the societal effects and power relations it stirred. 70 François J. Bonnet, The Infra-World (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 70. 71 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 25. 72 Maxwell, Raundalen, and Vestberg, Media and the Ecological Crisis, 87.

Conclusion 1 McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives, 194. 2 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 156. 3 Saidiya Hartman, “On Working with Archives,” Creative Independent, February 3, 2021. Available online: https://the​crea​tive​inde​pend​ent.com/peo​ple/said​iya-hart​ man-on-work​ing-with-archi​ves/ (accessed February 2021). 4 McCormack, Queer Postcolonial Narratives, 20. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 Susan Sontag, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories Wild Possibilities (London: Canongate, 2016), xii. 7 bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003), xiv. 8 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 168–9. 9 A further example of practicing-with can be found in the work Re:Barsento (2014) by artists Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela. The duo perform and record one another’s interactions with the landscapes of Barsento, Italy. Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, Re:Barsento [download] (Venice: Galaverna, 2014). 10 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58. 11 Ibid. 12 Isabelle Stengers, “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices,” Cultural Studies Review, 11 (1) (2005): 195.

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Index acoustic ecology 1, 26, 45, 137, 139, 141 air imagination 108 infrastructure 114–18, 139–43 practice 145–6 pressure 91–3, 128 rights 51 Alaimo, Stacy deviant agents 97 Altman, Rick sound recording 73, 124 Amazon 90 Antarctica 105, 106, 111, 112 Anthropocene 1, 4, 11, 40, 65, 95, 112, 141, 151 apophenia 41–2, 87, 129 archive 4, 14, 17, 22, 26, 46, 66, 94, 109 armchair 5, 31, 40–1, 89, 102, 127, 145 see also listening-with artifact 25, 29, 65, 90, 119, 135, 149 Attenborough, David rights 48, 66, 170 nn.19, 20 audition 2–6, 21, 40–2, 61, 83, 89, 119, 124–30, 145–6, 153 auscultation 92, 180 n.30 BBC 48–9, 66, 71–2 bear 55, 71–2 Bell, Alexander Graham decibel and eugenics 13, 121, 154, 162 n.8 Bennett, Jane vital materialism 95, 101, 144 body recordist-site 23, 33–9, 82, 129–30 Braidotti, Rosi posthuman ethics 101, 154–5, 181 n.44 Bruyninckx, Joeri recording history 53

Campt, Tina low frequencies 6, 152–3, 162 n.11 capture sound 2–8, 15–21, 24–6, 49–51, 54–5, 120–46 Chacon, Raven 52, 90 Clifford, James 102 see also contact zones Cloud, the 22, 131, 142 colonization 11–17, 33, 55, 64–5, 151–4, 161–2 n.6 Common shama bird 7, 19, 21 see also Ludwig Koch community 50, 97, 107, 139, 154–8 see also practicing-with Coney Island 56–7, 60 consent 7, 27, 43, 49, 51–2, 59, 87 conservation-composition complex 45–56, 65, 68, 77–8, 82, 84, 109–10 consumption 7, 24–6, 36, 54–5, 118–9, 128, 146 contact microphone 80, 91–3, 101, 139 contact zones 5–8, 101–13 copper 116–17, 121–42 Cox, Trevor 52–3 see also trophies critical practice 2–4, 10–11, 33, 44, 85, 95, 113, 116, 138, 146, 150–8 Cusack, Peter Oilfield Soundwalk 81–90, 111, 136 Daniel, Drew All Sound is Queer 59, 174 n.56 DAPL 89–90, 179 n.27, 180 n.28 Darwin, Charles 13–14, 16, 162 n.7 data 5, 65, 105–12, 114, 141–2 decolonization 74–6, 177 n.93 DeLaurenti, Christopher To the Cooling Tower, Sastop 38–40 Densmore, Frances 16–17, 20, 164 nn.29, 30

210 Index desk listening 4, 9, 28, 66, 147 see also audition Devine, Kyle 118–19, 184 n.11 see also streaming doppelgänger 4, 37, 39–40, 70 ecology dark 54 media 118–19, 140 political 95–6 practice 2–4, 157–8 eco-sonic 118–20, 126–9, 132, 137–8, 143, 145–6 elsewhere fields 5–8, 61, 101–14, 125–7, 133–9, 143–5, 148–9, 157 El Teniente Mine 121–4, 126–7 entanglement 5, 32, 47, 79, 87, 96, 113, 132, 151 Eshun, Kodwo mythscience 59, 75 ethics 17, 24, 27, 51, 101, 124, 153–8 ethnography 3, 82–4, 117 ethnomusicology 3, 7, 14–18, 41, 46 eugenics 13, 154 e-waste 135–6, 184 n.8 extraction 7, 20, 50–2, 84, 122–9, 137, 146 extra-verbal 26, 28–31, 61, 64, 70 fabrication field, the 11 recording 73 windshields 128 Fawn-breasted bowerbird 63, 83 feedback 31, 36, 117, 143, 151 Feld, Steven Acoustemology 84 fiction 73, 75 fieldcraft 19–20, 23, 92, 129 field recording practice 23, 33, 83, 85, 112, 138, 148, 157 field recordings epistemology 61, 73, 78, 150 field, the 2, 12, 15, 17, 20, 50, 55, 148–50, 160 n.6 Foley 69–73, 75–8, 112, 177–8 n.103 footprint 29, 72, 115–19, 127–8, 144

Freedman, Peter røde 131–3 Gabrys, Jennifer 135 see also e-waste Galton, Francis eugenics 13, 16, 162 n.9 ghost 19, 32–3, 40, 81, 122, 156 Glissant, Édouard the west 3 Godoy, Fernando Cu 121, 123 Google 122, 131, 134, 136, 147 Gordon, Avery haunting 32, 122 see also ghost Great Animal Orchestra 47–8, 68 see also Krause, Bernie Greie, Antye Sonic Wild Code Recordings 28–30, 156 Hāmana, Hēnare 66–8 see also Huia bird Haraway, Donna 11, 33, 77, 106–7, 156–7 hard drive 24, 41, 46, 104, 142 Hartman, Saidiya 154 health 118–19, 122–9 Heise, Ursula K. extinction 67–8 Hempton, Gordon 54 Hinterding, Joyce Spectral 99–100 hiss 6, 26–8, 34–5, 98, 152 hope 132, 134, 146, 148, 154–5 hope gap 9, 153, 158 horror 30, 36–7, 40, 64, 86, 151–4 Huia bird 66–8, 175 n.63 hunting 53–5, 66, 116 Hurston, Zora Neale 134 hydrophone 58, 93–4, 97, 101, 148, 150, 180 n.32 ice 50, 105–14, 148 infrasound 17, 61, 94–5, 99–102, 108, 152 infrastructure 94, 117–20, 141–5 Ivory-billed woodpecker 19, 165 n.38 Karel, Ernst rockefeller 24–5 Maps of Parallels 41 ºN and 49 ºN 69–72, 76

Index Khan, Douglas 115 Kheshti, Roshanak 16–17, 49 Kirkegaard, Jacob 136 Koch, Ludwig 19–21, 35, 54, 165 n.39 Krause, Bernie 48–9, 73 Larkin, Brian infrastructure 141–3 Latour, Bruno matters of concern 134, 137 mediators 39 Lewis, Mark and Maslin, Simon colonization 161 n.4 see also Anthropocene orbis spike 11–12, 161 n.3 listening-with 5–6, 60–2, 98, 101, 108–9, 126, 129, 148–50 listening-without 8, 65, 99, 101, 148–50 Lomax, Alan 17, 164–5 n.33 low frequencies 6–7, 13, 26, 33, 55, 102, 109, 123–9, 152–3, 162 n.11 see also Campt, Tina Maxwell, Richard and Miller, Toby 119, 126 McCormack, Donna community 153–4 listening ethics 76 memory 64–5 McIntyre, Sally Ann Huia Transcriptions 67–8 McLuhan, Marshall 142 media assemblage 85 colonization 13–15 ecologies 118–29 infrastructures 142 listening 98 natural 111–12 preservation 46–7 sonic 24, 35 wax 20–1 medianatures 118, 146, 184 n.7 Men from Montana 72–3 Michael, David dark nature recording 54, 156 Microphones are not Ears 22–5, 29 microphone 19–21, 25–7, 36, 38, 43, 94, 102, 115–46

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Mignolo, Walter epistemic disobedience 3 military 23, 40, 86, 90–3, 99, 172 n.44 mimicry 62–70, 77–8 Minh-ha, Trinh T 84–5, 88 mining 116–17, 121–7, 129, 134, 136, 138, 148 Mirra, Helen Maps of Parallels 41 ºN and 49 ºN 69–72, 76 monsters 26, 31–7, 133 Morris, Rosalind C. The Miner’s Ear 123–4 myth fiction 75 field, the 16–20, 41, 138, 146, 154, 158 microphone 132 nature conservation 45–6 progress 90 sound 103, 116 NASA 109 National Park 55, 73–4 nature 1, 18–20, 26–7, 43–56, 71–8, 138–42, 149, 154, 159 n.1 nature-culture 31–2, 65, 74, 96 neocolonial 57, 137, 149 neodymium 121–2, 133, 143 Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision Archive 66, 68, 175 n.70 Nieto, Mikel R Dark Sound 90–1 Nixon, Rob slow violence 136 noise 22–3, 33–6, 93–4, 98, 107–10, 123–4, 141, 150 Noisy-Nonself 4–5, 31–8, 41, 91, 125, 151 oil 24, 79–90, 114, 118–19, 147–8 O’Keeffe, Linda Silent Spring 139–44 Papua New Guinea 24, 63–5, 84 parasite 34, 36–7, 99–100 Parikka, Jussi 118, 132 patchwork ethnography 117, 134, 145 Payne, Katherine and Roger Songs of the Humpback Whale 58–9

212 Index pedagogy 9, 119, 127, 129, 137, 156 Pettman, Dominic vox mundi 29, 31 phantom 21, 125, 145 phonograph 13–14, 35, 118 Pisano, Leandro rural futurism 74, 139 plastic 69, 115, 118–19, 121, 128, 142 play 26, 37, 45, 67, 72–5, 95, 108, 148–50 playback 4–5, 58–62, 152 Polli, Andrea Sonic Antarctica 105–8, 110–11 pollution 35, 79, 81–2, 116, 148 postproduction 22, 45, 49, 62, 70, 87, 98, 112 Powell, John Wesley 16 see also ethnomusicology power 12–21, 41–2, 51, 64, 94, 103 practicing-with 155–8 Pratt, Mary Louise Contact Zone 103 predation 26, 53–5, 63, 66 presence recordist 20–2, 26–7, 31–8, 67, 87, 125, 139, 149–51 preservation 16–20, 45–9, 66, 73 preservation paradox 46–7 see also Sterne, Jonathan rare earths 9, 122, 133–4, 140–3, 185 n.15 rat 132–3 responsibility 47, 50–1, 62–8, 79, 101–2, 109, 112–14, 126–7, 152–5 rights 44, 48–54, 78, 123, 156, 171 n.26 Robinson, Dylan decolonization 76 Hungry Listening 15, 49 Rockefeller, Michael 24–6 røde microphones 130–6 salvage 16–20, 26, 41, 49 Samartzis, Philip Perpetual Motion 139 savior 16–17, 26, 49, 137 Schafer, R. Murray 35, 45–6, 164 n.26, 169 n.5 Schuppli, Susan Material Witness 50, 111 noise 98

self-dissolution 27, 29–30, 34 self-erasure 27, 34 self-silence 23, 29, 31 shellac 56, 118–19, 126, 132 see also Devine, Kyle; Smith, Jacob Shukin, Nicole 56–7 signal-to-noise 19, 23–5, 46 site 26–8, 73, 79–95, 112–13, 142–4, 151–3 slow listening 89–90, 97, 125 Smith, Jacob 56, 118–19 see also eco-sonic sonic journalism 81, 84, 87, 89–90, 94, 111, 127, 139, 178 n.4 sonic knowledge 22, 84–5, 95, 150 sonic pedagogy 127, 129, 156 sonification 105–12, 150 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty archive 25 ethics 17 stars 97, 113 Stengers, Isabelle 157 Sterne, Jonathan medium 142 Preservation Paradox 46–7 recording 14 streaming 66, 119, 139, 184 n.11 students 10, 31, 61–2, 83, 126, 153–6 see also pedagogy; hope studio 18–20, 26, 62, 71–6, 91, 98, 103, 125–6, 139 TallBear, Kim 96 see also nature-culture taxidermy 13, 18, 46 see also trophies technoculture 132, 139, 145–8 technological colonialism 18, 123, 127 Teibel, Irv Environments 59–60, 174 n.58 testimony 50, 62–5, 84, 91, 111 Thompson, Marie noise 34 Todd, Zoe 74 see also decolonization Topsy the Elephant 56–7, 60, 172 n.48 trauma 32, 41, 64, 82 trophies 52–3, 110, 149–50 truth 3, 15, 64–9, 73–8, 84–91, 104–7, 134–7, 150 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt anthropocentrism 95 landscape 86

Index ultrasound 99, 102, 108, 114 United Nations 184–5 n.12 unjigsaw 62–3 see also listening-with veracity 18–20, 64–9, 71–3, 87–9, 150 vocabulary 92, 132 Voegelin, Salomé 70 voice 18–20, 29–31, 62–5, 72, 83–6, 111–12 walking 38, 81–9, 108, 115 Watson, Chris 54–5 Watts, Venessa rights 49–50 Weismann, Carl Singing Dogs 57–8

213

Westerkamp, Hildegard Kits Beach Soundwalk 26, 37, 43, 166 n.48 what am I not hearing? 26, 40–2, 74, 93–5, 113, 123, 137, 152–3 Whitehouse, Andrew anxious listening 65 whiteness 3, 160 nn.11–12 white noise 34–5, 41–2, 88, 110 wilderness 73–4 Winderen, Jana The Nosiest Guys on the Planet 97–8, 104 wind noise 69, 128–9, 144, 186 n.33 windshield 127–9, 143, 148 wind Turbine 139–46, 188 n.60 witness 20, 44, 50–1, 63–4, 79, 111

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