Posthumous Sound and the General Imagination

Organised Sound, 2015

The ever-increasing focus on sound in recent creative practices has ideological implications and seems to reframe and problematise ontological perspectives on music. Today it is possible to contrast notions of music as identical with sound (as in the discursive framework of ‘audio culture’) with artistic practices where sound and music arenot at allidentical, and the usually implicit hierarchy between them is probably twisted. This article discusses such matters from a methodological position that weaves together issues usually discussed in different areas of concern: it understands ecologically informed notions of sound and auditory experience as strictly intertwined with critical and inventive attitudes on technology, particularly as their intertwining is elaborated through performative practices. It suggests that, in music as well as in sound art, what we hearassound andinsound is the dynamics of anecology of situated and mediated actions, as a process that binds together (1) hum...

In this article, the author analyzes the work of two artists, Miki Yui and Jana Winderen, who respond to unprecedented ecological change by using nature field recordings as the foundational element of their compositions and installations. Their works replicate environmental dissolution and dislodge listeners from the habits and assumptions of everyday life. The author draws upon the work of sociologist Henri Lefebvre, defining rhythmanalysis, the everyday, and, in Lefebvre’s words, the “dialectical dynamic between tragedy and daily life.”

Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Music Conference., 2016

In the 1980s, geographer Eugene F. Stoermer coined a term that has achieved pronounced attention in the 21 st century. Known as the Anthropocene, the conception refers to a geological period of time from the late 19th century to the present, in which the most profound force affecting change on the earth is the collective, often unconscious action of humanity (Crutzen, 17). In order for sound art to sustain meaning and functionality across epochs, new conceptions of time and materiality and their relationship to sound must be examined. In this text, I will use the conceit of the Anthropocene to provide a framework for envisioning and designing sound art that is informed by the prospect of the end of an era in which human activity is identified as being the primary agent of change on Earth. In doing so, I will outline strategies that can be put into place to evoke, for inhabitants of the far future, a very personal and aural sense of the contemporary moment.

This paper examines some political, ethical stances of recent music towards planetary solidarity in the Anthropocene. Ashley Fure’s ecological installation-opera, The Force of Things (2016/18), with its animate assemblages of vibrating materials, aims to stimulate listeners to recognize the vital animacy of the vibrational events of global warming. Fure emphasizes fundamental commonalities between humans and ecological entities, citing philosopher Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter to advance the radically flat ontology that grounds her opera’s rhetoric. In this framework, also explored by musicologist Nina Eidsheim, material vibration and its animacy stand as properties that ontologically unite all peoples, lifeforms, and matter. Critical race theorists like Zakkiyah Jackson and Fred Moten, however, have pointed out that such radically universal ontologies occlude the human sphere’s internal rivenness. This results in race-blind, difference-blind political imaginaries, silencing injustices affecting differentially marginalized populations. Putting Jackson and Moten in conversation with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, I argue (contra Fure and Eidsheim) that sonic vibration is better understood not as an ontological unifier, but as a figure for human and non-human entities’ recognitions of each’s singularity, alterity, and vulnerability to each other, which buttress foundational ethical injunctions to avoid harming those others. I clarify with Pamela Z’s Syrinx (2003), which slows down recorded birdsong until a singer can imitate it. The voice is recorded and gradually manipulated to match the birdsong’s original register and speed. Syrinx frames human and non-human lifeforms not as ontologically same, but as reciprocally open to one another, yet sonically irreducible to each other. Its transformations of bird and human vocalizations point to each’s opening towards becoming sonically other than themselves—hence towards becoming vulnerable. This reading of Syrinx reconfigures The Force of Things to hear both as occasions for ecological solidarity, while avoiding the colorblindness of grounding solidarity in violently occluding the other’s difference.

This paper traces dominant ideologies of nature, starting with Aristotle's inclusive formulation, which incorporated all things, biotic or abiotic. This view was lost with the Roman division of society into the domestic (domus) and savage (silva). Abrahamic religions proposed an originary paradise, an Eden corrupted by humans, who nonetheless are granted superiority over nature. The providential ideology holds that nature is a resource without value, until tamed and managed. In the 18th century, the Romantics valorised nature as moral good, a wellspring of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration. This paper will explore how these ideologies are expressed in R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape, using sources from anthropology and human geography (Jedediah Purdy, Philippe Descola). The goal is to understand how Schafer relies on a dichotomy between nature and humanity that is inherently problematic in the Anthropocene. A clear understanding of the limitations of the soundscape will enable the development of sustainable sound practices.

I am a human being. I am also an artist, and as such, my work entails an understanding of how to feel and interpret things. The planet on which I was born will radically change within my lifetime, and the decline of the entire biosphere is now unavoidable. Mankind is responsible for the massive changes that are happening, which will affect the survival of the majority of creatures in all of Earth's biomes. This ecocide is progressively damaging the magnificent choirs of natural sound, 'eco-symphonies' we have not even heard, much less recorded. About 15 years ago, I felt compelled to invest my life in a sound-art project, which would promote public awareness on the most silent catastrophe of our times: the Sixth Mass Extinction. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (signed by some 1360 world scientists and released by the United Nations in 2005), the current global extinction rate is between 100 and 1,000 times higher than it would naturally be. Immediate projections for the future indicated that this rate may reach 12,000 within our lifetime 1. As a result of the direct human pressure on ecosystems (mostly deforestation and overexploitation) and the effects of human impact on the biosphere (as invasive species-triggering and pollution) an exponentially growing number of the planet's recently estimated 8.7 million living species are going extinct. The rate of 30,000 species per year was already predicted in 1993 by Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson (estimates which order of magnitude has since been revealed correct by most current studies), which equals to some 3 species going extinct every hour. Current estimates do not even include climate change. This is all the more shocking if we consider that, at present, only 1.9 million species have been described, most of which have barely been studied, if at all. Of all known species, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, and 41% of amphibians now appear on the IUCN Red List of threatened species 2. We are facing the collapse of life itself. From an ontological point of view, our species is only one among others on Earth's network of interconnected ecosystems. Every single species, the smallest microorganism and the largest mammals, all thrive and conduct their lives without any external support device to survive and propagate their own genetic heritage. Rare individuals of the same species meet in vast spaces and mate through no force but their own natural communications. I am speechless as to how these coordinated and interdependent mechanisms can happen at every scale of life, within extremely complex processes of natural selection and co-evolution, and how these cycles have slowly refined themselves over the last 65 millions of years. I wish I could regain the perspective of a guest and in-depth observer of this highly evolved web of life. The time has come to reverse the anthropocentric view of evolution and to envision a new inner space for a deeper understanding of the complex, now vanishing equilibrium of the natural world. To achieve these aims, I have used environmental sound of ecosystems as the object of investigation and conservation, as the model for compositional creation, and as the entity for designing worlds of perception for diverse audiences.

Open Philosophy, 2024

With reference to Steven Feld’s “acoustemology,” his epistemology of sounding and listening, developed in the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea, where the trees are too dense to afford a distant view and meaning has to be found up close, on the body with other human and more-than-human bodies, this essay deliberates how sound knows in entanglements and from the in-between: in a being with as a knowing with rather than from a distance. In this way, this essay, from the densities of the rainforest, critiques Western knowledge and its reliance on visual categories, straight lines, and universalising principles that pretend objectivity and a distant view. Instead, it turns to the relational indivisibility of sound that lets us hear interdependencies and confronts us with the invisible of which we are part. In conclusion, it proposes that sound studies as applied, transversal studies enable such a paradigm shift that at once reveals what hegemonic knowledge strands exclude and invites a different dialogue from the in-between of everything.

Humans are enigmas of artifact. So they conceive some of their most naturally consistent outputs, such as music, as artifact. But there are two opposing directions to conceiving music: (A) as artifact; (B) as something fundamentally natural, even necessary for animal life. But Nature lacks ready instances of humans’ own full set of reflective musical specifications. This lack allows humans the presupposition that (x) Nature has neither precedent nor prototype for humans’ musical outputs, and, therefore, (y) ‘music’ is a ‘human construct’ the essence of which is alien to the entirety of the ‘natural world’. This presupposition trivializes human musicality by (1) overlooking the ontological priority and primal flexibility of human musical sensibility to sound over that of human artifactual music, and (2) rejecting the ways in which that sensibility constitutes part of humans’ primal and enigmatic relation to Nature and the cosmos. Therefore, to conceive music as necessarily an artifact, while seemingly anthropocentric, is contrary to humans’ interests and capacities.

The Senses and Society, 2016

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2010

A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropo-logical approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive inter-weavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology , we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.