Sonic Ecologies

Bioacoustics, soundscape ecology, anthropophony, sound art, noise

sound (verb):
figurative. To make inquiry or investigation.
To investigate, to search into, to seek to ascertain (a matter, a person’s views, etc.), esp. by cautious or indirect questioning; to make trial of in this way. Also with out.

How to think with sound in the context of environmental history? And what does this mean in a world so dominated by the visual image? This chapter takes up the question of sounding environments as an invitation to listen across time, and across different kinds of scientific, intellectual and cultural practice: from the empirical work of acoustic ecologists to the experimentalism of contemporary sound art. The sonic imagination, we suggest, is a provocative mode for thinking in some way beyond a human-centred world (and a human-dominated past). A brief history of birdcall recordings; microphones under melting ice caps; spring biophonies and the insect ‘vibroscape’; drone artists in the tropical rainforest; container shipping and underwater seismic blasting; the natural and cultural history of whale calls; increasing noise and gathering silence – in this chapter we sound out these different worlds, tracing their entanglements of human and beyond-human history. If cultural and historical imagination in the Anthropocene ‘is mostly disengaged from the sonic tumult we create’, then the act of listening more carefully confronts us with the difficult paradox at the heart of this sensory crisis: that our species ‘is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches’ (Haskell 2022: 318).

Sounding Environments (with Aragorn Eloff). The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Ed. Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart. December 2023

‘No One Who Hears Them Is Left Unaffected’: Musician and Ecologist Bernie Krause on Turning the Sounds of Nature Into Art (19 November 2021).

‘Over the course of a 24-hour day, I’ll likely record four two-hour sessions: a dawn chorus, a midday chorus, dusk and nighttime choruses, times when biophonies are likely at their peak. [These are] the collective sounds coming from all organisms in a given habitat at one moment in time.’

‘One that sticks in mind is the first time I heard ants singing in the American southwest desert. […] At one campsite in Arizona slickrock country, I dropped a small lavalier microphone onto the entrance of an ant’s nest. The tiny critters immediately gathered around the intruding object and physically tried to remove it; the leader [was] furiously stridulating, rubbing its hind legs on its abdomen, and sending out high-pitched signals that I managed to record. It isn’t the large organisms that surprise me as much as the ones we can barely see. One researcher in the UK has even recorded the sound signature of a virus.’

‘One thing I did notice: when COVID first hit, in March 2020, the spring biophony everywhere was particularly gorgeous, with amazingly positive reports from Europe and large cities here in the U.S. That was because there was a lot less noise masking the resonant biophonies that always try to make themselves heard above the din we create.’

https://www.pem.org/exhibitions/the-great-animal-orchestra-bernie-krause-and-united-visual-artists
https://www.wildsanctuary.com/

‘But in April last year, Krause played back his recording and was greeted with something he had not heard before: total silence. The recorder had run for its usual hour, but picked up no birdsong, no rush of water over stones, no beating wings. “I’ve got an hour of material with nothing, at the high point of spring,” says Krause. “What’s happening here is just a small indication of what’s happening almost everywhere on an even larger scale.”’

‘In 2019, Krause argued that the climate crisis could be “changing the Earth’s natural acoustic fabric”.’

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/16/nature-silent-bernie-krause-recording-sound-californian-state-park-aoe

https://onbeing.org/programs/gordon-hempton-silence-and-the-presence-of-everything/

Digital Bioacoustics:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/30/science-hear-nature-digital-bioacoustics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other#comment-160101491

‘By recording many hours of bat vocalizations and decoding them using AI algorithms, scientists have revealed that bats remember favors and hold grudges; socially distance and go quiet when ill; and use vocal labels that reveal individual and kin identity. Male bats learn territorial songs in specific dialects from their fathers and, much like birds, sing these songs to defend territory and attract mates, which scientists characterize as culture.

Research by Mirjam Knörnschild in Costa Rica with sac-winged bats has demonstrated that mother bats babble to their babies in “motherese”, in a manner similar to humans; baby bats learn to vocalize this way. Until recently, scientists had no idea that bats were capable of vocal learning, or conveyed such complex information in their vocalizations.’

https://e360.yale.edu/features/listening-to-nature-the-emerging-field-of-bioacoustics

‘He dreams that one day soon, audio recordings of natural soundscapes will be like rainfall and temperature data, collected from a worldwide network of permanent stations, widely available for analysis, and permanently archived.’

James Webb, ‘A Series of Personal Questions Addressed to 5L of Nigerian Crude Oil’

How honest can we be with each other?

How old are you?

What was your original form?

At what stage will we become like you?

What have you been told about your value?

Who died for you?

How does this end?

‘A recorded voice addresses questions to 5 litres of Nigerian crude oil. In this ongoing series, the artist literally poses a series of questions to select inanimate objects as if they were sentient beings able to respond. The installation takes the form of the display of the particular object, e.g. a glass cube containing Nigerian crude oil, and an audio speaker installed above where the audience would ideally be situated in relation to the object on exhibition. The audio speaker broadcasts the series of questions addressed to the object. Time is given between each question for the object to reply, and for the audience to consider their own responses to the questions and the situation.’

James Webb, ‘There’s No Place Called Home (Guangzhou)’, 2005. Calls of South African carnivorous birds broadcast from speakers concealed in trees outside the Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou, China.

‘There’s No Place Called Home (Company’s Garden)’. Calls of an ‘Ōma’o (Hawaiian Thrush) broadcast from speakers concealed in the Company’s Garden, Cape Town.

Started in 2004, “There’s No Place Called Home” is a recurring, worldwide intervention wherein specific foreign bird calls and songs are broadcast from speakers concealed in local trees. The incongruent audio is mixed so as to appear as “real” and “lifelike” as possible in the environment.

‘There’s No Place Called Home (Montmartre)’, 2009. Songs of extinct American birds broadcast from speakers concealed in trees in Montmartre, Paris, during the summer of 2009.

This iteration of the artwork was temporary, uninvited and unannounced.

‘There’s No Place Called Home (Joubert Park)’, 2006. Calls of non-migratory Nigerian birds broadcast from speakers concealed within the trees of Joubert Park, Johannesburg, South Africa.

https://theresnoplacecalledhome.tumblr.com/
ArtThrob review

‘All the Unseen Things: Reflections on Process in Sound’ (2017).

InThe Black Passage, a sound recording of the empty elevator cage descending into and ascending out of the South Deep gold mine is broadcast from a wall of speakers installed at the end of a narrow, 20m black tunnel. Visitors enter the long, confined space and are drawn towards the frame of golden light emitted from a location behind the speakers at the rear of the tunnel. The sound is diffused at high volume and can be experienced as both an auditory and a physical sensation.

The scenography of the block of black speakers framed with light is a critical reference to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915).

The South Deep mine is located 66km south-west of Johannesburg, and at the time of recording was the deepest twin-shaft gold mine in the world.

https://vimeo.com/515206709

In Ocean of Sound, David Toop recounts some remarks of Brian Eno’s which reveal the two faces of an archipelagic listening:

I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater Road recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this-a 3-minute section, the length of a single – and I tried to learn it? [...] I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried to learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercise to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: ‘Right, then he puts this bit there and that pattern’s just at the exact same moment as this in happening. Brilliant!’ Since I've done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way.

François J Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Trans. Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media, 2016.

Electrical Walks is a work in progress. It is a public walk with special, sensitive wireless headphones by which the acoustic qualities of aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields become amplified and audible.

The transmission of sound is made by built-in coils which respond to the electromagnetic waves in our environment. The palette of these noises, their timbre and volume vary from site to site and from country to country. They have one thing in common: they are ubiquitous, even where one would not expect them. Light systems, wireless comunication systems, radar systems, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, cell phones, computers, streetcar cables, antennae, navigation systemes, automated teller machines, wireless internet, neon advertising, public transportation networks, etc. create electrical fields that are as if hidden under cloaks of invisibility, but of incredible presence.

The sounds are much more musical than one could expect. There are complex layers of high and low frequencies, loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny signals, long drones and many things which change constantly and are hard to describe. Some sounds are sound much alike all over the world. Others are specific for a city or country and cannot be found anywhere else.

https://christinakubisch.de/electrical-walks
https://electricalwalks.org/video/
SFMOMO interview, Electrical Walks.
A Collection of Disappearing Sounds, VAN magazine.

The Acoustic City comprises five thematic sections: urban soundscapes with an emphasis on the distinctiveness of the urban acoustic realm; acoustic flânerie and the recording of sonic environments; sound cultures arising from specific associations between music, place, and sound; acoustic ecologies including relationships between architecture, sound, and urban design; and the politics of noise extending to different instances of anxiety or conflict over sound. In putting together this collection, we have also sought to de-centre some of the implicit assumptions underlying earlier approaches to the study of sound by including feminist insights, post-colonial threads, and other approaches that necessitate a more nuanced reflection on the sensory realms of modernity.

https://www.theacousticcity.com/

‘I analysed the distress calls of various animals in slaughterhouses, and then quantized that into a series of musical keys…’

Aragorn Eloff, ‘Factory Farm Studies’.
https://asqus.bandcamp.com/album/factory-farm-studies

‘When I view footage of factory farms, what affects me more than the images are the sounds: the cries of loneliness, fear, pain and madness. In these algorithmic piano pieces I want to respond to these sounds, to call back even if my voice cannot be heard.

Using publicly available research data I have mapped the sonic environments of cows, sheep, pigs and chickens and transformed them from soundscapes of suffering and death into something else. Analysing the acoustic dynamics of the distress calls of each animal, I have located the musical keys within which they speak. I have also captured the aural density of their environments - the decibel levels and amounts of variation - and used this to control various dynamics within each piece. Finally, I have calculated how many cows, sheep, pigs and chickens are killed every second worldwide and used this to control the tempo of the compositions. Every note you hear for the pieces Sheep and Cow indicates five deaths; for Pig it is ten deaths; for Chicken it is a hundred.’

‘Materials of Relation: A Sonic Pedagogy of Non-Mastery’
https://herri.org.za/4/aragorn-eloff/

‘Anthropogenic climate change may yet receive the film it deserves. If it does, although this is far from certain or, indeed, necessary, it will perhaps be a film far closer to Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, a slow-moving, oneiric meditation about a flower seller whose sense of normality is disrupted by the repeated incursion of a loud sonic boom that only she can hear, the source of which she spends the latter half of the film seeking.’

Aragorn Eloff, ‘Don’t Look Up, Look Around’
https://www.newframe.com/dont-look-up-look-around/

Abstract:
Coral reefs worldwide are increasingly damaged by anthropogenic stressors, necessitating novel approaches for their management. Maintaining healthy fish communities counteracts reef degradation, but degraded reefs smell and sound less attractive to settlement-stage fishes than their healthy states. Here, using a six-week field experiment, we demonstrate that playback of healthy reef sound can increase fish settlement and retention to degraded habitat. We compare fish community development on acoustically enriched coral-rubble patch reefs with acoustically unmanipulated controls. Acoustic enrichment enhances fish community development across all major trophic guilds, with a doubling in overall abundance and 50% greater species richness. If combined with active habitat restoration and effective conservation measures, rebuilding fish communities in this manner might accelerate ecosystem recovery at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Acoustic enrichment shows promise as a novel tool for the active management of degraded coral reefs.

Subject terms: Conservation biology, Restoration ecology, Tropical ecology, Marine biology

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6884498/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/29/sonic-youth-healthy-reef-sounds-lure-young-fish-to-degraded-areas

Samuel Hertz (b. Washington, DC, USA 1987) is a Berlin-based sound artist and researcher working at intersections of Earth-based sound, sonic sensualities, and climate change. Having studied composition with experimental music pioneers Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Maggi Payne, and Zeena Parkins at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, Hertz works fluidly between the worlds of composed music for ensembles, electronic music and installation, performance, and film. Alongside his performances exists a strong research component based in Anthropocene studies and encompassing relationships between sound, geography, climate, and social ecologies. A prime motivation is investigations of hearing practices as practical engagements with environments and non-human scales.
www.samhertzsound.com

‘Brooke Jarvis’ recent New York Times article entitled “The Insect Apocalypse is Here” is an apt case-study on the ‘sensible infinitesimal,’ highlighting an approach to disappearance that bridges sensuality with intuition. Jarvis’ main characters in this multi-pronged story about the steady, world-wide decrease in insect populations hover around the point articulated by entomologist David Wagner:

‘We notice the losses. It’s the diminishment that we don’t see.’ (…) Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night—familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty.

There is already a feeling associated with loss, however not always so clearly articulated through data. This pulse of feeling, however, has the cyclic span of a full generation—an adult’s remembrance of a noisier time: the tactile unavoidability of this chattering and chirping biomass. If we cared to listen, we might hear (or might have heard) this slow disappearance as well—a creeping decrescendo of insect life, or a ever-so-gentle crossfade of biophony into anthrophony and technophony. Hearing absence is a funny thing; it is always harder to hear a hole than an intruder. And because of the longer scales of time involved in these disappearances, the body falls victim to “shifting baseline syndrome”—the almost-too-casual adjustment of the ear to a consistently diminishing bed of sound.’ 

THE BIG BANG and what we left behind (or, hearing loss) (2019).
http://sonicfield.org/the-big-bang-and-what-we-left-behind-or-hearing-loss-essay-by-samuel-hertz/

‘An acoustic connection is established with the telephone, be it to a melting glacier (Calling the Glacier), to international energy companies and institutions (Hotline) or to previously unknown pathogens. The call gives each participant the opportunity to put themselves in a situation that normally remains unreachable and is neglected by the headlines in the daily press. Activating this perspective in the context of climate change and linking it to social, political and scientific aspects is the goal of Call me!

CALLING THE GLACIER is direct telephone communication with a glacier. A microphone on site transmits the sounds of nature directly and unprocessed to the caller. You can hear flowing water of varying intensities, the occasional cracking sound, and other sounds that a living glacier makes according to the seasons.

In the meantime, a broader public is becoming aware of the reality of climate change. Our planet's glaciers dramatically symbolize this change. They resemble gigantic living creatures that are slowly, or in many cases frighteningly fast, shrinking, literally fading and disappearing. Calling the Glacier invites the caller to connect. Of course, the glacier itself cannot answer, but if you decide to dial this number on your phone, you will be there, in real time, anytime, from anywhere. The focus is not on sensational reporting about strange, distant worlds, but rather on the personal experience of a process that affects us all.’

http://www.callme.vg/Glacier/D/projekt.html

Pulling Ford’s new all-electric Mustang Mach-E out of a Brooklyn garage late this winter, I felt a little duped. It seemed more like I was driving a giant motorized iPad than the electrified successor to an iconic American muscle car. Just a few weeks earlier, the company’s sound designers told me about the lengths to which they had gone to design and digitally produce the perfect engine noise, experimenting with recordings of electric guitars, Formula E race-car engine sounds and the hum of high-voltage power lines. But inside the loaner car’s cabin, I didn’t hear anything at all. Then, while messing around on the vehicle’s touchscreen, I found – and immediately pressed – an all-too-tempting button to engage ‘unbridled mode.’ Next time I hit the accelerator, the car took off, emitting the throaty, electric roar of a cyberpunk spaceship. Now that was more like it.

Alejandro de la Garza, ‘How Electric Cars Could Craft the Soundscape of the Future’ Time, 6 April 2021.

‘Sound designers have long helped craft everything from the roar of a car’s engines to the satisfying thump of a closing door. But they have never had the opportunity to shape the soundscape of the future on such a massive scale. For sound engineers, it’s like getting the chance to design not just the Guggenheim but the entire Manhattan skyline. In the notoriously rivalrous world of car design, there’s little agreement about what that soundscape should be.

Broadly, automakers are divided into two camps. The first includes those who’ve drawn inspiration from the sound of gasoline cars—or at least tried to make it sound as if something is at work under the hood, though often with a futuristic edge. […] Audi sound engineer Stephan Gsell agrees. “The vehicle is a technical device,” he says. “It’s not a musical instrument.”

On the other side are carmakers that have little interest in replicating the sound of a gasoline engine at all. “We shouldn’t be trying to communicate that there are moving pistons in this thing,” says Danni Venne, lead producer and director of innovation at Made Music Studio, an audio branding agency that designed the engine sound for a recent iteration of the Nissan LEAF. “We’re somewhere else now technologically.” The LEAF sound, Venne says, has “a little bit of a singing quality to it.” GM also took a step in the musical direction, creating EV sounds using sampled guitar, piano and didgeridoo. ‘We want it to sound organic, yet futuristic,” says GM sound engineer Jigar Kapadia.

Becoming Visible, a film by Janet Solomon (2018).

Director’s statement:
‘I am not prepared to mourn my coastline. There is an escalating and unrelenting push for oil and gas development along the east coast of South Africa. This section of coastline experienced its highest ever recording of  whale strandings during and after a 2016 marine seismic survey looking for oil and gas reserves. This survey was granted an extension into the whale migration season. Was there a connection between these events? The more research I did the more aware I became of the trauma associated with the chronic, ever-present sound of these surveys, the inefficacy of the mitigation for it in the ocean space and what happened to environmental regulatory protections around reconnaissance/seismic surveys in South Africa.’

Dr Simon Elwen, NRF Research Fellow, Director of Sea Search:
‘You can, under extreme sound conditions, end up with gas bubbles in the tissue. It causes gas to vibrate, for want of a better word, out of muscle tissue, similar to shaking a can of Coke. And within the ear, it’s similar to humans, you can get damage to the small cells and to the bones. More commonly you’ll get things like permanent or temporary deafening: the classic nightclub example when your ears are ringing in the morning. Or it can be a much more subtle behavioural response, animals don’t like the sound and move away from it, as you might with a jackhammer. And then masking is quite a big one because cetaceans are a very vocal species. They communicate hugely over quite vast distances with sound, and if that sound is being masked, that’s when they have to vocalise louder or vocalise at a different frequency’.

This is a history of a sound you cannot hear….

‘How, then, might sound studies admit into its purview (its percussion?) those aspects of the vibratory world that are not, strictly speaking, sonic? To productively draw sensory studies into conversation with multispecies science studies requires that the nonhuman umwelt be examined as rigorously and on the same footing as the human sensorium (and, indeed, to query the very notion of a sin- gular and homogenous “human sensorium” in the first place). A more capacious understanding of sound could consequently reorient its focus away from not only anthropocentric but also “earcentric” models of sonic perception in favor of an extracochlear modality that recognizes entire percussing bodies as vibratory sensory apparatuses.

Once we retune hearing to incorporate the entire body, rather than ears alone, then the sensory hierarchy falls away. Sensory studies scholars consequently must admit the possibility that sound—or any other sense—cannot be studied (or experienced) in isolation but only on a spectrum with other sensory and affective states. Infrasound is on the fringe of the audible yet bleeds into the palpable. It occupies the threshold between hearing and the many other perceptual modalities that audition both complements and overlaps (most significantly, tactility and proprioception, but also nausea and dizziness, as well as affective, cognitive, and emotional states). The twentieth-century history of infrasound is one place to begin such a project, as it problematizes which vibrations do or do not count as “sound”; requires an extracochlear model of hearing; and attaches audition to somatic feelings and moods, including agitation, anxiety, irritability, and apprehensiveness.

Roosth, Sophia. ‘Nineteen Hertz and Below: An Infrasonic History of the Twentieth Century.’ Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 5, no. 3 (2018): 109-124.

‘The retooling of CTBT stations to monitor and predict volcanoes and earthquakes filters infrasound’s previous technological uses, refashioning the enemy not as a political threat but an environmental one. In this regard, infrasound might be considered, following sound- installation artist Raviv Ganchrow, to be “the bandwidth of the Anthropocene,” because “environmental infrasound exhibits an intermingling of large-scale human industrialized activity with these other earth- and atmosphere-related frequencies.”’

https://portal.sonicacts.com/darkecology/commissions/raviv-ganchrow-long-wave-synthesis

David G. Haskell, When the Earth Started to Sing & Practice 08: Playful Listening. Emergence, 28 February 2022.

How Climate Change is Muting Nature’s Symphony
https://grist.org/culture/nature-sounds-bird-insect-silence-climate-change/

‘David George Haskell, a biologist and author of the book Sounds Wild and Broken, said he experiences the diminished soundscape as a “very thin, worn cloth,” comparing the richness of an untrammeled soundscape to the texture of thickly woven tapestry. “It’s a ground-up soundscape where thousands of species are finding their way within this whole,” he said. “It’s a lot more anarchic than the very controlled experience of listening to a band or an orchestra.”

More and more, researchers are documenting the fragility of the planet’s natural soundscape; many say the changes to Earth’s acoustic fabric speak to just how much new, unpredictable climatic conditions are messing with the Earth’s natural balance. One 2019 paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution argues that climate-related changes to the nonliving world — higher ocean temperatures, more intense rainfall — may have cascading effects on the soundscape, since qualities of the air, earth, and water affect the propagation of sound.’ 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534719302265#!

The Sound Aquatic: The Ocean and the Anthropause.
Episode 5: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The anthropause has shown us that we’re too noisy for the ocean’s animals.

‘Sounding the Call for a Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds’ (GLUBS).
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (February 2022).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.810156/full

‘From the “boing” of a minke whale to the “drum” of a red piranha, scientists are documenting more sounds in our world’s oceans, rivers and lakes every year. Now, a team of experts wants to go a step further and create a reference library of aquatic noise to monitor the health of marine ecosystems.’

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/17/underwater-sound-library-to-reveal-language-of-the-deep-aoe

Until the release of Roger Payne's now excruciatingly familiar recordings of Humpback whales, the format of sonic entertainment of an extra-human nature tended towards pseudo-science. As one’s stylus tracked across the dark vinyl waste of a birdsong long player, the fauna would be caged off in separate bands, to be named and classified by sepulchral voices in weighty ‘objective’ tones. Payne delivered up the first psychedelic bio-acoustic document. His intentions were prophetically conservationist and the project took off with remarkable force. Despite their limited range of sounds, whales continue to sing the call sign of the New Age and Green movements. If a whale could sign a contract, the Humpbacks would now be bigger (in all senses) than Phil Collins.

#64 Dr. Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970)
The Wire’s ‘100 Most Important Records Ever Made’ https://rateyourmusic.com/list/funks/the_wires_100_most_important_records_ever_made/

I drop the needle onto a vinyl album. Industrial diamond meets sound ensnared in polyvinyl chloride. The claw of the record player’s stylus follows the spiral furrow. The jewel follows the wavy plastic groove, every microscopic side-to-side motion conveyed to magnets and wire coils in the stylus’s head. Burned coal and methane, arriving on wires strung across the sky, electrify my amplifier. The power of factories, oil wells, and mines converge. A humpback whale’s song awakens, leaping out of the sea into air, breaching out of the 1950s into an experience of the moment.

David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken (2022).

‘While field recordings are considerably the most common approach to ecosystem documentation, many artists have resorted to the practice of sonification—translating data into sound waves in order to convey information (Krammer 1994, Walker and Nees 2011)—sensing the invisible and making the natural world audible. Lichens, fungi, microbes have been given centre stage in multiple audio works, with the aid of biosensors, contact microphone (Krabbe, Policarpo), probe microscopes (Roosth 2009), and audio editing and computation programs (Helmreich 2015, Ertl-Shirley, Mangan). Furthermore, atmospheric and planetary phenomena, such as the weather, the magnetosphere or seismic activity have also been registered by artists, approaching them often through deploying sonification techniques that unveil spectrum events occurring at a distance or on frequencies beyond the thresholds of human audition (Ganchrow; Luz; French, 2014; Polli 2005, 2006; Kubisch).’

’A Sonic Anthropocene: Sound Practices in a Changing Environment’ (2021).
https://journals.openedition.org/cadernosaa/2957

‘Sound is transduced as it travels through media and mediating machines. […]
The kinetic motion of motor proteins becomes a cytoplasmic rumble that vibrates the cell wall, which exerts pressure on a cantilever, causing the piezoelectric crystal to convert the deflection into an electrical output. A graphic trace of its deflection is created, which is then converted using a computer program into an electrical signal sent through a pair of speakers as mechanical wave oscillation, creating a periodic turbulence in the air that vibrates the tympanum, which vibrates the ossicles, which vibrates the fluid of the cochlea, which ultimately triggers hair cells to send electrical signals to nerves that travel to the brain. Each time the signal travels from one neuron to another it must be transduced from electrical to chemical energy while traveling through the intercellular synapse. Thus the acoustic, the technological, and the biological harmonize with one another in a biological soundscape. However, this biological soundscape is in turn culturally transduced, obscuring the technical conditions of its production.’

‘The “vibrating world”, of which sound is but a small, biologically mediated fraction…’

Sophia Roosth, ‘Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplascmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities.’ Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 332–350.

Also, Schafer’s compositional approach in a work like The Tuning of the World – ‘Throughout this book I am going to treat the world as a macrocosmic musical composition’ (1977: 55) – begins to overlap with a 20th-century avant-garde (musique concrète, for example, or the work of John Cage) which sought to unravel the boundary between music and sound in general: to reimagine the ‘sound effect’ as ‘sound object’ (l’objet sonore) – as instrument or component of a new, broader idea of what music might be (Schaeffer 1966).

 Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. […] Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide. 
(Cage 1961: 3)

Once on a Windy Night. R. Murray Schafer.
25th Anniversary of Vancouver Chamber Choir.

Program Note:
You want to write a piece about the wind: no easy task. You listen to the wind. But what you write is not about the wind, rather a piece of music. Tear it up. Go and listen aagin. Still it is not the wind that your composition expresses. Is it because you can’t hear the wind, or because you are afraid to write down what you hear?

This ambivalence is the character of the wind itself, for its sound is devious. The Greeks imagined Typhoeus as a god with a thousand heads, each with a different voice: dogs, bulls, lions, snakes…voices defying arrest or transcription.

https://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=19983

Krause proposes that wind is “arguably one of the most difficult aspects of the soundscape to convey through musical art” (ibid.), and Schafer’s creative notation (sampled in the image to the left and visible in the video link below) demonstrate the complexities inherent in this representational practice. This piece has a profound metaphorical-to-literal transformative character: the human singers literally use and create wind in the act of singing, and as such they create windiness, rather than just representing it metaphorically or abstractly. In this way, the performance of this composition transgresses the boundaries between environment and self, between the elemental (wind) and the biological (human)

‘Our house is very shaky - the zinc structure makes vibration and we try to stop it. The noise is every day and night. It has been here since we moved in 10 years ago. It affects our family and our community. My mother was a heart patient, my stepfather is an old man and on medication. Sometimes we all are shook if a car sounds loud or if aeroplanes are flying very low over our place, then the dogs are barking a lot and the cats get scared and hide. We can’t watch television or movies, we can’t play music, our structure is always shaking because of the vibration of cars and aeroplanes. It is becoming worse as more people move into Blikkiesdorp. More children, noises, cars and sounds, more aeroplanes and trucks affect us.’

Saudiek Williams. Noise Pollution Diary for research by Alexandra Downing Watkins. Cape Town, South Africa. November 2, 2018.

Alexandra Downing Watkins, ‘Sonic Apartheid: Ecoracism, Apartheid Geographies, and Noise Pollution in Cape Town’s Blikkiesdorp’ (2019).
https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/32488

The Sound of Gentrification is Silence
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-brooklyn-be-loud/670600/

‘Acoustemology conjoins “acoustics” and “epistemology” to theorize sound as a way of knowing. In doing so it inquires into what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening. Acoustemology begins with acoustics to ask how the dynamism of sound’s physical energy indexes its social immediacy. It asks how the physicality of sound is so instantly and forcefully present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations. Answers to such questions do not necessarily engage acoustics on the formal scientific plane that investigates the physical components ofsound’s materiality. Rather, 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.

Acoustemology joins acoustics to epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing-in-action: a knowing-with and knowing- through the audible.

Acoustemology, then, is grounded in the basic assumption that life is shared with others-in-relation, with numerous sources of action (actant in Bruno Latour's terminology: 2005) that are variously human, nonhuman, living, nonliving, organic, or technological. This relationality is both a routine condition of dwelling and one that produces consciousness of modes of acoustic attending, of ways of listening for and resounding to presence.’

Steven Feld, ‘Acoustemology’ in Keywords in Sound ed. Novak and Sakakeeny (Duke University Press, 2015).

Environmental Acousmatics. The Hidden Cicada Paradox

Acousmatics, or the rupture of the visual cause-effect connection between the sound sources and the sounds themselves, can contribute significantly to the ‘blindness’ of profound listening. La Selva, as most tropical rain forests, constitutes a strong paradigm of something we could call ‘environmental acousmatics’.

There are many sounds in the forest but one rarely has the chance to see the sources of most of them. Is not only that the multitude of animals are hidden in the foliage. The foliage also hiddens itself, keeping away from our sight a myriad of plant sound sources, not only caused by wind or rain, but also by falling leaves and branches (sometimes of considerable size), which is a quite frequent event in this forest. Many animals in La Selva live in this acousmatic world, in which the rule is not to see their conspecifics, predators or preys, but just to hear them. This acousmatic feature is best exemplified by one of the most characteristic and widespread sounds in La Selva: the strikingly loud and harsh song of the cicadas. During the day, this is probably the most typical sound that naturally stands in the foreground of the sonic field. One can perceive it with an astonishing intensity and proximity; many times you hear the cicada in front of your face. Yet, like a persistent paradox, you never see it.

‘Environmental Sound Matter’ by Francisco López. April 1998. From the liner notes of the CD La Selva. Sound Environments from a Neotropical Rain Forest (released by V2, The Netherlands). Extracted and modified version of parts of the in-progress larger essay ‘The Dissipation of Music’.

http://www.franciscolopez.net/essays.html

Timothy Morton, ‘Poisoned Ground’, Symplokē , Vol. 21, No. 1-2 (2013). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/symploke.21.1-2.0037

Bikini tests

able 22:00:34 30 June 1946 (GMT) Bikini Atoll lagoon, Marshall Islands Airburst,520 ft. Yield 23 Kt. A standard Fat Man type Mk 3A fission bomb. The bomb fell 980 ft short and 1870 ft left of target,
bravo 18:45:00.0 28 February 1954 (GMT) Bikini Atoll. Surface burst. Yield 15 Mt. A 15 Mt two stage thermonuclear surface burst. The Bravo test created the worst radiological disaster in US history.
cherokee 17:51 20 May 1956, Bikini Atoll. Test B-52 Air Drop, 4350 (+/- 150) Ft burst. Yield 3.8 Mt.
fir 17:50.00.1 11-May-58. Bikini AtollYield 1360Kt (1500 est). Sponsor UCRL. Test of weapon deployment Clean 2-stage Thermonuclear Device only 90 kt of yield due to fission (6.6%)

http://www.jliat.com/

‘In January 2021, Conner, by now consistently sleep deprived and driven half mad by the noise, set up a Facebook page about hearing it. It turned out, to her great relief, that she wasn’t losing her mind: all over Halifax, others were hearing it too. People I spoke to compared the sound with a diesel engine idling, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, something vibrating. “It’s like you can hear a car coming, but it never gets there,” according to Holmfield resident Gemma Redford. However they characterised the noise, the debilitating effects people told me about were the same. Anxiety, headaches, sleeplessness, tension, despair, fears they were going insane. “I’m literally crying at night . . . it seems to get louder and louder and louder,” one woman told BBC Look North. And the more they tuned into it, the more they heard it. “Daft as it sounds,” Sue Dollard told me, “once you’ve heard it, you can’t unhear it.”’

The international mystery of ‘the Hum’:
https://www.ft.com/content/69d94162-8580-4001-96ea-42675739d483

The sound is coming from a cluster of sheds at the base of the mountain housing a cryptocurrency data center, operated by the San Francisco-​based firm PrimeBlock. Twenty-​four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, powerful computers perform the complex computations needed to “mine,” or create, digital currencies. And those noise-​generating computers are kept cool by huge fans.

“It’s like living on top of Niagara Falls,” said Mike Lugiewicz, whose home lies less than 100 yards from the mine.

“When it’s at its worst, it’s like sitting on the tarmac with a jet engine in front of you. But the jet never leaves. The jet never takes off. It’s just annoying. It’s just constant annoyance,” he said.

A neighborhood’s cryptocurrency mine: ‘Like a jet that never leaves’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/cryptocurrency-mine-noise-homes-nc/

‘Almost thirty years ago, Roderick Nash pondered the question of the compatibility between music and wilderness in an article about a group of professional who played a series of classical concerts with a full range of instruments during a two-week float trip through the Grand Canyon-a place full of fantastic natural amphitheaters and acoustics. Instruments and musicians were roped and hauled up cliffs and floated across pools on air mattresses. See Nash, “Mozart on the Rocks: A Grand Canyon Experiment in the Relationship Between Wilderness and Civilization,” Western Wildlands (Fall 1977): 39-44.’

’Intensifying disputes about flights over the Grand Canyon and snowmobiles in Yellowstone are simply the best known of a growing number of confrontations that pit contemplative recreationists against the mechanically assisted pleasure seeker. […] By 1987, though, there were fifty thousand flights a year over the canyon. The National Parks Overflights Act of 1987 mandated “substantial restoration of the natural quiet” at the Grand Canyon and, on Earth Day in 1996, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order instructing the park service to work to restore the canyon's natural quiet. But little has been achieved. In 1998, the annual number of over-flights had climbed to 132 000-a volume comparable to that of a major airport. Another flashpoint has been the persistence of military flights in protected areas designated under the California Desert Protection Act of 1994’ (651-2).

Peter A. Coates, ‘The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise’, Environmental History (2005).

‘Silence just might be on the verge of extinction, and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton believes that even the most remote corners of the globe are impacted by noise pollution.’
Sanctuaries of Silence
https://emergencemagazine.org/feature/sanctuaries-of-silence/

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this: the coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally–well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. what would happen?

A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … feelings–which? incredulity, timidity, fear, awe–which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?

Rainer Maria Rilke, On the Day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, 1919