History of sound technology and worker immigration is about the migratory patterns of labour immigration to America, and then to the space of Michigan. It also mimics the development and migration of sound technology, sound effects, art and music genres that crossed and crisscrossed the Atlantic, between Europe and America. 

Myself and others ask the phrase "If you can hear it"through the sound collage...which refers to microphones and recorded sound.ounds from this mix are extracted from samples from radio and newsreels footage, live music recordings, television, and also from visits to the Lautarchiv (Sound archive) of Humboldt University in Berlin. Other sources included oral history interviews from the Labor History Project at the University of Michigan.

History of Sound Technology and Worker Immigration

Sound anthropologist Dr Tom Rice takes us on an immersive audio tour of an imaginary zoo, and asks us to think about it as a sound world. What happens if we make a conscious effort to listen to the zoo and its animals rather than just look at them? Can listening make us feel closer and more connected?

In an Anthropocene age of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, an acoustic mindfulness of other lifeforms can help humans recalibrate their relationship to the natural world. It’s argued that looking at animals can produce a sense of detachment from them, and that having animals displayed for our viewing pleasure is an expression of a relationship in which humans are given power, and a sense of superiority. If that’s the case, can listening create a more sympathetic and empathetic orientation towards animals? 

Using animal sounds recorded at British zoos, in this podcast you’ll discover animals in an entirely new way, and think about our impact on them. What is the animals’ sound world like? What impact do our human sounds have on them? And we’ll do an experiment. One way to think about the decline in biodiversity is not just about diminishing numbers, you can also imagine a fade in the audible presence of animals. When a species dies out it also fall silent, so sound is a powerful way to draw attention to the value and fragility of biodiversity. Imagine a fade, taking decades, until finally there’s nothing, only silence. Would that be a loss do you think? 

Tom Rice is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter. His research specialism is in sound and in 2018 he started a project called Listening to the Zoo with a small group of colleagues. The team worked with Bristol and also Paignton Zoo in Southwest England, to try to think about the zoo as a sound environment, and find out whether attending to different kinds and qualities of sound could produce new perspectives on the zoos and their animals.

This podcast was produced as part of the Listening to the Zoo project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Transforming Social Science research call.  

It was written and presented by Tom Rice, with input from Alex Badman-King, Sam Hurn and Paul Rose, all from the University of Exeter, and also from Adam Reed at the University of St Andrews. The sound designer was Eve Streeter.


Main image: Professor Sam Hurn recording Hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas)at Paignton Zoo.

Listening to the Zoo

Cattle Grids Of Dartmoor (excerpt)

Out of Gat and Brodszky I (live)

Work in progress. This track is collated for listening, analysis and research purposes only.

The Fur Coat Of Automation - V6 - 2023 - 05 - 30

An amalgam of sounds on a railway walk in Derbyshire, teens in a DLR station, Singapore MRT announcements and a Georgian Doorbell being rung.

Plunderphonics, Part 2

Audio Obscura is an award-winning immersive sound work by poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw. Originally intended for London's St Pancras International Station, it works well in any busy railway station. In an aural equivalent to the camera obscura, the audience enter the crowd and start to hear the voices of those around them, saying the things they don’t know they want to say.

It is essential to use noise-cancelling headphones. Listeners are encouraged to post their experiences of the work on the audio timeline.

To find out more about Audio Obscura, visit: www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2011/audio_obscura

Image: St Pancras International train station. Photograph by Julian Abrams

Lavinia Greenlaw: Audio Obscura

Writer, mapmaker and artist Tim Robinson on the elsewheres of his life and work: in conversation on RTÉ Radio 1's Arts Tonight with presenter Vincent Woods in Roundstone, Co Galway, in 2014.

Tim Robinson talks to RTÉ Arts Tonight

(Im)migrant Noise And The Infrapolitical Space Of Michigan

From a conversation in 1977 with the composer, teacher, founder of the World Soundscape Project, and author of "The Tuning of the World."

R. Murray Schafer on SILENCE

Over the summer 2020 Marcus recorded two bats that fly up and down his road every evening – literally up and down, up and down, up and down… he stood in roughly in the middle of their flight with his ultrasound detector as they swoop back and forth. This track explores the potentials of these recordings as sonic materials: recorded live in quad using 4 amps and two parallel chains of hardware signal processors. Then the tracks where mixed down to stereo. 

Dr. Marcus Leadley is a sound artist and composer whose work explores the relationship between sound and place. He is the Studio Manager at Goldsmith’s Electronic Music Studios and also works as lead artist and consultant in relation to public art projects. Much of this practice is collaborative: working with other sonic artists, musicians or with visual artists.  He holds a PhD is Sonic Arts and an MMus is Studio Based Composition. His research interests include phonography, soundscape composition, acoustic ecology and ecoacoustics.

Marcus Leadley: Bats (common Pipistrelle)

Operating at the intersection of acoustics, audiology, urban design, sound art, soundscape studies, and experimental music, Drever’s practice represents an ongoing inquiry into the perception, design and practice of everyday environmental sound. He has a special interest in soundscape methods, in particular field recording and soundwalking. Resulting from the findings of his study on the noise impact of high-speed hand dryers, Drever has been developing the concept of auraldiversity, attempting to reconceptualize hearing in sound practice that diverges from a paradigm predicated on a singular, idealized, symmetrical model of hearing (i.e. the auraltypical) that has predominated.

Drever is Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-leads the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR).

In 1998 he co-founded and chaired the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community (a regional affiliate of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology) for whom he chaired Sound Practice: the 1st UKISC Conference on sound, culture and environments in 2001 at Dartington College of Arts.

Drever is an avid collaborator and has devised work in many different configurations and contexts. Commissions range from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, France (1999), WDR Studio Akustische Kunst, Germany (2011), Shiga National Museum, Japan (2012). As a core member of arts collective Blind Ditch, he is currently working on the Common Line project (https://thecommonline.uk/), Britain’s first linear forest.

Cattle Grids Of Dartmoor (excerpt)

John Levack Drever