Ania Mauruschat: The Heartbeat of the Drum 

For over 4000 years, the Inuit in Kalaallit Nunaat, as Greenland is called in Greenlandic, have been living in an intimate relationship with nature in the Arctic. Their knowledge of how to survive under such harsh conditions has been preserved and passed on via sound through the millennia. For the Inuit, storytelling and frame drum singing and dancing have sonic agency. They give them the energy they needed to survive and thrive in the cold. The powers of these sounds and their misconception by missionaries and colonizers as addressing pagan or even evil forces led to the ban of the qilaat, the Inuit frame drum, from churches and public spaces. After the suppression of these sounds for around 300 years, in December 2021 Inuit drum dancing and singing has been inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. But despite this huge acknowledgment, the fight for the revitalization of the qilaat is far from over, as the case of the Greenlandic ex-priest Markus E. Olsen shows.

The Heartbeat of the Drum

Emery Petchauer & Ruth Nicole Brown: The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole

In Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World, performance studies scholars Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis offer nine borderless vignettes that pulse, converge, resonate, and dissolve into one another by "rejecting the solidity of a frame" (2021, p. 9). Formlessness, for them, does not suggest an absence of form. Rather, formlessness attends to the chance encounters staged between minor aesthetic performances. Formlessness is an anticolonial strategy, a method of solidarity.

Following Ruiz and Vourloumis, this audio paper performance sounds a formless formation, exploring integrity and wholeness among Black and Indigenous collectives that organize via radical forms of togetherness outside state-sponsored institutions. By the term integrity, we suggest nothing about individual moral virtue but rather a collective ontological state of being whole.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

The Second Sound of Integrity: Us Whole

This audio-paper explores the phenomenon of voice-based technology in the smart-home. Through ethnographic interviews we study how older people use voice-based technologies and with what effects for their experiences of the affective environment in their homes. We followed nine people over the age of 65 online and onsite in their private homes in or nearby Copenhagen during the covid lockdown. We used Google nest smart speakers as cultural probes and followed the participants over the course of six months of integrating and using the new technologies in their homes and everyday lives.  

Marie Ertner, Stina Hasse Jørgensen, Signe L. Yndigegn: Voice as Infrastructure

Our research explores how voice-based technologies participate in creating affective environments in older people’s homes and seeks to address the mundane, unremarkable, and often unspoken experiences and affects related to voice-based technologies and smart homes, which is a largely absent theme in the research on this topic.

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

Voice as Infrastructure

Morten Poulsen: Fear Of Weakness: Songs To Agitate The Man

In the audio-paper Fear of Weakness: Songs to Agitate the Man, artist Morten Poulsen builds on his project Boys Will Be… (2022), in which he met with young cis-men to have conversations about vulnerability, intimacy and masculine norms. In the end of these meetings, Morten recorded the men giggling, and these recordings were then presented as a sound installation. Listening back to these recordings, and informed by both sound and gender studies, Morten explores the deficiencies of masculinity norms and the fear of being exposed as non-masculine. How might the sound of giggling cultivate a softening of hardened spaces, and encourage a reflection on the way that men relate to each other? How might the sound of giggling men serve as a noise in the patriarchal system?

The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)

Fear Of Weakness: Songs To Agitate The Man

Why is it that in experimental improvised music (EIM) anything can happen but hardly ever does? And if what musicians play is not determined in advance, what holds performances of EIM together? We address these twin questions through a combination of verbal dialog, recordings of a live performance of the Splitter Orchester and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, and comments on both. Drawing on theories of »participatory sense-making« in enactive philosophy, we show that while musical phenomena such as drones and grooves emerge from human interaction, they take on a life of their own as more-than-human agents. By enabling and constraining what »makes sense« in particular situations, these »emergent autonomous organizations« shape the (inter)action that gave rise to them, obtaining normative force. By the same token, however, they can also change according to musicians’ subsequent (inter)actions. EIM thus stages the emergence and transformation of norms in real time and illustrates how human action more broadly interacts with the more-than-human.

Audio paper by Christopher A. Williams and Joshua Bergamin. 

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Real-Time Norms: Grooves, drones, and sense-making in experimental improvised music

MP3 changed the aural world as the first digital technology to compress audio, interpreting it through perceptual coding that models the standard human, hearing standard sounds, in order to sell and share them. Today, in the era of streaming and virtual meetings, bandwidth has become an even scarcer commodity: Artificial Intelligence comes to help, but the current codecs, such as Lyra by Google, or Opus, used by Whatsapp and Discord, present a sound reconstructed on the basis of their reference corpuses, and fine-tuned for speech – »good enough«, as defined by Sterne. A model is trained to efficiently distinguish noise from voiced information, and to rebuild a synthetic simulacrum of them, neutering context. When this happens, whose voice is your voice? Whose ears are your ears? And if, following Marius Schneider, sounds create the world, what is the world those models remember?

The research stems from a technical analysis of these codecs, their bias and their proven limits and virtues, to focus on the consequences of this widespread acceptance of apparently transparent audio transmission: a social, efficiency-driven homogenization of the soundscape; the elimination of more-than-human sounds. leading to a deeper dissonance in authenticity of the acoustic ecology; and creative possibilities hidden in abusing the emergence of meta-human debris.

Audio paper by Alberto Ricca.  

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Whose voice is your voice?: Control, identity and metahuman sounds in AI audio compression codes

This audio paper seeks to understand the agency of sounds and instruments in designing intra-actions between humans and their environment. It further explores how different mediating technologies influence the ways professional musicians experience place through sound. In addition to the core research group, members of the contemporary music ensemble Norrbotten NEO participated in these site-specific explorations, which were devised as part of the ecological urban sound art project Invisible Sounds. Through a long-term collaborative artistic process, described in the audio paper, an hour-long composition titled Sounds by Water and Trees was produced (Hultqvist et al., 2024). 

The mediation between humans and the environment was driven by audio technologies on site, utilising sensors, hydrophones, and surround sound microphone arrays, along with their deep entanglement with musical instruments. The interview materials and the original audio recordings have been further analysed by revisiting the multi-modal recordings and exploring the individual experiences of each participant through stimulated recall analysis (Östersjö et al., 2023). The audio paper expresses all these layers of signification while emphasising the individual experience expressed by the participating musicians. The project is characterised by recursive loops that flow continuously between subject and object, self and world, order and chaos in rhythmically cohering and complexifying patterns. We provide examples of how such complexifying patterns may emerge through a participatory and multidimensional engagement with sound in tandem with the mediation enabled by the technologies used.

Audio paper by Anders Hultqvist, Stefan Östersjö, Jan Berg, Robert Ek.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Sounds by Water and Trees: Exploring place through mediated listening

The migrations of baleen whales generally go little noticed, yet they have a profound effect on underwater sonic milieux. Seasonal fluctuations in the songs of the humpback, minke, and sei whales are underpinned by the near-constant subsonic bass pulse of the fin whale. As underwater acoustic monitoring is helping to reveal, migration routes and timings of these top predators are shifting in response to changing ocean temperatures. Such monitoring allows whales to be used as climate sentinels, facilitates conservation efforts, and also offers the prospect of building on public »whale listening« projects such as OrcaSound. Widening public access to underwater acoustic data would permit an active deep listening with the potential of generating a fuller engagement with marine environments, complementing the everyday awareness of birdsong that connects even urban citizens of industrial societies to the more-than-human world. Using underwater recordings from the North Atlantic supplied by the Marine Directorate of the Scottish Government I simulate the yearly pattern of cetacean song, aiming to show the listener that different species are readily distinguished and »good to listen with«: they attract and hold the attention, extending our sense of dwelling in a world always already experienced by other sentient beings.

Audio paper by Alex South. 

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Sounding migrations: Deep listening and the acoustic phenology of whale song

This audio paper examines listening practices, technologies and cultures within the scientific study of marine ecosystems. It mixes recordings of whale song and ocean sounds with the voices of its co-authors, marine mammal ecologist Dr Denise Risch and artist researcher Dr Mark Peter Wright. Moving across three phases of argumentation and reflection, the paper questions how underwater knowledge emerges  through tools such as hydrophones, spectrograms and Artificial Intelligence. It situates the ears, bodies and imaginations of researchers to ask what constitutes sonic data when listening to worlds beyond the human.

Audio paper by Mark Peter Wright and Denise Risch. 

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds


Ocean sense: Listening, technology and the sonic researcher

In villages and cities across the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of songbird competitions are held every week. In these competitions, members of one species of songbird compete with each other, where the aesthetic qualities of the song, including its rhythm, melody, timbre, and volume, are evaluated by a team of referees. First prizes are large cash awards and sometimes cars.  A birdsong that incorporates motifs from other species is especially valued, and bird owners spend much time caringly teaching their birds the song of other species. Champion birds are traded for as much as 100,000 euros.  

The competitions are at the vortex of a »songbird craze«, called kicau-mania in Indonesia, that has emerged in the last two decades. Some 14 million songbirds, endemic to the region, are held captive on Java alone. The unsustainable industry of trapping and trading to satisfy the demand of Indonesian songbird lovers now threatens dozens of endemic species with extinction. 

Following bird trainers, owners, and referees, this audio paper investigates the awkward and »non-innocent care« that links multispecies love to extinction in the Asian Songbird Crisis. We argue that the aesthetics of Indonesian bird lovers – intimate, caring, situated, individual, and more-than-human – presents a challenge and a contrast, full of ambivalence, to the abstract, general, species-focused, and Romantic aesthetics at the heart of Western environmentalism in the Anthropocene.

The audio paper argues that an attention to the multiplicity of multispecies aesthetics is needed to avert the extinction of endemic species, a possibility that we will explore in the new research project »Aesthetics of Extinction«.

Audio paper by Nils Bubandt and Sanne Krogh Groth.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Love unto death: The multispecies aesthetics of birdsong and bird extinction in Indonesia

Abstract

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

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

Audio paper by Diana Chester and ​​​​​​​Damien Ricketson.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Listening with earth

This work takes place in the garden, a space of refuge and multispecies co-dependence, from the perspective of two people living with disabling conditions.  

We are a sound artist and an anthropologist, also mother and daughter. We are both adjusting to alternative temporalities, reduced mobilities and ways of living by our chronically unwell bodies. Our paper meditates on how multispecies listening can help us to live slower and maybe better, embrace new temporalities and sustain practices of care within the garden and beyond.  

We have been developing sound sitting, as opposed to sound walking, as an accessible listening practice. Sound sitting invites slow listening, »in every possible way to everything possible to hear« (Oliveros, 1998). attending to the small, mundane, and everyday sonic worlds within and between bodies – our own and the critters of the garden that we ignore or treat carelessly under capitalism. Inspired by crip time (Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2017), anthropology (Tsing, 2021) and expanded listening practices (Oliveros,1995; Shah, 2021), we become participants in a sonic network that extends to the semantic and the ethical allowing us to listen and learn from more than human temporalities – »slug time« or the amorphous, sticky instances of slow knowledge production. 

Audio paper by Nils Bubandt and Sanne Krogh Groth.

Audio paper by Cathy Lane and Maya Lane. 

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Listening in slug time: Listening slowly with bodies, critters, and the temporalities of the garden

Along and in the rivers of Lewisham in south-east London, we hear stories of mermaids, treasure chests, crocodiles and, dwelling in a dark corner of Deptford Creek, the Necker, some say a merperson or a serpent.

In this audio paper, we explore these ethereal and slippery stories through listening to the landscape, examining the role of sound in the ongoing process of producing places (Massey, 1994). We consider how sound conjures the imagined mermaids and other watery creatures and foregrounds the pluralities and possibilities of places (Voegelin, 2021). In a reciprocal feedback loop, sounds give rise to certain imaginings and, once imagined, these sounds confirm the existence of what we think or know we heard. 

The imaginings are intimately tied in with everyday forms of place-making along Lewisham’s rivers – picnicking, graffiti-writing, playing and birdwatching. They are also a response to the liminality of such spaces; concerns about safety after dark or uncertainty about what is in or under the water equally giving rise to mythical creatures. 

In turn, the imaginings layer onto the multiplicity of trajectories and practices intersecting to create places (Massey, 2012). Entwined in this are the landscape’s sounds - field recordings, interviews, and music that the rivers recalled to us. Sounds which are not echoes of places but active in their production. 

Through the sonic personae of mermaids, we suggest listening confluently to grasp sound’s role in texturing the rivers’ ambiguous and otherworldly qualities. Like the confluence of two streams of a river, listening confluently opens a crack in any notion of place, allowing other stories to issue forth. 

Along and in Lewisham’s rivers we invite (in fact, impel) you to listen confluently; to listen for mermaids and the places in which they dwell.

Audio paper by Konstantinos Damianakis, Louise Rondel and Emma Jackson. 

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Listening for mermaids: The otherworldly life of Lewisham's Rivers

Even though you can’t hear it, infrasound fills the air. And because the atmosphere doesn’t absorb it as readily as regular sound, infrasound comes from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. If humans could perceive frequencies lower than 20 Hz, then changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic entanglements taking place across the globe would shape our imagination of the planet’s very nature.  

In my research, I’ve developed infrasonic »macrophones« to make infrasound audible. Comprising wind-noise reduction arrays leading to microbarometers and using custom signal processing, I’ve appropriated the basic technique from what the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect distant warhead tests. In this case, however, we’re listening to a planet in transition. Unlike with a scientific endeavor, it’s not a matter of extending the horizon of human knowledge. Instead, it’s about encountering agencies greater than our own that connect us through the atmosphere, an experience that is both poetic and political.

This paper features ambient atmospheric infrasound recorded with Macrophones installed in the woods near Amherst, Massachusetts. I sped up the recording by a factor of 60, raising the pitch by ~6 octaves into a range perceptible by humans. I played this audio to residents of Amherst in a controlled listening environment; excerpts of their reactions are also included.

With support from Creative Capital, Amherst College, and the J & K Altman Foundation. Thanks to Ethan Clotfelter, Ben Holtzman, Leif Karlstrom, Theun Karelse, Lucia Monge, the art department at Lewis & Clark, and the Columbia Center for Spatial Research.

Audio paper by Brian House. 

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Infrasound and the planetary imaginary

2.6 kilometres below the surface of the Northeast Pacific Ocean, Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space is submerged as a chimerical anomaly, a sonic platform entangled with an immense physics experiment and a vast oceanographic monitoring station. Attached to a subaquatic telescope that probes anarchic, abundant yet extremely elusive neutrino particles, the SFB1258’s Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) and Radio Amnion are in turn hosted at the »Cascadia Basin node« of Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) NEPTUNE Observatory. 300Kms west off the shores of Turtle Island (aka »North America«) this multi-year audio platform and communication device has commissioned and relayed more than 25 unique artists’ compositions deep within – and addressed to – Ocean. During each full moon since 2021, activating scales and senses ‘beyond-the-human’ (Kohn), participants have taken part in telepresent, nonlocal, sono-luminous hydrosocial ceremonies initiated at the lunar-clock and portal https://radioamnion.net – Ocean is transcendental in that they are one of the prime conditions for the possibility of complex planetary life. Their dire and tumultuous conditions under industrial, extractive and monopoly capital include rapid die off, eutrophication, darkening, heating, and acidification. These in turn lead to cataclysmic events like an oversaturated Ocean that can no longer heat or carbon sink, as well as expectations for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Conveyor (AMOC) collapse (Ocean current collapse leading to unknowable climate and weather system disintegration). 

As a site for ecological grief and reprieve from hegemonic Western beliefs, Radio Amnion (RA) is an extension of an unprecedented opportunity to enter into a vast, distant and otherwise unreachable abyssal zone where physicists scry the depths for a rare neutrino’s superluminal cascade. In this audio-paper extracts from Amnion compositions alongside excerpts from Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece Solaris (1961) punctuate this development of the Quantum Ecologies project of Thoms’ PhD on »Landscape-Laboratories« (2021). Here we advocate for the re-enchantment and decolonization at sites of scientific knowledge production where »pluriversality« (Escobar) should be fundamental. By listening from a »cosmopolitical« (Stengers) perspective, this investigative array of vibratory thought explores how commissioned RA artists have approached Ocean through rites of sonic meditation, sonic fiction, and (watery) materiality. 

Radio Amnion acknowledges the support from Canada Council for the Arts, the SFB1258: Neutrinos and Dark Matter in Astro- and Particle Physics Group  and Ocean Networks Canada. 

Audio paper by Konstantinos Damianakis and Jol Thoms.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

How ocean dream: Sonic transmissions, deep-sea ecologies, and pluriversal listening

This audio paper offers an autoethnographic engagement with both glaciers and the ideas-of-glaciers through acts of listening by Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta campaign members. The campaign relies upon artistic intervention as sociolegal innovation by nominating the glacier Snæfellsjökull for Iceland’s 2024 presidential race. A founding tenet of the collective’s working method is listening as a primary strategy to become-with glacier (að jökla). Through campaign members’ application of multimodal research approaches, the audio paper will conceptualise, describe, and demonstrate how listening forms an integral component of communicating with the more-than-human to speculate on possible future worldings. 

The paper goes beyond the concept of the »soundscape« as a wide and general metaphor (Ingold, 2007) seeking more meaningful and intimate relationships via sound, understood as a physical phenomenon of vibration, both audible and inaudible (Östersjö, et al., 2024). It questions the Western notion of music as a human (and) sonic practice, promoting listening as a creative act of becoming-with. The narrative and sonic structure of the audio paper is a building, layered unfolding – an ecomimicry of glacial becoming through flow, surge, thinning, thawing, recession, ablation, melt – where our prose outlines the palimpsest​​​​​​​ of Snæfellsjökull from its extent to its projected disappearance.  

Audio paper by Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings, Santiago Rueda-García, Konstantine Vlasis, Daniela Amado, Adam Świtała, Rike Scheffler, Linnéa Ida-Maria Falck.

Part

Glacial withness: Listening at the edge of planetary boundaries

In this audio paper, I advance the concept of trans sound studies, a field that both theorizes and enacts how sonic practices can unsettle the presumed stability of voice, body, and gender. Drawing on trans studies, sound studies, and media archaeology, I situate the voice not as a transparent index of identity but as a mutable and more-than-human medium of experimentation. Through citations of historical speech synthesis, such as the Voder, CHANT and the DECtalk, as well as contemporary artistic practices by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Luca Soudant, the work demonstrates how technologies of vocal modulation open onto new sonic possibilities for gender beyond naturalization or legibility. Central to the paper is my own voice, spectrally manipulated in real time, foregrounding the critical potential of vocal unnaturalness as a practice of destabilization. In dialogue with theories of the »acousmatic question« (Eidsheim), trans operations (cárdenas), and trans*formative sonic thinking (Soudant), I propose trans sound studies as both an analytic and a creative method. It argues for embracing the alien and inhuman capacities of synthesized and modulated voices, not as failures of authenticity, but as generative openings for rethinking identity through sound.

Audio paper by Paulus van Horne.

Part of Se



Embracing unnaturalness: Computer voices & trans sound studies

This paper explores how field recording practices can be impacted by concepts from the fields of energy production/efficiency (Lovins,1976) and energy ethics (Marder, 2017). 

We’ve seen greater focus on the agency of field recordists at work; from noisy non-presence (Wright, 2017), to extractivist listening (Robinson, 2020), yet attempts to capture worlds without anthropogenic noise persist (Winderen, 2019). Simultaneously, the embodied energies of recording tools have come under scrutiny (Polli, 2017, Wright 2022); where ethics of care are held close. 

But what of the field itself? From an energy perspective, we need actualisation rather than potential for fieldwork, and thus require the field to expend energy for our purposes. In this paper, I’ll look, via Michael Marder’s philosophical work, at how we have come to think of energy as a resource. How post-WWII optimism led to the energy crisis of the 1970s, and how mitigating strategies contributed to the present energy situation.

With reference to my own fieldwork: with more-than-human worlds in experimental nuclear fusion, and isostatic uplift in the Baltic, I consider the energy dynamics of human expectation and demand on the field itself and show, despite the best intentions, how we often still operate within 20C energy strategies and paradigms. 

I conclude by looking at Marder’s threefold alternative energy paradigm that reworks Aristotle’s energeia: energy as actualisation, not as potential, and how it might be applied to field recording practices in order to improve the balance going forward

Audio paper by Julian Weaver.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Being-at-work in the field: Rethinking field recording through energy ethics and actualisation

Ambient Tremology reorients the act of listening from the sonic to the vibrant by gaining contact with the trembling matter of amphibious worlds. Situated within the soaked and brackish Romanian Danube Delta, our contact-accelerometer recordings and haptic experiences trace granular memories, waterways in transition, and other-than-human transmission. Drawing on perspectives from the fields of ecotremology, sound studies, new materialism and posthuman phenomenology, the audio paper opens up questions on sonic and vibratory fieldwork as a process of »making with«. Vibration is observed as a shadowy ambient force that not only relates agents within the Delta but also shakes up submerged histories and configures contact zones with spatio-temporal rhythms and scales beyond human perception. Concerned also with the materiality of the voice and recording themselves, the audio paper unfolds through spills and glitches between its layers while amplifying the vibratory linkages in the Danube’s deltaic landscape. By means of sonic translation, our dialogue with recorded vibrations offers a glimpse of the amphibious burrows enmeshing matter and the other-than-human.

Audio paper by Kosmas Phan Ðinh, Mae Lubetkin and Michal Mitro.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Ambient tremology: Vibratory linkages in the Danube Delta

Cultural practice in general is a slippery but deeply felt affair, where practitioners are often tasked with communicating the »underside of meaning« (Barthes, 1976). In algorithmic times, focusing on this task when working with machine learning outputs can offer an alternative to the pressure to consider quantifiable and easily machine-readable datasets as complete repositories of human knowledge. The multimodal knowledge held in sound and human experience is difficult to parse with data tools, e.g. machine learning, but the failures and messiness of these outputs add to our toolsets of constructing and reconstructing the worlds we offer in our stories. Through a presentation of some of Sinha’s discoveries navigating the worlds of theatre and machine learning-based audio research-creation, this audio paper offers examples of the possibilities of engaging with algorithmic failure as a deliberate strategy of discovery, to uplift the exploration of cultural possibilities and engage alternative models of community building and connection.

Audio paper by Debashis Sinha.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Algorithmic mythologies: Failure as a cultural tool

Drawing from environmental semiotics and the onomatopoeic echoes of flowing rivers and rustling leaves, the audio paper urges a release from rigid human perspectives and explores the possibilities of attuning to the subtleties of more-than-human communication. It proposes mimesis and empathetic listening as tools to engage with our surroundings beyond extractivism and as an ambiguous practice that embraces failure to develop intersubjective experience and sonic fictions, while reconnecting with the rhythms and patterns of the more-than-human world.

Audio paper by Nele Möller.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Alarming calls and whispering winds: On game-calling instruments, mimicry and intersubjectivity

Drawing from examples of recent sound works and research the audiopaper explores the idea of listening to biophonic and geophonic »voices« as a form of technologically aided sonic animism. Field recording is understood as a practice of listening seeking heightened awareness and environmental connectedness and sonic research as 'deep' listening into scientific audio collections and archival sound. The audio paper features examples from the author’s recent compositions, radiophonic works and installations, and reflects on perceived sonic animism through the sound material. The compositions are contextualised as works relating to climate change and ecological crises and encompassing broader narratives: Rediviva intermixta, a sound installation/radiophonic work for Oscillations, a collaboration between University of the Western Cape and Akademie der Künste Berlin, includes sounds of wind, water and ocean, plants and animals, wooden constructions and metal fences at places with historical and current political and  societal significance; Homeostasis, an audiovisual installation presented in two natural history museums asks questions about anthropocentric perspectives on bioacoustic voices. By acknowledging that the voices of animals communicating underwater, and therefore in a medium of sound strange to human ears, will always be alien to humans, the work – composed with scientific research recordings – aims to appreciate otherness in these voices. Future Forest, a currently ongoing project, in collaboration with ecoacoustic researchers from Freiburg University, relates to the ecosystem forest: the Black Forest and old-growth forest in Brandenburg. The paper describes how, in making the first recordings of wind, sounding through different tree species with contact mikes connected to the trunk of a tree, transported us into a state of »animistic listening«, even a spiritual form of insight and realisation (»everything is connected«). 

Audio paper by Kirsten Reese.

Audio paper by 
Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

Sonic animism?: »Deep« listening into field recordings and scientific audio collections

An audio paper exploring the uncanny other world of the imagined consciousness of puppets. This sonic exploration of materialism and objects explores the sonority of puppets as an interface and space that explores sound from a novel non-human perspective. We will explore the relationships between human and puppet and the sounds of these interactions along with the delocalized anamnesis of historical puppet noises. This practice research explores narrative semiotics in the non-dialogue sound of puppetry and the expression in non-words and noise from the puppet perspective – the sound of a hand inside me, on me, holding me, touching me, manipulating me. How does the puppeteer talk to the puppet, how do they talk for the puppet, how does the puppet talk to others and what internal voice does the puppet have? Based on recordings from within a puppets body and the vocal of Matt Smith including found recordings of puppet voices and audio ephemera. The voice, though seemingly giving a particular marker of gender, is not fixed in a puppet and so potentially transgresses notions of identity and binaries. This ambiguity in the audio paper is intentional. 

Audio paper by Matt Smith and Paul J. Rogers.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds

What do puppets hear?: The uncanny other world of the imagined consciousness of puppets

Abstract

This paper explores how field recording practices can be impacted by concepts from the fields of energy production/efficiency (Lovins,1976) and energy ethics (Marder, 2017). 

We’ve seen greater focus on the agency of field recordists at work; from noisy non-presence (Wright, 2017), to extractivist listening (Robinson, 2020), yet attempts to capture worlds without anthropogenic noise persist (Winderen, 2019). Simultaneously, the embodied energies of recording tools have come under scrutiny (Polli, 2017, Wright 2022); where ethics of care are held close. 

But what of the field itself? From an energy perspective, we need actualisation rather than potential for fieldwork, and thus require the field to expend energy for our purposes. In this paper, I’ll look, via Michael Marder’s philosophical work, at how we have come to think of energy as a resource. How post-WWII optimism led to the energy crisis of the 1970s, and how mitigating strategies contributed to the present energy situation.

With reference to my own fieldwork: with more-than-human worlds in experimental nuclear fusion, and isostatic uplift in the Baltic, I consider the energy dynamics of human expectation and demand on the field itself and show, despite the best intentions, how we often still operate within 20C energy strategies and paradigms. 

I conclude by looking at Marder’s threefold alternative energy paradigm that reworks Aristotle’s energeia: energy as actualisation, not as potential, and how it might be applied to field recording practices in order to improve the balance going forward.




Nicole De Brabandere & Graham Flett: Hearing on the Verge. Cuing and Aligning with the Movement of the Audible
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Nicole de Brabandere & Graham Flett: Hearing on the Verge.

Jakob Kreutzfeldt & Sandra Lori Petersen: "Like Sitting Inside a Phone"
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Jakob Kreutzfeldt & Sandra Lori Petersen: "Like Sitting Inside a Phone"

Anne Robinson: Through the air with the greatest of ease: phonogenie.
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Anne Robinson: Through the air with the greatest of ease: phonogenie

Rasmus Holmboe & Jan Stricker: Between Maps and Territories
Produced for the special issue Fluid Sounds, Seismograf.org. August 2016.

Rasmus Holmboe & Jan Stricker: Between Maps and Territories

Audio Paper

Kate Donovan: Listening beyond radio, listening beyond history

Piotr Cichocki: Production of sound, production of knowledge

Seismograf is an independent Danish web magazine focusing on the newest developments within the arts of sound.

Seismograf

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