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

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.




Atem - for MIDI-fied pipe organ, extract from live recording of performance in Kapelle der Versöhnung, Berlin, Aggregate Festival, 2025

ATEM Aggregate Festival Berlin 2025

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