Favs

Seismograf audio papers selected by The Lake

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

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.

---

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

Voice as Infrastructure

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

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

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 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

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

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.




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