B.2.1 Speculative bioacoustics, interspecies audibility, and the posthuman choir

• Jami Reimer, Simon Fraser University

The construction of the humanist liberal subject voice is bound up in a history which relies on a systematic separation of listening and sounding subjects and objects. But what about when voices join? From Greek theatre to Western musical traditions, the notion of a chorus has muddied the individuation of voice by assembling an observing or narrating mass rather than invoking a self- realizing subject. By performing a kind of ‘audienceship,’ choral voice beckons listeners into its fold with aggregational sonic momentum. While interpreting such a phenomenon as musical may be circumscribed to the human, vocal and indeed chorusing behaviours are prevalent across species. My research focuses on locating multispecies voices as features of sympoetic (collectively making) systems as a way to interrogate the primacy of the human within interspecies sonic relationships. This inquiry into voice binds sonic materiality with auditory perception– the two caught in a perceptual loop, one hailing the other in an ever-emerging system.

As chorister, prophetic muse, and climate change poster child, frogs quickly surfaced as an intriguing focus for this work. I partnered with the Amphibian Natural History Lab and the Fonoteca Neotropical sound archive (University of Campinas, Brazil) during the mating chorus field season to immerse myself within modes of recording and listening to chorusing frog species via the biologists who listen to them. Through shared experiences of listening in the field, formal and informal interview, and lab and field ‘shadowing,’ I used a phenomenological and ethnographic approach to listen for the perceptual experiences of bioacoustic biologists. By looking to bioacoustics as a site of sonic acoustic knowledge and interspecies relation, this arts-based research considers the disciplinary production of listening modalities and the sonic aesthetics of ecological inquiry through video, text, and sound.

keywords: listening, relational ontology, biosemiotics, voice, sound

B.2.2 Walking and/as Listening

Rachel Epp Buller, Bethel College

How do we listen?
To whom do we listen?
Why should we listen?
This time of converging crises calls us to listen differently.

In this presentation I offer a series of walking scores as artistic inquiries into listening, proposing that listening is not just an action but a reciprocal orientation. Good listening, relational listening, or what Salomé Voegelin (2020) calls “care-full listening,” is a listening toward engagement, a furthering of connection with human and more-than-human relations. Indigenous education scholar Dr. Dwayne Donald argues that we are in an era of “relationship denial” and that we need to repair these relations, with each other and with the land, and renew these relationships on kinship terms. He writes further, “By walking and listening, people begin to perceive the life around themselves differently. They feel enmeshed in relationships. […] They walk themselves into kinship relationality” (2021, 61). My artistic research takes this claim seriously. In my performance practice, I explore ways that listening can be carried out not just with our ears but with the whole body—hearing, sensing, perceiving, attuning—and how specific artistic practices and gestures enact and facilitate forms of reparative and relational listening. I posit that walking might enable a shift away from what Dylan Robinson (2020) terms “hungry listening”—informed by a settler-colonial, extractivist history and mindset—and toward a greater awareness of one’s critical listening positionality with the goal of listening as a guest. This presentation features art objects, audio recordings, scores, and creative texts produced as part of daily walking encounters alongside human and more-than-human kin during a four-month residency in Edmonton, Alberta.

keywords: listening, walking, attunement, daily practice, artistic performance

B.2.3 Listening is a form of touch

jake moore, University of Saskatchewan

A voice need not be sonic, but it must be received to be fully actualized. For once we have received the voice of another, we have recognized the presence of being. This is not to say the beings are not present until acknowledged, but that our failure to recognize their presence constitutes a lack. This failure accounts for alienation and injustice in many ways. For what we recognize as beings and what we accept as knowledge is evidence of our ethical positionality, what theoretical physicist Karen Barad names as ethico-onto-epistem-ology. With justice at stake in the reception of voices there is a call for new methods of listening.

I wish to take up the methodologies of listening gaining traction in contemporary scholarship that acknowledge this call, and its ethical stance, like Dylan Robinson’s articulation of the extractive processes of “hungry listening”, Zoe Todd and AM Kanngieser’s proposition of “refracted listening” as well as much earlier teasing out of distinctions between écouter (to listen) and entendre (to hear) by Jean Luc Nancy. Acknowledging that these analyses are coming from Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist, and anti-capitalist scholars, the plurality in methods of listening are laid bare and the role of positionality asserted.

Looking to public works of sonic intervention, performative listening, and direct address by artists, this proposition considers the ethics of care in public connection and the fecundity of being together, apart.

In order to receive something or someone that does not merely reflect ourselves back, requires an attunement made possible through radical openness. It demands great vulnerability in unlearning knowledge as a form of consumption and instead posits that we must arrive at encounter as active exchange. We must understand listening then as a chosen gesture towards one another, a form of reciprocal penetration, and ultimately a form of touch.

keywords: vocality, listening, care, presence, touch

B.2.4 This Street is a Song

Stephanie Loveless, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

This Street is a Song is a creative-research project that explores practices of situated and public listening on my block in the South End of Albany, NY. This is a complex and contested neighborhood marked by 1960s “urban renewal” and subsequent disinvestment, whose soundscape is composed alternately of birds, dogs, squealing children, bluetooth speakers, animated voices, car stereos, occasional gunshots, long silences, and frequent fireworks. Taking to heart Dylan Robinson’s call for settlers to develop their own decolonial listening practices (Hungry Listening, 2020), This Street is a Song explores methodologies for allied listening to and with the many subjectivities (human and more-than-human, present and past) of this site.

Using This Street is a Song as a case study, I propose attention to the hyperlocal (or “going nowhere”) and suspension of productivity (or “doing nothing”) as potent strategies for both un-fixing habits of listening and countering settler-colonial disciplinary norms. The ethic of “going nowhere” resists the colonial drive that undergirds much of historical field recording practices and takes seriously what it might mean to dwell in, to steward, to be responsible to, and to belong in, a particular place in a particular time. “Doing nothing” resists extractivist desires to produce creative outputs that are disciplinarily legible, instead allowing for non-goal oriented and responsive activities. Here I am inspired by artist-thinkers such as Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing, 2020) and Ultra-Red (10 Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation, 2008), and projects like Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry.

Grounded in non-verbal listening-based practices such as Soundwalking, Deep Listening, field recording and composition, and such dialogical listening practices as conversation, interviews, and community meetings, This Street is a Song enacts the ethics of “doing nothing” and “going nowhere” in order to unsettle listening habits and create the possibility for responsive listening to--and with--the many voices of one complex site.

keywords: allied listening, deep Listening, hungry listening, soundwalking