2. PURIFICATION AND ‘KNOWING WITHOUT KNOWING’

A summer night in a tropical swamp is dense with life – in a single pond, dozens of species, sometimes hundreds of frogs, can be heard calling together (Bogert Reference Bogert1958: track 3). We know a tremendous amount about how these creatures live in their environments, but modern scientific method divests our knowledge of the life which it describes. By the strength of its method, natural science has, in Bruno Latour’s language, ‘purified’ the natural from the cultural, the objective from the subjective (Latour Reference Latour1993: 11), and we cannot grasp other animals’ lives as we grasp our own. In Derrida’s language, there lies an ‘abyssal rupture’ (Derrida Reference Derrida2008: 30) between the human and the non-human, and others contend that we could never know ‘what it is like to be’ another being or species (Nagel Reference Nagel1973: 437). Specifically within the study of animal sounds, Rachel Mundy traces this purification as a product of changes in the sciences after 1945, where imagining ‘what it was like to be a bird’ was ‘a breach of scientific conduct’, placed on the status of a confession (Mundy Reference Mundy2018: 141). These ‘breaches’ in the personal biographies of animal scientists betray that there is a practical sense which objects to such a sharp boundary between humans and non-humans, and instead draws contingent, perhaps imaginative, conclusions. One scholar has called this decidedly unscientific knowledge ‘knowing without knowing’ (Kohn Reference Kohn2013: 86).

However, these animal studies and science studies scholars who analyse the loss of subjectivity in scientific knowledge do not generally respond through wholesale rejection of modern science; rather, Donna Haraway, and many who followed after, actually centre scientific learning, but place it within the context of practical interspecies engagements, encouraging those who have ‘risked knowing something more about [non-humans] and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately’ (Haraway Reference Haraway2007: 20). In other words, these so-called nature/culture abysses reveal themselves as a rich terrain of contingent knowledge, which recognises humans and non-humans on the same plane of subjectivity.

While Haraway’s work draws practical and scientific engagements into philosophical/conceptual reflections, the work and text presented here takes a sonic path towards the project of returning the ‘intersecting gaze’ (Haraway Reference Haraway2007: 21) – or rather, returning the call – of those who inhabit the southeastern Florida swamplands out of which this work developed. Through arguing that a specific affinity exists between the processes of electroacoustic music and the semiotic networks of non-humans, this article contends that electronic music can draw these same engagements into a unique sonic knowing, or phonosophia.

Within my personal artistic practice, my work moves towards answering this directive in the form of a soundscape composition with shifting, distorting actors and scenes. Scientific knowledge, in the form of field guides and a computational model for the self-organisation of frog breeding choruses, is used to inscribe imaginative differences within the objective modality of field recordings. This approach opens up a space where real and virtual elements hybridise and intermingle, and where we may have difficulty concretely locating our position in listening – exposing us to the vertigo of feeling the many perspectives which abide in the swamplands.

3. SOUNDSCAPE COMPOSITION AND THE DANCE OF ENCOUNTER

There are many ways in which soundscape composition, from its outset, addressed these issues of de-purifying and mediating nature/culture divides through centring conscious, first-hand engagement with – and scientific learning about – environmental sounds. By their very nature, soundscape compositions are already nature–culture hybrids, cultural productions emerging from some situated environment. Furthermore, many have emphasised concrete engagement with sources, as articulated by Hildegard Westerkamp’s insistence on composers’ own attentive listening to their environment, writing that ‘the actual recorded materials are of course important, but the listening experiences while recording and while going about one’s life are just as important’ (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp2002: 53). Further, R. Murray Schafer has discussed his frustration with students and other composers failing to learn more about what specifically they are recording, writing that ‘a composer owes it to the cricket to know such things. Craftsmanship is knowing all about the material one works with. Here is where the composer becomes biologist, physiologist—himself cricket’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1977: 206). We even see Schafer suggesting here the relationship between scientific learning, practical engagement and the imaginative transformation of subjectivity.

However, in the nearly five decades since the birth of acoustic ecology at Simon Fraser University (Truax Reference Truax2002), critiques of this approach have emerged. Steven Feld has criticised Schafer for his romanticism and ‘evolutionism’ (Feld Reference Feld2001) underscored by his conception of soundscape, ‘with all its physical distance from agency and perception’ (Feld Reference Feld and Novak2015: 15). Speaking of this reification of a distant nature which is as unchanging as it is lost, sound artist Erik DeLuca criticised the stultifying presence of ‘wilderness ideology’ (DeLuca Reference DeLuca2018: 72) in some forms of environmental sound art, which ‘present nature as if it was universal and had no cultural context’ (ibid.: 75). While soundscape composition hybridises nature and culture, these authors suggest that in some instances a certain form of domestic/wild dualism endures, brought on by the preconceptions that a composer may have in the process of artistic production.

The needed reflexivity to transform preconceptions can be characterised as an encounter, where ‘encounters transform us’, including transformations of our subjectivity and crucially our own concepts in the process (Tsing Reference Tsing2015: 28). This encounter, or negotiation of difference between the twin traps of anthropomorphism and reification, has been characterised as a ‘dance’ (Haraway Reference Haraway2007: 4), but one with the possibility of conceptual transformation, as Haraway writes that for some, encounters have ‘undone and redone themselves and their sciences’ (ibid.: 21). Though merely one example of such an encounter, what follows illustrates the conceptual transformations resulting from listening and recording, reading and thinking in and about the swamps of southeastern Florida.

While the practice presented here remains within the framework of fixed media acousmatic works, it is hoped that in what follows, the incorporation of concepts from other humanities provide fertile directions for soundscape composition to think about these critiques and develop a method which strives to not hold the aforementioned divides fixed, but can rather provide directions for realising such an ostensible impasse as a complex continuum. This realisation is effected through tools which are in some respects uniquely available electroacoustic music – namely, by utilising the sympathy which exists between sign-processes and forms in acousmatic music and living signs. This work aims to position its vision of soundscape composition within a context of conceptual and reflexive listening to these interspecies engagements, taking the tradition, in the fashion of Feld, ‘with but against’ (Feld Reference Feld and Novak2015: 14) the initial formulation of acoustic ecology.

4. THEORETICAL RESOURCES: LIVING SIGNS AND LARVAL SUBJECTS

In order to articulate the process of one such encounter, the sound-work presented here begins from two mutually supporting directions, from two reference frames. The first – call it critique – questions whether human categories are indeed uniquely human, and the second – call it discovery – realises non-human qualities within the human.Footnote ³ Taken together in the current context, these methods are a movement of subjectivity and objectivity drawing nearer.

5. ON PHONOSOPHY

The account of sonic knowing here exposes some resemblances between acousmatic music-making and Steven Feld’s acoustemology – which centralises ‘knowing-with and knowing-through the audible’ (Feld Reference Feld and Novak2015: 12), even though acousmatic music preserves the ‘physical distance from agency and perception’ that Feld objects to, at least for the listener. It is hoped that this direction outlines a critical reflexivity which does not take concepts of ‘nature’, ‘animal’ and ‘soundscape’ as reified wholes, which risks flattening animal subjectivity, but rather integrates scientific knowledge production and the electronic medium’s sympathies with living signs to reveal how the categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are in constant transformation through continuua of subjectivity. Through electroacoustic music developing relationality to its dynamic environments, vis-à-vis transformations and correspondences in the languages and processes of living signs, soundscape composition can attest to a speculative sonic knowing which takes inspiration from Feld’s knowing-through-sound as ‘relational ontology’ and a ‘connectedness of being’ (Feld Reference Feld and Novak2015: 13) across interspecies lines, built on listening and sounding. Hence a real, but murky, connection emerges between composition, Feld’s notions of knowing-through-sound, and Kohn’s notion of iconic thinking in a mixture which may be called phonosophy. With this sketch completed, we can now turn towards an explicit discussion of my compositional work, which represents a first step towards practising this sonic knowing.

6. COMPOSITIONAL PRACTICE

I chose the compositional processes for The wet centre is bottomless by listening to the specific flows and changes in the sonic networks of the swamps encountered, which have their own peculiar perceptual dynamics. Smalley writes that ‘[a] listener needs time to progress from an initial listening encounter with the soundscape to a state of engaging actively and fully’ (Smalley Reference Smalley2007: 37), but in sonically bustling swamps, I find myself continually thrown back into the flat density of the initial listening encounter as the experience’s many layers adjust, with myself and other recordists present only noticing changes retroactively.Footnote ⁵ The peculiar vertigo is the result of my shifting attention between different networks of species within the aural scene – that is, between the many possible points of attention which are of relevance to the many auditors and sounders present.Footnote ⁶ When recounting what I heard with the others with whom I was recording, it became clear that this environment creates divergent perspectives between listening experiences. I settled on the musical processes for this piece based on these experiences of hard-to-track gradual change and a non-human plurality of perspectives translating into a human one.

The wet centre is bottomless constructs real-virtual hybrids of swamp soundscapes, where I have attempted to allow acoustic images and scenes to propagate and distort out from the living signs within the slough. Compositional flexibility is created using spectral isolation to separate acoustic niches within field recordings, and the computational model for frog breeding choruses is fed into extracted sample banks of recorded or synthesised frog calls to reassemble shifting scenes within the final work. Except for a rupture in the middle of the piece (Sound example 1: 3:00), gradual transitions between scenes occur as iconic resemblances, where acoustic niches fade and transform at staggered rates in the background. Distributions of spectral energy gradually morph in shape and focus as different regions are articulated through a layer of foregrounded signals (e.g., 0:44–0:51, 1:22). In the play of resemblances, propagations and transformations, the virtuality of the experience is exposed as a breeding-chorus spirals, divergently propagating out from any feasibly real acoustic image (1:51–3:00), and the final scene (3:00–6:37) re-introduces the dream-like flow of niched sonic networks, which shift between moments of conjunction and disjunction. The uncertainty between the real/virtual distinction invites us to question our position in listening, as the choice of approach is intended to expose a heterogeneously propagating (from intra-environmental, to composer, to audience) network of perspectives and responses. I hope that this uncertainty opens up terrain for further encounter – an invitation and mediation – be it transmitted in an act of listening, sounding or thinking as these ecological signs continue to ‘think through us’.