The idea of the more-than-human, the focus of this issue, was introduced by philosopher David Abram in his influential book The Spell of the Sensuous (Reference Abram1996). The term is indicative of the turn away from human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism towards recognition and investigation of the entanglement of human and non-human, not least the natural world. In this, the more-than-human is representative of a robust critique of the bifurcation of nature and culture, human and non-human, which is itself paradigmatic of the ecological turn in Western societies that began in the mid-twentieth century – Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Reference Carson1962) is a significant moment in this regard – and accelerated along with the multiple environmental crisis that induced this turn.
The concept of the more-than-human has closely informed many fields of study that have emerged over the last few decades, including those broadly captured under the rubric of environmental humanities. The concept has of course also been an object of criticism; one point of critique is that its scope is too narrow, excluding systems and artefacts of human origin but which ultimately exceed and escape human understanding and control. Expanding the theoretical scope of the more-than-human, through the influential work of thinkers including Karen Barad (Reference Barad2007), Andrew Pickering (Reference Pickering2010) and Gilbert Simondon ([1958] Reference Simondon, Malaspina and Rogove2017), has afforded a wider purview that extends to techné and technology. Jane Bennett’s conception of systems such as the North American power grid, as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett Reference Bennett2009), is a related example. This is not to rehearse critiques of more-than-human, or to revisit useful conceptual distinctions between, for example, more-than-human and other-than-human, but rather to situate the current thematic issue, with its musical and sonic concerns, in the wider conceptual space of more-than-music.
Music – the term used as a catch-all for sound-based creative practices – has a long history of entanglement with the more-than-human. Boethius’s harmony of the spheres, discussed by Farida-Muñoz in this issue is a notable example. Farida-Muñoz’s argument, via Boethius, points to the inextricability of humanity from the wider environment, an ethical cosmology foundational to many indigenous cultures, including that of the Mapuche people discussed in her article. Historically in Western music, perhaps the closest approach to such intermeshing is found in the so-called programmatic music of the nineteenth century – the work of Robert Schumann is emblematic of this tradition. Such music could be described as emerging through eco-poiesis, creative processes in music or sonic art that are significantly connected to the natural world. Blinkhorn and McConaghy’s discussion in ‘Biomimicry in Electroacoustic Composition: Conceptual frameworks and prototypes’ can be understood as a deepening of eco-poeisis, in which the more-than-human – natural and technological – is integral to musical creation and, as they phrase it, ‘offers a glimpse into realms that are more than music, more than human’ (254). A similar tangent is followed by Damianakis in exploring post-anthropocentric machine listening, in this case molluscan listening, via the theoretical route of science fiction and Donna Harraway’s refractive concept of SF (science fiction, science fact, speculative fabulation, and beyond). Blazsek extends this othering of technology in his critical expansion of machine listening, and AI more generally, as a pathway towards ‘getting somewhere no one has ever been: an intelligence that is profoundly “other”, not a tiny fragment of the world as we think we already know it’ (284). However, as emergent disciplines such as aural diversity demonstrate, within the human realm there are divergent perspectives on sound-based art and experience. One such perspective is put forward by Austin-Stewart in his critical assessment of non-cochlear sound art through the lens of disability aesthetics, challenging the assumption of invariant human listening.
Soundscape composition and acoustic ecology are of course long-established exemplars of practices that commingle human and more-than-human. These fields have expanded significantly over recent decades, both creatively and conceptually (notably moving away from a reductive valorisation of non-human nature). This is reflected in North’s discussion in ‘The Haptic in Soundscape Composition’, which extends human entanglement with the soundscape through the concept of haptic aurality. An orthopteran insect soundscape is central to Schorpp and Galliker’s critical exegesis of Schorpp’s Écosystème(s) installation, which ‘fabricate[s] an artificial and autonomous sound environment that imitates existing other-than-human sonic ecosystems’ therein creatively problematising human and non-human relationships in a shared ‘context for attentive human listening’ (306).
In Schorpp’s work, the ‘more-than-musical’ plays a determinative role in shaping musical outcomes. This emerges through intermeshing the human and the non-human, alerting us to the shaping agency of non-human musicking upon sonic creativity. Technology plays an integral role in such creative practice, as a mode of translation – using the term in Graham Harman’s sense – between human and more-than-human that is a shaping force in and of itself. In other words, more-than-human understanding recognises agency in the tools of creative practice. This is the focus of Carey’s article, ‘Metastable Inventions: Simondonian concretisation and technical invention in modular synthesis practice’, in which he examines the intra-actions (Barad) of composer and modular synthesis systems, drawing closely on Simondon’s ([1958] Reference Simondon, Malaspina and Rogove2017) work in the philosophy of technology. Such an understanding of ‘technologic agency’, explored by Frank in his ‘Technology and Mathematics as Non-Human Forces’, is also central to Parkinson and Dunning’s investigation of the ‘agency and interaction possibilities in technologically mediated musical practices’ (340) as part of a developing taxonomy for making sense of relationships between electronic music performers and their instruments.
