Contribution short abstract:

Listening with frackquakes via geophones, thumper trucks, mineral dowsing, interferometry and USGS felt reports reveals differences of describing vibrating, trembling and shaking. In these descriptions, tremors complicate calculable thresholds of toxicity that separate human from milieu.

Contribution long abstract:

Frackquakes caused by oil and gas operations near the nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Permian Basin) create uncertainties of threshold theories of pollution and containment.

Listening with frackquakes in ethnographic moments via geophones, thumper trucks, mineral dowsing, interferometry and USGS felt reports, with ordinary people attuning to tremors reveals differences of describing vibrating, trembling and shaking. Listening is indefinite, creating tensions around the interpretability and accessibility of data. In these descriptions, tremors complicate calculable thresholds of toxicity that separate human from milieu.

A sonic materialism disturbs the apparatus of measurement and monitoring that determines legal policies for nuclear waste disposal, seismic prospecting for oil and gas, as well as citizen science efforts to incite urgency. Through transduction and sonification techne, attuning to infrasound destabilizes what or how a subject forms, or listens. A more-than-human listening includes geological grammars or a “matterphorical” (Gandorfer et al) relation of infrasonic pressure, compressibility and heat describe fluid dynamics. In and of air, sand itself “listens” as folds of matter affected by sonic energy, and as nuclear memory, i.e., “the sand melted into glass” used for blast effects.

Literalizing phonography to mean "writing sound," I argue that descriptions of sensation problematize both event and perception to ask after prefigurative and incomplete forms of political relation in confronting oil and gas’ regimes of imperceptibility. This work uses both field recordings and compositional sound writing as a sonic ethnographic form.