Paper short abstract:

This paper considers animate mobilities' troubling of boundaries through the lens of sonic ethnography. Drawing on Salomé Voegelin's writings on "sonic possible worlds," I argue it forms a kind of "ontological poetics" opening us to other ways of perceiving how nonhumans "thing" spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers animate mobilities' troubling of boundaries through the lens of sonic ethnography: the recording, editing, and presentation of anthropologically-informed works of sound-based media. Although the field overlaps with ethnomusicology, it focuses less on music than the voices of both human and other-than-human actors comprising our shared environments. Instead of writing about these voices, sonic ethnography asks what we can learn by composing with and listening to them. Drawing on my own recording practice in Japan and recent work in sound studies, visual ethnography, and ontological anthropology, particularly Salomé Voegelin's writings on "sonic possible worlds," this paper theorizes the kind of knowing this enables. Sonic ethnography, I argue, produces representations of contingent and shifting sonic relationships between actors, human and other-than-human, "thinging" spaces and places in ways that both underpin and exceed visible and discursive boundaries. This often—though not always—occurs below the level of everyday consciousness. By directing attention to it, sonic ethnography not only explores how we generate and interpret soundscapes; it is also a kind of "ontological poetics" opening us to other ways of perceiving, and thinking, the world and its actual and possible compositions.