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Paper short abstract

This paper offers a historical analysis of hydrophones and contact microphones across military, scientific, and artistic use cases to map technosocial conditions of power and politics as embedded within the technologies of sonic transduction and related listening techniques.

Paper long abstract

Listening to an acoustic environment is a co-constitutive experience shaped by one’s personal sonic sensitives and the technologies that extend or augment one’s capabilities of listening within diverse soundscapes (i.e. oceans, soil). Examining a history of contact microphones and hydrophones, this work will critically investigate vibratory sonic translation and techniques of listening in artistic, militaristic, and scientific practice. By attending to the technological development of these tools as shaped by complex social and cultural lineages, this work will critique these technologies as entangled with surveillant histories and military control. This paper asks: How have hydrophones been mobilized historically through military efforts, artistic practice, and scientific analysis to render audible ecological changes, promote sustainability efforts, and/or enact surveillance? Examining the role of the listener in this assemblage of transduction, I ask how is listening taught through particular techniques of engagement? Framing this work through media archaeology (Natale, 2012; Zielinski, 2006), I reflect on the relationship between aquatic and piezoelectric sound technologies and listening techniques in militaristic (Shiga, 2013; Wilson, 1920), scientific (Bakker, 2022; Helmreich, 2009), cultural (Sterne, 2003), and creative (Jue, 2020) use cases. I weave these mediated histories with artistic ethnography and interviews with artists, whose diverse uses of hydrophones and contact microphones reflect possibilities for sonic understanding in ecoacoustic research, scientific intervention, and multi-sensorial relations. With a critical lens towards re-orienting power, this work challenges mediated immersion, questions extractive logics of these tools, and considers both real and speculative futures for sonic transduction.