Presentation short abstract

Sonic Diplomacy explores listening to soil as a collaborative musical practice. Using soil microphones, farmers, gardeners, and land stewards engage with the acoustic life of underground ecosystems, developing embodied knowledge through collective improvisation.

Presentation long abstract

Sonic Diplomacy is an artistic research project that explores sound as a diplomatic space where we can reinvent ways of composing with more-than-human living beings. Drawing on Pauline Oliveros's deep listening and Christopher Small's musicking, we engage with soil as a living, active participant through what Robin Ryan theorizes as "multispecies musicking"—collaborative musical creation positioning soil organisms as co-creators.

Our practice is grounded in listening sessions with local gardeners, farmers, and land stewards. Using soil microphones, we capture sounds of underground inhabitants, revealing acoustic dimensions of soil ecosystems previously inaccessible. The sounds often surprise participants, who are hearing their soil “speak” in this way for the first time. These listening sessions become moments where people begin to improvise with the sounds coming from the soil, opening up a felt, embodied sense of soil health through shared sonic exploration.

This practice shifts us away from the more distant, visual modes of assessing soil conditions and toward a slower, more participatory form of attention. The unpredictability of soil sounds—varying with moisture, temperature, and biological activity—necessitates non-idiomatic musical attention that remains responsive to what each soil community offers.

These encounters demonstrate how artistic and musical methodologies can reactivate our sensitivity to soil's vital dynamics, addressing the "crisis of sensibility" underlying ecological disconnection. By opening ourselves to soil's own acoustic manifestations and treating underground inhabitants as musical partners, sonic diplomacy aims to offer pathways for environmental thinking grounded in direct relational experience through collaborative sound-making.