Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debate as to whether the apparent sound of the aurora, recorded by residents of northern latitudes and a small number of auroral researchers alike, was imagined, illusory, or objective.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses heightened interest in the potential audibility of the aurora borealis during the First and Second International Polar Years (IPYs) of 1882–3 and 1932–3. Galvanized by a growing volume of local accounts expressing belief in the elusive noises, written by the inhabitants of the Shetland Islands, northern Canada, and Norway, auroral researchers of each era were determined to establish the objectivity of auroral sound. There was considerable speculation within the auroral research community as to whether the apparent noises were imagined or illusory, connected to discussions about the possibility of low-altitude aurorae. The anglophone auroral sound debate primarily played out within the official reports of IPY expeditions, the journal Nature, and a Shetland Island newspaper. I argue that the embodied senses were used exclusively to register the liminal sounds of the aurora across the two periods, adding an experiential element to the study of the phenomenon and the atmosphere, despite developments in sound recording technologies, the primacy of mechanical objectivity, and instruments transported to the polar regions for the investigation of visual features of the aurora. This overlooked episode complicates our understanding of the modes of knowledge creation in open, outdoor ‘wild’ spaces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by revealing a faith in the corporeal senses, interactions with folklore and poetry, and the significant role of lived experience.

Paper short abstract:

This transdisciplinary paper explores how the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's figures of trees sound out human and nonhuman harmony and discord. Anticipating works of modern arboreal ecology, the treescapes of Shelley's poetry are transhistorical sites of communication and interconnection.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contributes to the developing intersections between the arboreal humanities and Romantic Studies with particular attention to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘botanical poetry’, recently defined by Cian Duffy as ‘poems which not only have a plant as their ostensible subject, or which develop extended plant imagery, but which also engage, either explicitly or implicitly, with contemporary botanical discourses and practices’. Shelley’s ‘botanical poetry’ demonstrates an ecological awareness that complements contemporary environmental discourses around human and nonhuman connections, especially through his figures of trees. Anticipating modern landmark works on arboreal ecology by Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben, Shelley's 'botanical poetry' emphasises interconnectedness and communication.

Shelley's treescapes are sites of human and nonhuman harmony and discord, from 'the Norway woodman' who 'quells' the 'howling' pine forest, to the 'woodman, whose rough heart was out of tune' with the 'singing' forests ('Lines Written among the Euganean Hills', 1818; 'The Woodman and the Nightingale', 1820-21). Extending Frederike Middelhoff’s focus on ‘the nonverbal soundscapes of poplar articulations’, where ‘the Romantics developed a poetics which acknowledged poplar articulations as part of the process of…historicizing the present’, to Shelley’s treescapes, this paper reveals how the poet echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s communion with Scandinavian forests in ‘Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’ (1796). Wollstonecraft’s witnessing of landscapes transformed by the eighteenth-century timber trade in Norway grate against her ‘poetical images’ of ‘audible—nay, musical’ aspens and pines. This discord shapes Shelley’s arboreal soundscapes, culminating in the pines of his last lyrics that ‘echo all harmonious thought’ (1822).

Paper short abstract:

In my PhD thesis, I analyse the representations of nature sounds in popular science books on local nature, especially on birds, of the late 19th century. I seek to understand how describing nature’s and animal’s soundscapes might have been an expression of a changing nature-culture relationship.

Paper long abstract:

The representation and dramatisation of nature’s sounds and silence in non- or partly fictional texts of the past is a broad and interesting – though neglected – field for literary analyses. Since sound recording and broadcasting technologies were not developed sufficiently enough to be used for scientific and/ or educational purposes until the beginning of the 20th century, literature was the main medium to provide educational content about nature and representations of natural sounds. Early science books, especially from the field of popular ornithology and zoology, played an outstanding role not only in being an instrument of communication of scientific knowledge to a broader public, but also in shaping people’s attitudes toward local species and natural spaces and, by doing so, in influencing the collective memory. In my research I wish to explore 1. what sounds were described as natural sounds by the authors and how they were described, 2. what role those sound descriptions played in the texts, and 3. what relationships between humans and more-than-human-environments were articulated and how these corresponded with the formulated acoustic qualities of a place or of nature's denizens. In answering these questions, I want to show that in the context of the rapidly changing environments and the vanishing wilderness of the late 19th century, authors of popular science books aimed to sensitise readers to nature’s acoustic dimensions and to promote proto-ecological thinking by constructing environments and animals as geographically and emotionally close spaces resp. individuals.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing especially on the distinctive 'crex crex' of the corncrake (a bird once common, but now endangered in Britain), my paper will explore how literary renderings of natural sounds in previous historical periods continue to shape our understanding of environmental change as well as loss.

Paper long abstract:

When the Northamptonshire poet John Clare was writing in the early nineteenth century, the ‘craiking’ voice of corncrake could be ‘heard in every vale’ (‘The Landrail’, 1832-7). Once widespread throughout the British and Irish Isles, the population of corncrakes declined catastrophically in the twentieth century due to changes in farming practices: tall grass hay crops once provided the bird with cover in which to breed and raise its young, but the introduction of mechanised mowing and earlier cutting for silage led to its near extinction. By the time that Kathleen Jamie set off in search of it for her book Findings (2005), the bird’s distinctive crex crex could only be heard in remote parts of the Scottish Western Isles. Focusing especially on Jamie’s responses to Clare’s description of the corncrake, my paper will explore how literary renderings of natural sounds in previous historical periods continue to shape our understanding of environmental change as well as loss. As the bird’s geographical range has considerably narrowed, the corncrake, as Jamie is led to reflect, raises further questions about natural soundscapes and their importance to local identity and our sense of place: the topographical, cultural and linguistic features particular to a specific region or locality.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Icelandic traditional music practices have meaningfully shaped the human ecology of glaciers in Iceland for centuries, and the extent to which the integration of soundscape recordings with folk melodies can influence environmental sentiments and mitigation efforts today.

Paper long abstract:

In 1912, in the wane of the Little Ice Age, a mother sings an Icelandic lullaby, “...í jöklinum hljóða dauðadjúpar sprungur” (“...in the glacier, death-deep cracks rumble”). Within this example, both musical melody and sonic descriptors evidence glacial morphology, and foreground the act of listening as a texture of everyday life. Glacial “cracks rumble” alongside a human voice to form an inseparable legacy between nature and culture—as both mother and ice resonate prescient stories of love and loss. Today, as glaciers in Iceland melt at unprecedented rates, sound and listening remain significant to how people experience glaciers, environmental change, and the climate crisis more broadly.

While a burgeoning collective of audio engineers, acoustic ecologists, and sound artists have flocked to Iceland’s disappearing ice to measure noise pollution, create activist-art, or curate last-chance sound archives, this paper centers on the lesser-known significance of Icelandic traditional music to glaciological knowledge. By analyzing several folk songs alongside corresponding environmental data, I aim to show how music has meaningfully shaped the human ecology of glaciers in Iceland for centuries, and the extent to which music can influence environmental sentiments and mitigation efforts today. To this end, I examine contemporary adaptions of folk melodies that incorporate natural soundscape recordings within their production as means for environmental activism and awareness. Drawing from my own interdisciplinary ethnographic research and natural soundscape recordings in Iceland, I hope to show how the sounds and songs of glaciers can help us navigate environments undergoing rapid change, transformation, and melt.

Paper short abstract:

The history of conservation is frequently presented as primarily a visual one. In this paper I will go beyond this narrative and explore the role played by an attention to the sounds of nature in early calls for the need to preserve the environment in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria.

Paper long abstract:

The visual aesthetics of landscapes – as well as of certain animal and plant species – lie at the heart of the process by which modern nature conservation came to be since the mid-nineteenth century. The appreciation of natural environments has, however, truly always been a multisensorial experience. As early as 1880 the composer and early conservationist Ernst Rudorff put, for instance, the preservation of nature's sounds at the core of his agenda and included man-made noise in his critique of the transformative power of modernity.

To what extent did this multisensorial sensibility, however, translate into an actual desire to preserve certain regions from the intensifying impact of human activities? In this paper I will answer this question by looking specifically at the role of natural sounds and their preservation in eliciting the push towards the protection of certain areas of Germany and Austria in the face of rampant industrialization and growing urbanization.

In particular, I am going to look at mentions of the sounds of nature and their potential disruption in print and archival sources discussing regions that, at some point during the twentieth century, were formally made into protection areas (e.g. the Lüneburg Heath or the Bavarian Forest in Germany and the Hohe Tauern mountain range in Austria). On the basis of this material I will analyse the role played by the appreciation of certain specific "soundscapes" in the decision-making processes by which these areas ended up being designated as nature reserves.

Paper short abstract:

Through an examination of nature sound records released between 1969 and 1989 for private and public spaces, this paper will show how background music was naturalized and then, in turn, the environment was pushed to the background, background-i-fied.

Paper long abstract:

With the introduction of car radio, telephone hold music, music on trains and planes, music while you sleep, music in death (at funeral homes), background music was an increasingly ubiquitous feature of the American soundscape. As auditory technologies and practices for engaging with them co-developed, background music was naturalized. That is, the public began to expect continuous, recorded, functional music, not just in public spaces but private spaces and moments as well. In 1969, the polymath Irving Teibel released “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” of recorded and edited ocean sounds, launching the nature sound records craze. The environments series produced by Teibel’s Syntonic Research Inc. marked an expansion in the types of sounds heard, their effects, their affects, and their applications. Like background music, the nature sounds produced by SRI and similar recording companies, were was also, by the 1970s, increasingly coating private settings. Through a close examination of the environments record series released by Irving Teibel between 1969 and 1979, I show how these engineered, improved sounds of nature repackaged natural sounds for consumption. This consumption practice reached its apex with The Nature Company stores, fixtures of suburban mid-tier indoor malls of the 1980s and 90s. Not only could music be functionally applied to improve the environment, nature itself could (be applied to the environment) as well. One consequence, I argue, as the sensory-perceptual feedback loop of functional sound was complete, stable and standardized, natural sounds — and nature itself — were pushed to the background.

Paper short abstract:

We discuss recordings of soundscapes of Southern African nature. Based on close listening and conversation with people who lived in the area of recording we show their specific role within the construction of colonial African natures and multi-species hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

For this paper we combine approaches from environmental history, sound studies and multispecies historiography to engage with recorded soundscapes of so-called ‘African nature’. The paper begins by locating recorded soundscapes within the larger subject of colonial recording, representation and conservation, of nature in Africa, and argue that these recorded soundscapes of Southern African nature deserve attention as a genre of recordings with distinctive features. We begin with a typology of the recordings in Southern African and British libraries. This allows us to place the recordings, as well as identify an intended audience and the anticipated ways of listening to them. A discussion on the ways in which animals and other nature sounds appear in the multi-species setting of the recordings is then put in conversation with the meanings of animal and other nature sounds drawn from interviews with people living in, or close to, the landscapes that had been recorded. Based on a close listening and examination of selected recordings, as well as interviews, we argue that while these soundscape recordings are implicated in well-established colonial representations and conservation narratives of African nature and wildlife, they can be simultaneously understood as complicating those representations; as a form of representation which does not necessarily adhere to the logics of colonial knowledge as they are found in other media and representations of ‘nature’ and ‘wildlife’ in Africa. Finally, we discuss the differing acts of listening in relation to multispecies theories and constructions of human to non-human animal hierarchies.

Paper short abstract:

I interrogate the case of snow and ice sounding in Southern Chile and Antarctica, demonstrating how their various forms of vibration and representation simultaneously reinforce and undermine geopolitical classifications of the Antarctic during accelerated climate change.

Paper long abstract:

Chile is one of seven countries with a territorial claim in the Antarctic, though most of the 56 parties to the Antarctic Treaty do not recognize its sovereignty. Nevertheless, Chile’s southernmost region, Magallanes y Antártica Chilena, both reaffirms the nation’s claim and administratively ties southern Chile with the Antarctic Peninsula. Initiatives like the newly-approved International Antarctic Center in Punta Arenas (the region’s capital) reflect a recent impetus to build an Antarctic, polar identity within the community. More specifically, musicians such as electroacoustic duo Lluvia Ácida work to create an Antarctic sound that sonically reinforces ties between Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica. However, projects of Antarctic identity-building pertaining to music and sound by human actors only exist as one point of inquiry within larger sonic ecosystems.

In this paper, I demonstrate how sonic properties of non-human actors complicate human-constructed geographical identities in Southern Chilean Patagonia and Antarctica. Using Nina Eidsheim’s concept of vibrational practice (2015) as a starting point, I suggest expanded possibilities for assembling “vibrational nodes” as points of sonic inquiry. I specifically interrogate the case of snow and ice sounding, demonstrating how their various forms of vibration and representation simultaneously reinforce and undermine geopolitical classifications of the Antarctic during accelerated climate change. I consider Antarctic field recordings and the audiovisual exhibit “Una Pizsca de Luz” as sites of geopolitical negotiation, blending multi-species ethnography, new materialisms, archival research, and storytelling in this postdisciplinary study. Accordingly, the presentation contributes to and invites new possibilities for methodologies in sound studies of the Anthropocene.