The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S4E2: Sonic Methods with Jonathan Prior
In this episode Claudia talks to Jonathan Prior about sonic methods and together they try to explore the ways in which methods such as recording, sound walking, and listening could help animal studies scholars better understand and appreciate the animals and worlds they are most concerned with.
Date Recorded: 12 October 2021
Dr Jonathan Prior is a lecturer in Human Geography at Cardiff University, Wales. His research and publications take an interdisciplinary approach, spanning environmental philosophy, sound studies, and landscape research. His first book, Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, co-authored with Emily Brady and Isis Brook, was published in 2018 by Rowman & Littlefield. You can access some of Jonathan’s recordings on his audio project website (12 Gates to the City) or archived on the Internet Archive. You can also learn more about Jonathan;s work on his university’s website or connect with him on Twitter (@jd_prior).
Claudia (Towne) Hirtenfelder is the founder and host of The Animal Turn. She is a PhD Candidate in Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and is currently undertaking her own research project looking at the geographical and historical relationships between animals (specifically cows) and cities. Contact Claudia via email (info@theanimalturnpodcast.com) or follow her on Twitter (@ClaudiaFTowne).
Featured: Sonic Geographies, exploring phonographic methods by Michael Gallagher and Jonathan Prior; The reintroduction of beavers to Scotland by Kim Ward and Jonathan Prior; Making Noise in the Roaring twenties: So
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.
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SPEAKER_09:I mean, when you attend to sound, you realize just the extent to which animals are world-making. Not just their own worlds, but our own worlds, creating particular kinds of atmospheres, creating particular kinds of sensory experiences. And yeah, you're right. So when you attend to that, you you you realize that something like a kitty wake might be small in stature, but um but it can create an and and completely kind of transform a place through through their through their calls.
SPEAKER_05:As you know, in season four, we're focusing in on animals and sound. And in today's episode, we're going to be talking all about sonic methods. So the first episode we looked a bit at soundscapes, kind of setting the scene a bit for what are we even talking about when we talk about animals and sound. And now we're getting a bit more into the nitty-gritty. So what kind of methods could you use to even, you know, access these types of sounds and to think about these sounds? My guest today helps me to really think through this a whole bunch, and that's Jonathan Pryor. Dr. Jonathan Pryor is a lecturer in human geography at Cardiff University in Wales. His research and publications take an interdisciplinary approach spanning environmental philosophy, sound studies, and landscape research. His first book, Between Nature and Culture, The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, was co-authored with Emily Brady and Isis Brooke, which was published in 2018. He's incredibly generous throughout the episode, and you'll hear that we riff off one another in what was a really generative conversation and thinking through how sonic methods could help us to better understand animals' lives and worlds. If you're interested in some of Jonathan's work, make sure to check out his sound recordings online. You can access them on the Internet Archive as well as on his audio recording project website, which is 12 Gates to the City. I must say up front, unfortunately, I did run into a few sound issues. You're going to hear that my audio has a minor echo throughout. It's not too bad, but I just wanted to flag it here so that you are aware. Other than that, everything goes smoothly, and we're joined once again at the end of the episode with Hannah Hunter, who gives us this episode's Animal Highlight. I hope you enjoy the show. Hi Jonathan, welcome to the Animal Tin.
SPEAKER_09:Thank you very much for having me.
SPEAKER_05:So today we're going to be speaking all about sonic methods. And as a as a scholar, of course, I've tended to, you know, sit within the writing world. And I haven't even I haven't even really thought of interviewing as a sonic method. You know, I haven't framed it or thought of it in that way. But today we're going to be speaking all about sonic methods, which is really exciting. But before we get into that concept uh itself and how you think sonic methods might be useful for folks with an interest in animal studies, perhaps we can learn a little bit more about you first. So could you tell us a little bit about what you do and uh maybe how you came to be interested in sound studies?
SPEAKER_09:Yeah, okay, thank you very much. Well, yes, my name is Dr. Jonathan Pryan, and currently I'm a lecturer in human geography at uh at Cardiff University in Wales. Um, I guess uh very broadly speaking, my research uh in my research, I'm interested in uh human-environment relations, um, how humans relate to the natural world, and how uh this impacts um uh particular forms of environmental practice. In particular, I'm interested in environmental conservation, ecological restoration, and rewilding. Um, well, I guess across those those three things, I'm really interested in the role of environmental value, how people come to value, whether it be landscapes or particular species, and how those values might play a role in in conservation policy, the making of conservation policy and the protection of the natural world. To narrow that down a little bit more, um, out of the kind of suite of different values that people might um might hold or appreciate in terms of the natural world, um I'm very interested in the role of aesthetics and ethics and how those two things relate to um uh lay as well as professional forms of environmental conservation. And so within environmental aesthetics, um there is a long history of thinking about uh obvious concepts such as natural beauty, uh, the um natural sublime, um, the picturesque. As you can probably imagine, all of these sorts of concepts are very visual in terms of their focus. So a lot of kind of the history of environmental aesthetics has been about how we visually value and appreciate landscapes and animals. There has been a more recent turn towards thinking about kind of the multi- the role of multi-senses in in valuing uh the natural world and also animals. Um but I guess when I was doing my PhD, I was coming across this concern that I was kind of reproducing this very um visual way of studying and investigating um environmental aesthetics. And so I started to become interested in um the role of senses beyond vision and visuality, um, and I really latched on to some early writings that considered the the role of sound in building up relationships with the natural world. And I kind of followed that through. I've got a background interest in in music, um, so I guess sound was something that kind of jumped out at me, and it seemed quite quite novel at the time in the early days of my PhD research. And I followed that through. I um I got in contact with um uh the music department at the University of Edinburgh. I did my PhD at the University of Edinburgh up in Scotland, um, and they very kindly lent me out a whole bunch of um audio recording gear, which allowed me to not just write about sound, uh, but also try and in some way document sound that I thought um would achieve, and I've got to be careful how I say this, how have a have a kind of a form of representation that I thought could go beyond what can be captured by the written word. So when we talk about um particular sounds, I think we have a um a fairly underdeveloped vocabulary when we talk about sound. We we talk um um about things being quiet or loud. Um we might use visual metaphors when we talk about sound. Um, but I wanted to think about how I could write sound without using writing, if that makes sense. And so this brought me to this idea of using audio recording, and it kind of took off from there. And now audio recording has kind of permeated much of my um uh academic research. Um, and I've also developed outside of academia, I've also uh developed kind of uh an audio recording practice as well. So I've done various work for um um art galleries and museums across Europe using audio recording, and I do work on my own little projects, um, audio recording as well.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, your your website's actually really interesting. Uh I was going through several of your kind of soundscapes that you've created and collected. Um, you know, there was one in BC where you can like you hear the flagpole and you hear the, I think you're on a ferry and you can hear kind of the waves on the ferry. And this this links back to kind of the first episode of the season where we were speaking about soundscapes and just how important all of these sounds are, that they kind of come together to create a distinct feeling of a place or sense of a place. Uh, but I like that you said here that your interests kind of hover around some of the ideas with regards to aesthetics and ethics. Because something that came up, I think, often in season three, was which was focused on animals in the city, was kind of how animals, particularly in North American and Western cities, they started to stand in opposition to the city, sometimes because of the sounds they were making or the ways in which they smelled, right? They they they were no longer uh sanitary enough for the city. They they they didn't smell the way a modern city should smell, or they didn't sound the way a modern city should um should sound, which I think is just really, really fascinating because you start to get a sense of there are particular sounds you expect in some places and ones that you don't. So I think that this is really an exciting um potential place or area for animal studies scholars to actually explore a bit more. Um, and do you have any sort of interest in animal studies itself? I know you mentioned the uh rewilding, which is obviously a really huge uh field at the moment, a lot of people speaking about real rewilding. Uh my my work is actually on cows, and I've been reading a lot about aurochs lately and how you know that the heck, the heck cows and how those have been used and all of these like rewilding campaigns, and it's really wild. It's it's insane when you kind of start getting into that literature. Um but yeah, what are your interests in in animal studies and have you kind of used any of these sound ideas when thinking about animals?
SPEAKER_09:Yes, I have. So in in terms of the specifics of rewilding, I've I've conducted some research on the reintroduction of um beavers into the UK, in particular looking at the reintroduction of um Eurasian beavers into Scotland. Now, this this work um I conducted with a um with a colleague based at Plymouth University by the name of Kim Ward, um, and we were looking at the social and political kind of ramifications of this, the reintroduction of this very charismatic species that caused a lot of delight for some people and also a lot of um c consternation from certain um landowners. Um, so the reintroduction of beavers has been relatively controversial, and we're trying to understand kind of the political dynamics of the reintroduction of this species. In terms of kind of the sensory qualities, um I guess more broadly thinking at processes of things like ecological restoration and rewilding, my interest in the senses here is what happens when we reintroduce um species that have perhaps been absent from a landscape for centuries. So the beaver has been absent from the UK landscape out in the wild for about 400 years or so. And so thinking about kind of the sensory ramifications of these sorts of projects for me is really interesting. Because there might be an assumption that people enjoy these species. They go out and they're nocturnal animals, so you tend not to see them during the day, but you can see kind of traces of these animals. But I wanted to think about what the sensory ramifications are of these species reintroductions in terms of the animals themselves, so the presence of the animals in terms of the sounds that they produce, and also the ramifications for the wider landscape. So beavers are notorious for creating um very watery landscapes. You know, they they they dam flood channels, they um cause low kind of level um flooding in areas. And this creates a very kind of very different kind of sensory experience of that landscape. You mentioned smell. I think smell is also something which is which is really kind of fascinates me about rewilding. Um, if you think about beavers, they create these um potentially quite stagnant pools of water, which can give off if if they've flooded an area of of wooded debris, um, that can create quite um sulfuric sort of smells. Um, so I'm interested, I guess, not just in sort of the positive ramifications of um of rewilding and ecological restoration, but also maybe some of the challenging aesthetic um uh qualities that emerge out of ecological restoration and rewilding. And so, you know, as much as people might enjoy the presence of beavers, I think kind of the, if if I can put this right, the beaver-y kind of presence of the animal, I think can also be discombobulating from a sensory perspective for people. And that's not to mention things like wolves, you know, the sound of wolves or the sound of bears or or those apex predators, which are, you know, even more controversial, particularly in in mainland Europe, um, where there's been quite a bit of outfall with the um re-emergence of these um apex predators. And so I think that's fascinating. I think that role of the senses plays a really interesting kind of role in how people come to know, understand, and appreciate a landscape.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, and and I think, like you you said there as well, how different animals appreciate their landscapes and their environments. So if if beavers have been outside of this landscape for 400 odd years, one would assume that the animals who are still there have uh adapted in a way that might not be attuned to beavers necessarily. Um, so what does it mean to all of a sudden be in your space and your environment and to hear a beaver or to smell a beaver? Uh, how does this start to impact the sensory experiences of other animals that are in those spaces? And like you said, this is not to say it's a net positive or net negative, but I think, and and I'm by no means any sort of expert in this area, but I think it starts to raise really interesting questions about how we think about landscapes or ecologies as being static environments, you know, oh, absolutely. This this being was here once upon a time, so they should, in quotes, naturally fit within here again.
SPEAKER_06:Absolutely, yeah.
SPEAKER_05:And yeah, I think that's a really interesting realm to kind of enter to think about, you know, how does sound play a role in all this?
SPEAKER_09:And if we think about the ways in which um sound has tended to play a role in ways in which people have appreciated natural environments, it tends to be associated with the absence of sound rather than the presence of sound. So we talk about how rural areas are tranquil or peaceful rather than potentially overwhelming in terms of the sounds that are kind of um, you know, the soundscape which is created by the return of these sorts of species. So I think it also kind of pierces some of the assumptions of the ways in which we talk and think about natural appreciation from a from a sonic perspective.
SPEAKER_05:I've always found the idea of silence kind of interesting or tranquility kind of interesting because I mean something that came up with with Brian in the previous episode is he said, you know, there is no such thing as silence, you're always hearing something. But also, even in kind of reading some sound literature, you kind of get the sense that the natural world is quoted as being silent somehow, whereas the human world is quoted as being noisy and loud and making sounds. And this to me just seems bizarre somehow. Somehow bird song seems to make an appearance. People think, okay, birds, you know, birds are sweet, but the sound of trees creaking or the sounds of uh, you know, a deer walking through the forest or whatever it is, those those kind of get usurped into the soundscape of nature without it any uh I don't know how to express what I'm trying to say here, but without it being distinct in any way, without the sound being acknowledged.
SPEAKER_09:Absolutely. There's very different very little in the way of differentiation between say what what bird sound constitutes. Um so one recording which I've I've made, um which I which you might want to introduce is um is a sound, is a uh recording of um Kitty Wakes um in Dunbar, Scotland. Um now this um I w I think you'd be hard pressed to call the sound of Kitty Wakes in any way peaceful or tranquil.
SPEAKER_05:Let me let me give it a play here.
SPEAKER_09:Absolutely, absolutely. Um kitty wakes, I think, is quite a good example of maybe some of the things that we're talking about here. Kitty wakes are a unfortunately a um a rapidly declining species um due to pressures on their feeding grounds, as as a lot of um seabirds are facing um issues in terms of of declines. Um now kitty wakes, I guess, would are a challenging species for people to kind of build a um a positive valuation from an aesthetic perspective. As you can hear, they are very loud. It's it's it's kind of a comedic sound in a way, I think, quite a cheery sound, but I wouldn't say it's a particularly pleasant sound. Um they're also um they also produced quite a lot of um waste wherever they nest. Um so you know they are seen as urban pests because they they they because of their um, I guess, pressures on their coastal feeding grounds, at times they they do move further in land. Um, as with a lot of gull species, um, they're not particularly highly valued, um, yet at the same time um they really are um, as I say, seeing quite rapid and quite um quite scary declines in their populations. And so I guess a question for me would be it's all very well for the um for the literature to talk about the tranquility of bird species. Okay, you know, we can talk about say the the wonder of the dawn chorus or the beauty of the the sound of a blackbird or something like that. But um, when we actually differentiate um different kinds of animal species, um I think we need to think a bit more carefully about simply delineating, you know, the natural world as something that is peaceful and tranquil and that people can easily build positive value with.
SPEAKER_05:I really appreciate the the use of your concept value there, because I think you're right. You kind of come to value, and and by you I maybe mean specific people. Um, you know, specific people might value the kitty wakes in different ways, uh, you know, just like different people will value pigeons in different ways or beavers in different ways. You know, you start having a conversation about beavers in Canada, you're gonna have a very different conversation about how beavers are valued, um, because you start to bring in different human identity, etc., um, human economies into how these valuations work. So I think that you're you're really on the money here when you say, you know, how are these species valued and perhaps how are their sounds valued, uh, and what is what is, I guess, shaping those valuations, whether it's economies or cultures or you know, national pride. Um, but I think a little bit of what I was trying to speak about just now was also the idea of silence. Um, you know, which which animals are are are not even being heard, you know, because they're there, they're being sounded and they're making noises, but when either we don't have the capacity to hear them or two, um we're just not interested. There, they're not there there is no value. Um I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_09:Um yes, I I in terms of the I guess of the lessening of value, I guess, I guess scale quite obviously plays a role here. Um something which I've been interested in using in my work, um perhaps in my work outside of academia more than inside academia, is using different kinds of microphones to access worlds that, or sound worlds that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to hear with your with your naked ears. So I have a slight obsession with recording the sound of ants. Um I think that I think there's a recording of of the sound of ants which I sent you.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, again, uh do you want me to play it for you now?
SPEAKER_09:Sure. Go for it.
SPEAKER_05:I quite enjoy this. So I must say I found the sound quite surprising.
SPEAKER_09:Yeah, absolutely. So um so this was recording um down on my allotment. I think you would call them community gardens in in North America. Um essentially, um, this is a an uh ant's nest. Um so digging in my in my allotment. Um there's quite a few ant nests, and um, when you hit an ant's nest, you certainly know it because um hundreds of thousands of potentially um certainly thousands of uh worker ants will start pouring out of the nest to investigate what's going on. Um and the sound that you can hear is me using what is called a contact microphone. Um, contact microphones essentially um they don't pick up um sound through the air as an ordinary microphone would. So the microphones that we're using now um have a diaphragm which moves um with with um you know as the compression of air moves from our mouths through the microphone. Instead, what happens with a contact microphone is that it picks up um vibrations um in in um has to be placed next to solid materials. So what I've done here is I've I've put in the um contact microphone in the middle of the nest or in the middle of these um worker ants. And it's them crowding round this contact microphone. And what you can hear is them using um their antenna, rubbing it against um their body and their legs and creating this kind of squeaky sound, which is their method of communication. So what I find fascinating about this kind of stuff, I guess, is that um, as you rightly say, you know, this is accessing a world that perhaps we're not even aware of underneath our feet, you know, every day. And you know, this I'm talking about in heavily urbanized downtown Cardiff. I'm not talking about um out in the countryside somewhere. And what I think I find fascinating about this is that it constantly reminds me, I guess, about the alterity of the non-human world, okay, that we're living amongst beings that produce all kinds of incredible sounds. Um, again, not just out in in um in wilderness or countryside environments, but living here alongside us in the city. All we need is the tools, is the particular kinds of methods to be able to get access to these worlds.
SPEAKER_05:I think ants are just um they're incredible. They're incredible architects, they're incredible workers, they they do amazing things. And to to hear that world, kind of how it opens up your imagination of what's going on, the busyness of what's happening, uh is really exciting. Uh, and you're kind of uh bringing us nicely here to the focus of today's episode, which is on sonic methods. So you spoke a little bit here about uh your microphone and kind of inserting the microphone amongst the ants. And of course, there are there are questions uh you know to be asked here about the ethics of bringing a microphone into uh the environment of another animal. So just like the beaver might disrupt um the sonic environment. What does uh yeah, maybe we can talk a bit about that before we put sonic methods broadly, but what does it mean now to to you know be recording these animals' uh spaces, their worlds?
SPEAKER_09:Yes, I think you're right that it does raise uh ethical questions. I guess in the in the context of the ants, I imagine the the spade going into the ground was more of a concern for the ants nest than um the insertion of a of a microphone. But um, but yes, uh it is it is it is challenging and it can be troubling. Um, I guess in my own work I try to be as non-invasive as possible in terms of recording at particularly animal sounds. Um, if I enter environments, I try to maintain as much distance as possible. And there are various useful tools to enable you to maintain that distance. So um a good example in the same way that a um a photographer would use a long lens zoom uh to to capture uh animals from a distance. Um, sound recordists will often, wildlife recordists will often use something called a parabolic reflector, which enables people to record from from long distances. Essentially what it is is it's a big plastic um half uh kind of uh dome-shaped um object that you insert a microphone um into one end of. And what this does is it's concentrating um sound waves from a distance down and channeling, channeling it into the microphone. So essentially it now enables you to kind of eavesdrop from a distance. Um, so again, I guess the question of eavesdropping is is something which um could also be ethically dubious, um, but it enables me to, particularly bird sound, it enables me to record bird sound from a distance in a way that um doesn't disturb the birds that I'm trying to record.
SPEAKER_05:Thank you so much for making uh understanding this so accessible. Because I uh yeah, I think making the comparison there with the photographer kind of really helped me to understand how the mechanisms of these different technologies work. And so we've spoken now about a contact microphone, and I'm gonna say it wrong, a parabolic reflector. Um, so these are obviously two tools that are quite useful in terms of you hearing both soundscapes broadly, so broader ecologies, but also potentially specific uh animals or even species. But when we speak about sonic methods, so these are obviously uh tools for for doing it. Uh and I'm I'm assuming here recording is is the method. Is is that the only method there is when you're thinking about recording um, you know, an animal or recording a soundscape? What what kind of yeah, what do you mean when you say sonic methods?
SPEAKER_09:Sure. So sonic methods I think is a the way that I use that, deploy this term, I think of it as a broad suite of different kinds of methods that enable us to investigate uh the interactions between um uh say an animal and the space that it inhabits, or it could be more generally about the the sound of a landscape. Um you're right to pick up on uh on sound recording as perhaps one of the focal methods, but there are other kinds of methods that I think fall under this umbrella category of sonic methods. So there are other things in terms of something which is called a listening walk, it's also referred to as a sound walk. Um, there are various kinds of um uh uh sonic mapping um methods, um, which essentially uh are transposing sonic data into visual data, so producing um visual representations of sound. Um these have recently been updated, I guess, in the digital world. Um, so there is now a vast um array of online sound maps where recordists have what they do is they have start with a bass layer map, a classic, maybe a Google map. And then what you can do is you can upload uh sound recordings in the location where those recordings have been made. Um so I guess here we have an interplay between sound and space and also kind of visual and uh and the sonic domain as well.
SPEAKER_05:So uh so this is kind of a way for you to, I suppose, localize sounds to try and get a sense of where particular sounds originate from. So sounds are not just floating in space, they have kind of a geography to them, they have a locatedness, uh, which is really cool. I saw, gosh, I'm gonna get the name of it wrong now. I think her name was Thompson, and it was to do with New York City, and she had mapped not only, she had mapped all the complaints in the city, and she had mapped both the like sound complaints in the city as well as um, you know, smell complaints, and and I think she had had in there kind of some of these sound recordings because it was at a time when recording and video recording had just kind of started, and it was kind of neat to hear, you know, older cars and older trains and um and horses, you know, all kind of happening in the city at the same time, which is so I think there's a geographic component to these maps, but also uh a historical one, right? Where you start to realize that these sounds change over time.
SPEAKER_09:Absolutely, yeah. So I think that it does give um a certain degree of geographic context for these recordings rather than them being, as you say, kind of floating away, decontextualized. There has been a numerous kind of um critiques and and and understandable critiques of of the use of these sorts of sound. maps um for all the reasons that um geographers kind of habitually use um sorry habitually um critique um visual maps so in terms of of of the kinds of um logics that um they reproduce in terms of power relations in terms of who gets to create these sound maps and to um and and to kind of what end and also i guess a more of a basic um issue with the fact that you know soundscapes as you've already mentioned are constantly changing constantly unfurling and kind of fixing them to a map in some way um prevents them from prevents this idea of them in constant flux or constant change if if that makes sense nonetheless nonetheless I still find them I still find them interesting and I still find them useful as a way of uh presenting what can be quite a chaotic catalogue of sound recordings and and like I say I think it does get gives some form of um geographical context to what is being recorded.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah I think I mean like you rightfully point out I think as long as you're sensitive to some of these these concerns around how things are constructed or reconstructed it's the same thing with the photograph uh I think you mentioned in your paper um on sonic geographies you mentioned kind of even when someone is taking a photograph they're framing the the image right they're they're choosing what image to take and that is to some extent a reconstruction so same thing with with a map kind of being sensitive to to those reconstructions uh I wanted to go back to sound walks and listening walks uh so one of my professors uh actually one of my supervisors Laura Cameron she made us do a um a sound walk as part of one of our courses and uh you had to kind of walk through your environments and create a sound and I did it through my university campus and it really is incredible how when you put on a different lens or a different orientation on a walk how that walk changes. And I found myself writing about that hum of machines. It was a hum that was kind of silent to me, invisible to me. And then I went on this walk and it was everywhere. I could hear just machines going and and it was amazing to me that I'd been on this campus constantly walked around and just not really tuned into that and then made a concerted effort to walk and listen and that was the sound that permeated everything.
SPEAKER_09:Yeah I think that it's a deceptively deceptively simple method but a really productive method in terms of for all the reasons that you've just um you've mentioned it's really a a fantastic way of desensitizing yourself to uh ordinary landscapes or or spaces that you habitually walk through. So yes I've I've run these listening walks and I've probably run them in the similar way that that um that Laura ran yours. So essentially what I do is uh with the with a group of of interested folk um I would lead them through um tends to be urban spaces because of where I'm located um walking through urban space and and getting people to try just to focus on on their experience of sound on their listening and when I talk about listening I'm not just talking about what comes through your ears okay in terms of what we can sense through the cochlea within our ears. It's also about um a more embodied sense of walking okay so things like vibrations um low frequency sound things like that we can certainly sense through our whole bodies and so I feel that it's a really nice embodied way of moving through space and as you rightfully say things like hums and and things that you habitually block out for good reason because listening intently and intensely is tiring. It can be really exhausting when you do it for prolonged periods of time. So it makes sense that we habitually kind of um don't attend to those sounds but when you do you realize just how diverse sounds are even in spaces that you might think of as being quiet or or tranquil or or peaceful. So I think that this as a method um is perhaps one of the if not the key methods I think for sonic methods um because it's such a fantastic way of not having to focus on technology, on recording equipment. I think it's really democratic. I think they're really easy to run and I think that they are um really ear opening in a way that people that beforehand I think are often quite skeptical about what they can get out of these walks. But when you go on them you just realize uh just how much stuff you're ordinarily missing and um and how lively um certain spaces are that you might have thought are are just dominated by road traffic or just dominated by um you know obvious things around the city and that there's far more detail and texture to our everyday sound environments that than we might ordinarily imagine.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah I think you're completely right. As part of the same course you know I tried to do a walk on the same block kind of following Alexander Horowitz on looking and um I did the same walk on the same block kind of as often as possible and was journaling about it. And I realized it was a suburban block and I have to say in general it was a fairly mundane block in many ways. Except when it came to sound there was one particular corner there was one tree where clearly the birds just loved this tree. And then there was another kind of swampy area where depending on the time of day you were walking the way in which that area sounded was completely different. So I think this method here is potentially really quite revolutionary for animal studies scholars as a way in which to understand and access animals. Because a really big concern is how do we kind of consider and look at animals as subjects so not just as beings that the world impacts but as beings that shape the world and that are shaping the world constantly and whose lives deserve to be considered in a meaningful substantive way. And I think that trying to instead of just sit and watch as like an impassioned observer, uh sound like you said you feel the vibrations what would it mean to be you know in in a national park and to kind of feel the vibrations of the elephant herd walking by uh what would it mean to to hear um you know the the how do you say them the kitty wakes kitty wakes that's correct um waking you up in the morning what what do these sounds say about the social relationships between us and these animals and between these animals and other animals?
SPEAKER_09:I think when yeah when you start to broaden your senses a little bit this is becomes a really exciting uh avenue for and and tool um toolkit of methods is that how it's it yeah for for animal study scholars absolutely I mean when you attend to sound you realize just the extent to which animals are world making um not just their own worlds but our own worlds creating particular kinds of atmospheres creating particular kinds of of sensory experiences um and yeah you're right so when you attend to that you you you realize that um something like a kitty wake might be small in stature but um but it can create an and and completely um kind of transform a place through through their through their calls.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah they like they give it a sense of a sense of place and and obviously not just like we said earlier not just for us though those calls matter they're not they're not um inconsequential something is going on there uh and the fact that they're calling so much or the fact that the ants are rubbing their antenna something is happening there this is not a uh it's not a it's not a pointless sound there's there's a reason there's something happening behind these sounds and to kind of I don't know to just say oh it's irritating or it's annoying seems to me to be foreclosing what the the potential meanings of those sounds are.
SPEAKER_09:Yeah yes absolutely and and meanings which go beyond uh purely uh human enjoyment or or or um frustration with these sounds so to return to the the idea um the the example of of the kitty wakes what's happening here is that I'm recording them during the breeding season um so there's a huge amount of vocalizations between um between between the paired you know the parents of of the Kitty wakes of the Kitty wake chick chicks so so this is recorded outside um uh uh Dunbar um near Dunbar uh harbour and it's no old really old stone wall and there's a series of um nests that have been created in this stone wall so these are really important vocalizations in terms of communication tools um and so and and as you rightly say socialization so it's not just uh it's not just a matter for for humans to attend to these sounds it's a matter of also for importance for things like the culture of animals and the conservation of animals as well.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah I think when when you start to realize that they are communicating and that these might be distinctive languages things change. And also you know we were speaking earlier about how their sound might be construed as uh irritating or annoying to particular humans but something you mentioned in your paper was you speak a bit about kind of reconstruction and what reconstruction does. And I think that some animals and some animal sounds kind of get reconstructed constantly perhaps to assume an irritating tone if that makes sense. You know I think I think back to um was it finding Nemo mine like like and I loved I loved them but they kind of became caricatures of an annoying bird right like birds that make too much noises um and it just starts or the roar of a line you start it's something that you should revere and something that should be really and I mean incredible sound I would argue but is that because of how it's been represented and what it means to my culture I definitely anyway um this it's really fascinating. But I wanted to just come back to that actually so in your um in the paper you said you spoke of methods as filters. So we've spoken about a couple of methods here um recording sound walks sound mapping um you know different types of tools whether it's uh the parabolic reflector uh different types of microphones so all of these could really help animal study scholars to access and understand and imagine perhaps different kinds of animal worlds and experiences but one thing you spoke of uh was methods as filters and you brought up three things kind of the the tension between capture and representation um as well as the idea of sound as performance I wonder if we could just speak a little bit about those and what what those filters are and what they mean.
SPEAKER_09:Okay I'm gonna have to rack my brains a little bit uh about this paper it was it was quite a few years ago but yeah so I um so my my myself and and my colleague um Michael Gallagher um who is now based at Manchester Metropolitan University we wrote this paper as kind of a way of thinking through uh what audio recording or specifically field recording and and when we talk about field recording what we mean is essentially all kinds of audio recording outside of a controlled studio environment what this might mean for geographical research and the ways in which we might conceptualize these different tools. And what we were trying to disentangle here is or trying to perhaps um uh kind of prevent people going down a route of presuming that and and I I kind of touched upon this when we really first kicked off this conversation is this idea of audio recordings as being a pure representation of as a of an objective external world. Okay. As with photography and film we need to not go down that route and think about the ways in which particular kinds of technology and particular forms of editing and particular ways in which we play back those subsequent recordings, that kind of chain, that assemblage of decisions which are made by the recordist in kind of concert with the technology that is being used is not a pure representation of an external reality. It's always filtered through different kinds of ways of listening and experiencing the world. So yeah we wanted to urge caution um about thinking about audio recording as a way of of capturing unfiltered external reality.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah the the the the tension between I think representation and um capturing I think is really significant. And it's come up a couple of times as as we've been speaking kind of the framing of the photograph versus the framing of the sound recording and to be attentive to uh what you're trying to show um you know it's not an untouched nature or uh and then I think you know nature documentaries have kind of faced criticism for this themselves as kind of showcasing this untouched beautiful nature and giving the illusion of just biodiversity going wild where when in fact maybe they're not doing enough to show uh some of the devastation. But one of the things you mentioned there was also kind of about the performance of sound and and how we could what we could do to I suppose how we could use sound to better relay information as well. So through like sound installations or sound art and and I think that this is potentially a really fruitful space for for folks with animal studies or folks with interest in extinction studies or even rewilding what what does it mean you know performative sound?
SPEAKER_09:What what what do you mean when you're starting to talk uh about that I suppose to some extent recording itself is performative but it absolutely is um we were also thinking about forms of dissemination um we were thinking about how do we if we're capturing all this um this material this data whatever you want to call it what are the means by which we then relay that to different kinds of audiences and so um performance is the is the is the replaying of these audio recordings and when we replay them in different spaces they're going to act in different spaces they're going to inhabit one room very differently to another one auditioning over microphone uh sorry over headphones is going to sound very different to speakers and so again it's being attentive to um the ways in which replay um impact what can be heard or not heard from those recordings. So yeah also thinking about um from kind of a more narrow academic perspective what are the means by which we can distribute or discuss audio recordings. When we were writing this paper um it was very challenging um to actually get audio recordings embedded within the paper itself. Okay it's very easy to send an editor a um a few photographs or static visual maps or things like that but working with multimedia data um was then a real challenge for academic presses. So that's why we were then also thinking about what are the sorts of mechanisms that could run in parallel to you know traditional written um academic texts. Things have improved certainly since then but it still is quite a challenge to get um audio recordings um into academic texts. And very often um and this is something which um quite a lot of people in broadly in sound studies I think have really struggled with is how do we ensure that that if we are dealing with sound recordings within our work, how do we ensure that sound recordings don't just remain as kind of referential points within the text which is the main important thing, right? You read a text, you read an article and then you refer to the recording or you know as an example of what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_05:Is there are there mechanisms by which we can maybe not necessarily completely flip that but maybe equalize that um inherent imbalance between the power of the text and the power of sound do we need to always have um uh sound recordings as purely examples of what we're writing about did does that make sense to you it does it makes a it makes a lot of sense and I was I was at a um a workshop this past this past week and one of the one of the presenters and it was a bovine scholarship workshop so everyone was talking about cows and we were all really excited and there were a lot of images of cows but only one presenter played a sound recording of cows and it it stuck out in my mind actually because the it was it was a whole bunch of calls kind of like what you had with the the kitty wakes happening earlier there was a whole bunch of of back and forth and things happening and I don't think we're used to hearing cows in that way and I found it really subversive actually to have to have the kind of presentations stop and to hear the animals for a moment to to kind of contend with the fact that they they speak in the world and they do things uh and and something is happening like we were speaking earlier something is is happening here. And and then I think okay wow this opens up a whole bunch of interesting ways of dissemination. So uh I'm interested in how cows were removed from cities and uh in the small city that I'm researching uh Kingston there were about the same number of cows as there were horses but they're not anywhere near like in terms of the urban imaginary they're not really in people's urban imaginary. But then I think wow imagine if I could get a whole bunch of speakers in the downtown core and play what 300 cows sound like you know that I I can't necessarily emulate the smell that might be breaking some bylaws or um but to to try and just compel that imagination to say what does it mean to remove because 300 seems kind of inconsequential when we think of of numbers and especially the numbers of animals today. But 300 beings in a downtown core that would be a cacophony. Right?
SPEAKER_09:It it would I mean cacophony has bad bad connotations maybe it would just be what should sound I think it would it would be it would be energetic and it would be lively and and and you touch on a really good point about I I guess the historical conceptualization of of sound. Okay so there's an assumption um that the current urbanism that we inhabit is noisy to use that word hycophonous is a degraded environment um and that somehow uh historical town and urban sounds were at a quieter volume because there wasn't road traffic. No, if you look at historical writings of urbanization of early forms of urbanization they were they were loud and and and and partly because of the presence of of animals you know the sound of of horse and carts along cobbled streets is not quiet. The sound of 300 cows in a downtown core is not going to be a a quiet environment so yeah taking that kind of historical approach I think also um gets us over this assumption that that um that that loudness and the or the presence of vitality um is is somehow a contemporary uh form of urban urban living and urbanization. Of course the sounds are very different but exactly yeah but but nonetheless there there's still there's still vitality there that this is not just um quiet peaceful historical urban spaces.
SPEAKER_05:But I think it talks to some of the the valuations you were talking of earlier right so there there was a clear kind of when you put on a historical lens in in you know the 19th century there was a kind of a clear shift in how sound was valued in in the urban space right the sound of a car I would argue is is very loud and invasive and it's too much. But at that time at that moment it was an exciting sound it was a sound that represented a lot more than just a kind of a noise in our in our environments was the sound of progress it was the sound of of of everything a horse at that time was not um you know it was the sound of change which I think speaks to some of what you were saying earlier about a listening walk. If you were walking down a street at that time and you heard the clickety clack of the horse's hooves and you heard the sound of a motor car, you were hearing class differences. You were hearing you were hearing the future and the past at the same time and you you created valuations on those sounds so for the longest time the sound of a horse and the sound of a car was just the way it sounded there was no problem. It was just what it was but then at some point it became problematic uh and I think what like what an exciting way to try and like think through these uh processes.
SPEAKER_09:Absolutely so I I guess that that might dovetail quite nicely with um some of the uh work which I'm doing at the moment in in relation to to um soundscape and and soundscape change um I don't know if you talked about the World Soundscape project in in your previous um podcast if you've even heard of of this group if if I have and we did then I'm not recalling it very well right no problem no problem so so the so the World Soundscape project are um are a a really important kind of piece of the jigsaw puzzle um when we're talking about sonic methods in terms of social science academic research they were the principal instigators of this suite of methods that I refer to as sonic methods so the World Soundscape project were were based um uh uh at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver um and they were initiated by uh somebody by the name of R. Murray Schaefer now R. Murray Schaefer I'm sure you've heard of um he was instrumental in in what we now turn soundscape studies or it's also called acoustic ecology. So R. Murray Schaefer set up what what was termed rather grandiosely the World Soundscape project in the late 1960s and it really started getting going in the early 1970s. They instigated a number of these methods that we've discussed so they they uh really came up with this idea of listening walks or sound walks um they discussed different forms of really quite interesting forms of uh of sound mapping before we had the technology to kind of acoustically represent places um and they were also instrumental in um social sciences using audio recording as a method of documenting soundscapes and also soundscape change now the World Soundscape project and particularly Armory Schaefer is very much associated with noise and noise pollution because Armory Schaefer a lot of his writings are kind of rallying against um uh uh noise in downtown cores of of places like Vancouver um but I think that there's a uh a a broader story about the World Soundscape Project and so currently I'm doing some research um quite slow progress but it is gradually uh taking shape and I'm I'm looking at the um one of the first projects that the World Soundscape project conducted in the early 1970s where they created this really wonderful um audio archive of Vancouver in the early 1970s so there was a there was a few guys and and it very much was male dominated this group um a few guys went out and and did audio recordings um across Vancouver for a number of months um and all of this all of these recordings um capture all kinds of fascinating unique mundane boring exciting moments of Vancouver at that particular time um and what I what I'm doing is I'm investigating the making of this sound archive so I was fortunate a few years ago to to go to Simon Fraser University and spend some time in the archive um it's it's now been digitized so it's actually accessible online um but this archive uh really kind of I really find it fascinating as kind of a document that sort of permeates but also at some moments goes off in very different tangents to this very dogmatic focus on noise and noise pollution that people associate with the World Soundscape project. There's a lot of celebration of noise there's a lot of celebration of the vitality of contemporary urbanism or what was contemporary urbanism in the early 1970s. There's a fascination with with really loud sounds the loudest sound in the whole archive they absolutely love and that's the sound of foghorns um playing out um over Barrard Inlet um so uh part of part of what I'm trying to do is trying to explore how um the recordists conceptualized uh the soundscape of Vancouver at that time cut some of the kinds of projections and forward kind of ideas of what they thought it might develop into um and also trying to think about um the kinds of technologies and the kinds of archival practices that were used at this time as a way of trying to make claims about urban living about soundscape about soundscape policy and all these sorts of things so so that's what I'm working on at the moment and to to go back to this idea of soundscape change across time something that I did is I spent um uh about a week and a half I I didn't have as much time as I'd have liked to but um you know funding's tight and I had teaching to to complete and things like this so I had to come back to Cardiff but um I spent some uh I spent uh a good amount of time out in the field trying to re-record some of the same locations that were recorded in the early 1970s as a way of trying to understand how soundscapes have changed with all of the caveats that I'm not recording in the same season I might be recording at slightly different times but kind of trying to get a general impression of of how these soundscapes might have changed over time. And what was really fascinating is that in some of the projections that were created by the World Soundscape project particularly the writings of our Murray Schaefer there was this assumption that urbanism and cities are going to just become louder and louder, more cacophonous and they're going to be harder places for us to live in and they really there was quite some judgmental things about the downtown core of of of of Vancouver in the early 1970s and what it might become. What I found really interesting is um processes of deindustrialization and also gentrification including green gentrification actually meant that some of the downtown core locations that were recorded in in Vancouver have rapidly transformed into quiet, relatively quiet um spaces that the World Soundscape project perhaps never had never would have been able to conceive of as being the future reality of Vancouver and it really upsets this assumption there is kind of this linear progression from quiet to noise. Actually there is quite quite considerable fluctuations um so there was things like they recorded a a downtown Cooperage um that made barrels for sorted fish and all these sorts of things a really loud space you know there's the sound of hammering of the making of the barrels there's the sound of buzzsaws as as logs as as wood that has been um brought in on the railroad system from the hinterland of Vancouver out into you know out in BC is brought into downtown core to produce these barrels all of that is gone all of that industry is gone it's been replaced by expensive condos um by little green space pocket parks and it's now full of the sound of people cycling around of kids playing in small parks of kind of leisure spaces so what I think for me was interesting here was how gentrification and processes of deindustrialization shape soundscapes um in quite considerable ways and in ways as I say that perhaps were not um could not even enter the imagination of these early recordists in downtown Vancouver.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah it's fascinating I think kind of the idea because I I do think cities are perhaps relatively loud places or spaces um but they're certainly not the only loud places and spaces uh you go to a feedlot that's going to be a really loud uh space uh but it's something that we're not exposed And I think that a lot of these um kind of offensive urban noises were pushed. There were bylaws that pushed them out, and that invisibilized some of the work that uh goes into sustaining cities, some of the, you know, the industries that that make cities function. They've been kind of increasingly invisibilized, I think, in these urban spaces. And some of that invisibilization is also, I guess, um a sound. I don't know what the thing is. There you go. I was like, what's what's invisible in sound? I was like, um, but yeah, and and also to just I guess disrupt the idea that a city is this or it's that, right? Different parts of cities have different soundscapes and different um things happening in them. Again, to I think your concept of value here is really important. Like who gets to create the sounds that they want? What kind of what can these different sounds tell us about different parts of the city and different parts of the country and different parts of the world? Uh it's really fascinating. And I love that you brought in the archives there because I mean, I don't know if that would constitute another sonic method necessarily. Um, but I think a lot of the methods that you spoke of so far have been quite uh presentist, right? You can go out, you can record, you can uh you can go on your sound walks today. But for me, doing historical work, kind of thinking of that. I had never thought of going into the archives and seeing if I could find sound files of the city I'm interested in or movie files and what this might be able to tell me uh of the urban at that time. So that's really uh it really is, like you said at the beginning, a fascinating new way to just kind of crack open thinking about animals and thinking about our world. And uh so thank you so much. This has been really, really helpful. Uh perhaps now, if you can believe it, we've been speaking for an hour. Um and I think I could speak to you for like four more, but uh I know that you you're lecturing and you know, things to do, things to do. Uh could you perhaps tell us your your quote?
SPEAKER_09:Yes, absolutely. So my quote um I think nicely dovetails with um uh with what we were we were early discussing a little bit about ethics and the kind of maybe the ethical dilemmas of of sound recording, particularly in terms of you know the insertion of microphones and how that might disrupt um animal spaces. Now, this um excerpt which I'm going to read is from a lovely um uh uh book called In the Field: The Art of Field Recording, um, which is edited um by um uh Kathy Lane and Angus Carlyle. Um, and this book is a compilation of um interviews with a range of field recordists talking about their practice, talking about why it is why they do what they do, uh, and and some of the things that we've touched upon in terms of why these methods might be interesting or important or vital, not just for academic research, but also um for the arts as well, and also sciences, so not just social sciences. Now, this excerpt uh comes from an interview with a Norwegian sound artist by the name of Jana Winderan, a really wonderful um sound recorder, sound artist. In fact, she is probably my favourite um sound recordist, um contemporary um field recordist. She she in particular she focuses on um aquatic recordings. Um so she uses I I spoke about contact microphones. If you waterproof a contact microphone, essentially what you get is something called a hydrophone. So a hydrophone is a waterproofed microphone that enables you to listen uh in in watery worlds. And so Jana has um produced a series of wonderful um recordings and she rec releases them as CDs, LPs, and what have you of these kind of watery worlds. Now, a question is posed to her about how how she feels about her own presence in recordings. And this is something we haven't touched upon yet, so I thought this might be quite an interesting quote. So Janis says the following I don't want to be there in the recording as it is played back. I don't want my voice to be there, my breathing to be there, or my footsteps to be there, because in each case it would become about me to s me about me listening to something. I don't want people to identify with me in my recordings, or for that matter, with any other people. Yet obviously I'm there, listening with my fullest concentration, often in a very solitary fashion. When you achieve that level of focus, it becomes like it sometimes can be with photography. You are concentrating so much that you just know you have a good photograph or a good composition. But it is totally not about me, and it is about the content, and that is why I really do not want to send around portraits of myself.
SPEAKER_05:Wow, that's so fascinating. Um, because you can actually in that quote see her. You can see her standing at attention, standing stiff with listening.
SPEAKER_09:Um normally in a in a um in a um fishing boat, fishing vessel, maybe out in the north north sea or somewhere. And so for me, I think this um presents a really interesting dilemma that a lot of recordists deal with, and that is this role of the presence of the recordist ourselves. Invariably, recordists will edit out any of their presence that might kind of incur within the recording itself. And this is an ethical dilemma. I think it's troubling for a number of reasons. Um, I also understand why someone doesn't want their presence to be within that context. But what is happening here is is a number of things, including kind of a disassociation between you and the environment. It's also trying, it also in this in this kind of a strange way, it creates a sort of a passive way of listening to a uh to a place if we don't actually constantly remind us that we are listening to someone else's listening, if that makes sense. You know, there is somebody who's physically there dangling a hydrophone off the side of a boat, and then going and doing all the other things in terms of editing and maybe doing a bit of EQing, some filtering and that kind of stuff, which she she tends to be quite light touch with those sorts of things. But yeah, this question of what is the role or what is the rightful presence of a recordist in recording is a conundrum which I constantly grapple with myself, both in terms of my writing but also in terms of my own recording practice.
SPEAKER_05:I suppose it's that kind of reflexivity, right? Even what we were talking about with regards to the documentaries earlier. Like what do you do when you when you just portray, you know, the relationships between the cheaters as just happening out there and you know, without necessarily showing what's involved in getting the sound for those documentaries, what's involved in getting uh, you know, I hadn't I had no idea foley artists were a thing until a few years ago, right? That most of the sounds I'm hearing in movies is someone standing in a little room, like figuring out how to make that sound.
SPEAKER_09:And very often that's the same with nature documentaries. You watch a nature documentary and and and and very often what you're listening to is not the sound of those animals. It's somebody somebody in a in a broom cupboard or a soundproofed um room somewhere recreating what they think these things will sound like.
SPEAKER_05:And and then again, those ethical questions come up because because you're you're trying to get a sense of, oh, I now know these animals, uh or I know this environment because I heard it and I watched it, and if it was on TV and there was that image, then it's real. Absolutely. And this raises I have no idea which documentary it was, so I'm gonna get it all completely wrong, and or even which species it was. So this is just a terrible story. But it was something to do with a a uh you know, a documentary where these birds were just pushed off the side of a cliff in order to make a dramatic story about you know these birds plunging to their death pools.
SPEAKER_08:Oh, are you thinking are you thinking about lemmings?
SPEAKER_05:Yes.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah, so the history of lemmings. Yeah, so the history of lemmings. Everyone, everyone thinks, you know, we have this metaphor of lemmings falling off cliffs.
SPEAKER_09:Exactly. Lemmings don't do that. They don't do that in in the in the natural world. Yeah, they were pushed off cliffs.
SPEAKER_05:And this was and that's a really extreme example. It's a really extreme example. It speaks to some of the interventions. What goes into making something? And I think it was BBC Earth recently, um, or Planet Earth, or where they've started now at the end of each episode, actually showing people going into the Arctic or people going into these spaces and showing like this is what's involved in it's two or three years worth of work, it's not just something that exists, and I think um yeah, and also showing some of the problematics with that, isn't it?
SPEAKER_09:Definitely, definitely. So, yeah, so in turn in terms of Foley, um there are good reasons why folio is used in in nature documentaries. You know, if you've got uh uh an image of a of a spider walk, you know, running across um a forest floor, um, invariably those sounds are going to be too small for you to be able to pick up in a distinct enough fashion that it is going to make a strong enough impression on a on a viewer that that is the sound of of that spider. If you don't have any sound, then weirdly your brain thinks this doesn't seem quite right. Why can I not hear the movement of this animal? So folia is used there as a way of augmenting reality, if that makes sense. Yeah, there are there is a number of really great um wildlife recordists that do fantastic jobs, and and and Chris Watson is is somebody who I I really look up to. He's a an incredible um wildlife recordist, and and he's worked on a lot of David Attenborough's nature documentaries. Um but even still, yeah, there are times when when Foley um is quite heavily lent upon within nature documentaries in ways that I think are are um are not made clear to a viewer or a listener to that nature documentary. I think it's quite challenging to fake images um in nature documentaries, unless you're physically pushing lemmings over over.
SPEAKER_05:I mean, but even that's becoming what is it called the like deep web now where you can like just have someone else's face in your face saying something like the world is the world is getting really weird.
SPEAKER_09:Of course. Um But yeah, but with sound, but with sound, I I think that um yeah, there are there are real challenges for for wildlife recorders, and that is why foley is used. Because as I say, there's this expectation that if you can see an animal on screen, then you should be able to hear it as well.
SPEAKER_05:And and I mean there are I don't think that there's necessarily anything inherently wrong with using foley artists, right? Same thing as perhaps including live animals in films should be problematized. There are definitely ethical questions you know with with actively tripping horses because you want a dramatic scene where if you've got CGI now and you don't need to have any horses, but you can recreate them, why not do that as a less invasive method? So if you've got someone who's able to create the sound um in a way that's for the real animals, better for them, you know, why not go that route? Uh, but at the same time, when we're speaking, I guess, in research ways, uh in ways in which we speak about sound and the significance of sound, what you're speaking of here is it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right? This this tension of having real sound or objective sound uh and why there is so much significance and weight in that. And what could Foley art present as a potential sonic method for us as animal studies scholars, right? What could we do in terms of using our imagination for how we could empathize with other animals, how we could empathize with other worlds by creating their sounds? Um, what would it mean for me to start rubbing my arms against my body to see what it felt like in terms of emulating the the life of an ant? I remember being just leaving down it's too late in the day. Um, yeah, it's interesting.
SPEAKER_09:I really find it interesting, yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I have one one of your sound recordings I really just want to play for the listeners because I thought it was just fascinating, and then I promise I'll let you go.
SPEAKER_06:Of course.
SPEAKER_05:Um, the one of the bats, I'm gonna play it, and if you could tell me what's going on, because it just I had no idea what what was going on in the sound.
SPEAKER_08:I love that sound. So I think I think it's Dorbiton's bat, I think I labelled it. Uh yes.
SPEAKER_09:Yes, yeah. Okay, so this is recorded um along the River Taff, which is uh a river system that that flows um through central Cardiff. So this is in a heavily urbanized area. Um these bats fly low across water bodies, and what you're hearing is them echolocating. So they navigate space and find prey by sending out um these uh high-pitched sound signals um that are inaudible to the human ear. So, what I'm using here is I'm using something called a bat detector, which can pick up these very high frequency sounds and transpose them into sounds that we can hear. So, again, there is a kind of there's a level of artifice to a certain extent because that isn't the sound per when there when that transposition happens, it is changing the nature of those sounds, but it's necessary for us to be able to hear them. So what we're hearing is is this bat essentially hunting for its prey. I don't know if you could pick up a few, there's a few little zip sounds, it kind of upticks, and that is it catching um its prey. So it's the sound, it's the sound of where it's locked in on its prey and it's catching um, it's probably a moth um that it will be feeding on because it feeds um uh um nocturnally. Um so it was at night. So I can't see the bat flying around the water. Um but using but using this um using this bat detector is absolutely amazing. It's it's a really incredible tool. And also allows you to um, it's really important for for ecologists to be able to distinguish between different bat species because different bat species produce slightly different tones or different rhythms of this echolocation process, and they also echolocate at slightly different frequencies. So you're essentially what you're doing is with your echo with your bat detectors, you're dialing into different frequencies. And when you hit upon a particular bat species or a particular frequency, sorry, you know what you know with good certainty what species that is.
SPEAKER_05:It's like bat radio tuning into this. Absolutely, absolutely tuning into this bat, tuning into this. That's what I that's what I do.
SPEAKER_09:That's what I do during the summer months. I I walk around at dusk and and listen to different bat species. And I again it's again it's something which um going back to this question of world making and and getting access to worlds that are uh, you know, in very mundane places around the city that I live in, and being able to access these with a relatively simple piece of technology uh creates endless fascination for me.
SPEAKER_05:Um where because you sent me a whole bunch of sound clips. I'm sure that listeners would love to access them. If people are interested in your work, learning more about kind of the work you're doing with the soundscapes, but also in terms of hearing, you know, more of these kinds of um animal clips, where could they where could they find them?
SPEAKER_09:Yeah, so I I um I put all of my sound recordings up on um the Internet Archive, which is um a wonderful archiving resource. And I put all of my recordings up there um uh under um Creative Commons licenses, so anyone can download them and use them for their own work, their own research, their own artistic projects if they so desire. Um my username um is 12 Gates to the City. That's numerical one two gates to the city. And my own um personal website where I document all of my audio recording projects is 12gates to the city.com. So if you head there, um you'll be able to hear a lot of these recordings.
SPEAKER_05:Wonderful. I'll make sure that there's a link to to both of those uh there. And um, yeah, I think anyone with an interest in animal studies should be looking at, nope, listening to more animals. And uh and thank you so much for just giving us you know a bit of an ear into your world and um for helping us to hear animals better. So thank you so much for joining us today.
SPEAKER_09:My absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
SPEAKER_05:Okay, and uh that was Jonathan. Thank you, Jonathan, so much for a fascinating episode. And uh now we're gonna turn to uh this episode's animal highlights. So welcome back to the show, Hannah.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, thanks for having me back.
SPEAKER_05:Uh so what are we what are we talking about this time?
SPEAKER_02:We're gonna be talking about bark beetles. Bark beetles. Bark beetles.
SPEAKER_05:And I'm guessing bark beetles are somehow related to trees or they bark like dogs. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:That would be a pretty cool animal highlight. There are these beetles that bark like dogs.
SPEAKER_04:Is this is this an onomotope? Are you really leaning into the sound theme? Like, yeah, that would be pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01:Unfortunately not.
SPEAKER_03:They are beetles that you may find in bark on a hand it over to you to uh teach us about bark beetles.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so one of the things that you and Jonathan talked about today um was about insect sound recordings. So Jonathan played those amazing ant sounds. And so I would be remiss if I did not use this time to talk about David Dunn's famous recording series, The Sound of Light in Trees. Um, so these are anyone who knows who who is interested in animals and sound have probably heard about these. Um, so in these recordings, he used innovative recording techniques to sonically capture the interior of a pinion tree, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, which had been taken over by bark beetles after periods of drought in New Mexico. So we don't often think about the sounds that small insects might make, not the least what the soundscape of a of the inside of a tree might sound like. Um, so indeed, in most cases, without recording devices, we would likely never know what these species or places sound like. So they're not audible to the human ear, you wouldn't be able to pick them up with a conventional microphone. Um, so these recordings are uh kind of an example of how acoustic methods or sonic methods um can give us access to animals' life worlds that are radically different from our own. So, with these recordings, Dunn's intention was to quote, convince the listener of the surprising complexity of sound that occurs within one species of tree, as emblematic of the interior sound worlds of trees in general. It also intended to demonstrate the rich acoustical behavior of a single species of small insect and to suggest how sound is a much more important aspect of how it, the insect, organizes the world and interacts with its surrounding ecosystem than previously suspected. So these recordings were taken to trace a major outbreak of a Mexican invader species of bark beetle that can kill trees that have been made vulnerable to infestation through drought and climate shifts. So the recordings, I'll talk a bit about how the recordings were made because it's fascinating, but they were made with a custom-built vibration transducer, which was inserted between the outer bark of a tree and the interior of a tree. And so I'm no sound recording expert, but I believe that sound trans, that vibration transducers are um pretty similar, kind of bigger versions of the contact microphones that Jonathan talked about in this interview. Um so they pick up sound vibration sound as vibrations on solid surfaces. If you tried to use a conventional microphone to record these sounds, you would likely pick up very little. The kinds of sounds that are made by buck beetles are unfortunately not bucks, um, but are better described as chirpy, like chirps, uh chirpy chirps, uh, which are made through an organ which is called a par strident that functions as a friction-based grating surface. Um, so that's how the noise are made. Um and you should definitely check the sounds out on David Dunn's website. He has a bunch of examples of it, and they're pretty crazy. Um, so Dunn says that over the course of a tree's infestation, the interior of the soundscape of the tree, the interior soundscape of the tree changes. So, in a sense, the recording may be very useful to measure the health of a tree. But perhaps more interesting is that Dan has this hypothesis about whether the conditions that make a tree vulnerable to infestation in the first place, so those drought and climate conditions I talked about earlier, um, whether the beetles might actually be able to hear those those vulnerabilities. And that might be how they know which trees to attack and which are which would be available for infestation. So I'm gonna quote him here to make sure I get this right. Um, but he says that as the tree's vascular system becomes stressed from insufficient fluid transport, discontinuities in the integrity of its vascular conduits cause small partial vacuum bubbles to form. These can implode with such tremendous instantaneous force that under laboratory conditions they have been measured to produce temperatures up to 5,000 degrees centigrade. When these cavitation events occur, they release both light and ultrasound signals. Under extreme conditions, some trees produce these events at an almost continuous ultrasound signature. End quote. So the hypothesis being that the beetles are able to hear that ultrasonic signature, which leads them towards the trees that they're able to infest. So that's you know pretty cool. Um, so here what I kind of wanted to highlight is that we have a kind of twofold and multi-species account of sonic methods. So, first, um we have how the beetles may use sonic methods to locate species of tree that they can invade. But the second sonic method being how human sound recording recordists can use innovative recording techniques to make these sounds audible to humans. So, regarding the latter, um I think that being able to hear these creatures um might help us to evoke more empathy towards them, reminding us that despite their kind of invader and antagonistic status, um, they're also just beings trying to find their way.
SPEAKER_05:Um that's that's so fascinating. I mean, like I know in the previous highlight, you'd also mentioned kind of uh nightingales uh being their sounds being like illegal, um but because people like the sound of their songs, they're kind of let alone. Whereas here you've got an animal who we can't necessarily hear, but who's been called invasive because they're kind of infecting um trees. And yeah, I like that you're kind of pointing us to some of these ideas of how animals kind of get framed in in these problematic ways. But I have to say that when you were saying that, my mind was imploding with as you were talking about these like mini explosions happening in trees, the kind of idea that a tree is a soundscape. You know, we spoke in the episode one about these soundscapes. I think that's just that's just fascinating, that these beetles are drawn to particular soundscapes, potentially, and that they and that they produce these soundscapes, right? That's in that's incredible.
SPEAKER_02:And I think one of the things that I love so much about it is it reminds us that there are, you know, when we think of the soundscape, we think about the things that we can hear, and that, you know, we, you know, in the same way as a landscape is is the stuff that we can see, but you know, we know that in a landscape there's all kinds of natures that we can't see that are, you know, underground or too small for us to see or whatever. And and it's kind of similar in in the in a soundscape, there are all of these sounds that we're not able to hear and all of these kind of sonic worlds almost that are that are there that um that we're not able to hear unless we kind of use these sonic methods in order to hear them.
SPEAKER_05:And but do you so so are bark beetles considered invasive because they damage trees?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think they're considered a really big problem in some parts of the US. Um, so these recordings, particularly, were taken in New Mexico. Um, but yeah, because of these these drought conditions that create these conditions, I don't pretend to understand it too much, but where the beetles kind of and then they they they burrow into the tree and kill the tree. Um so there's kind of if I have time, there's another sonic layer to this, um, which is that David Dunn, who was the guy who made these recordings originally, is now kind of using those recordings against the Beatles, um with these kind of sonic warfare. I'm making it sound really negative, but obviously the intention is to save the tree, so it's a good thing, I guess. Um, but these devices, the actors, they play the Beatles' recorded sounds kind of back to them. Um, but in they have what is it, kind of randomly generated electronic sounds underneath, um, those beetle sounds, um, with the intention to confuse the beetles so they are not able to communicate with each other, um, and things like that, and so that they won't be able to take over the trees.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, this raises a whole bunch of I think interesting questions about ethics and the ethics of using, you know, sonic methods, uh, some of which Jonathan and I Jonathan and I did speak about in the the episode. Um and I guess also how we start to frame kind of invasive species and which species we like, because there is a hierarchy happening here between the tree and the beetle, um, and and who belongs where. So really fascinating um to kind of think through. Uh, I'm maybe going to throw some other interesting facts in here about beetles. They are three sixteenths inches long. That's that's small.
SPEAKER_02:That's pretty small, so that's tiny.
SPEAKER_05:Um, they are approximately the size of a pinhead. They are oval and pearly white. I'm I'm busy looking at um actually some pictures of the tree of the wood. And I think I've picked up pieces of wood that I I mean, I don't know enough about uh beetles here, but I think I've picked up pieces of wood where certainly a beetle, whether it's whether it's this beetle, has done because it's really these like intricate kind of twists and turns. It almost looks like an artwork in the in the bark itself. Um, but maybe that's that's an engraver beetle or uh you know, I need to learn more about beetles. I know.
SPEAKER_02:I'm reminding us that we don't know very much about insects.
SPEAKER_05:Whoa. It says there are over 2,000 species of bark beetles. Wow. 2,000 species. And this again just kind of shows how we sometimes tend to have, I think, a bit of a mammal bias. You I mean, gosh, if you start to just think about how much variety there must be, but maybe I I don't know. I need to talk to a few more ethologists.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know. Well, and maybe maybe sonic methods, you know, can can help us to kind of make well, I don't want to use make the species visible through sound.
SPEAKER_05:So true. Okay, well, thank you so much for uh teaching us a bit more about black beetles. Anytime. A huge thank you to Jonathan for being a wonderful guest, to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast, to the Sonic Arts Studio and SAP Lab for sponsoring the season, to Hannah Hunter for helping out with the animal highlight, to Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the bed music.
SPEAKER_00:This is The Animal Turn with me, Claudia Hirtenfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.
