S4E3: Bioacoustics with Mickey Vallee

In this episode Claudia continues the focus on methodology as it relates to animals and sound. This time Mickey Vallee joins The Animal Turn to talk about the concept of bioacoustics and how using bioacoustics methods alters the ways researchers relate to their research subjects – who are often animals. They discuss some of the theory and ideas circulating bioacoustics generally and Mickey’s experiences more specifically. 

 
Date Recorded: 26 October 2021

 
Mickey Vallee is an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Athabasca University in Alberta, where he also holds the Canada Research Chair in Community, Identity and Digital Media. His work focuses on developing interdisciplinary sonic methodologies to develop new insights on human/animal relations. He has been working on a theory of critical bioacoustics, which grows out of his empirical research with bioacoustics researchers across Canada and the United States. Against a mechanistic ideology of bioacoustics sciences, critical bioacoustics, by contrast, builds a new ethical system that is less focused on the atomistic constitution of the organism than it is on the primacy of relations in sonic communication. Read more about Mickey here or connect with him on Twitter (@mickeyvallee). 

 
Featured: Keynote Lecture by Prof Rosi Braidotti  at the Posthumanism and Society Conference; Wikipedia page about Little Nipper; A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Delueze and Flex; What would animals say if we asked the right questions by Vinciane Despret; Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy and Charlotte Mandell; Indri Lemur by Mark H. Barsamian and Amy E. Dunham; Giant Lemurs are the First Mammals beside us found to use Rhythm by Jack Tamisiea 

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, and Instagram

Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab) for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John (Website) for the logo, and Hannah Hunter for the Animal Highlight

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

This is another I roar podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:05

And I I think this sort of like expanding empirical world of listening with and through animals is understand that the animal is not making a sound, and I am making a sound as we're all sounding together, and we're sounding apart and we're sounding together. And much of the sound is just this continuous movement or this continuous flow.

SPEAKER_05 0:33

Welcome back to the Animal Turn, everyone. This is season four. We're focusing in on animals and sound. As you know, in the season so far, we've tended to focus on some method and methodology-oriented concepts, and we're going to continue that trend in today's episode with talking about bioacoustics. Mickey Valley is going to join me today. He's an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Athabasca University in Alberta, where he also holds a Canada research chair in community identity and digital media. His work focuses on developing interdisciplinary sonic methodologies to develop new insights on human-animal relations. He's been working on a theory of critical bioacoustics, which grows out of his empirical research with bioacoustics researchers across Canada and the United States. We're going to be speaking a fair deal about that today in terms of how researchers relate to bioacoustics and how that alters and shifts the ways in which they understand the animals that they're working with. And I think that that's a really interesting way to go about it. We've spoken a lot about animals and how sound could help us to understand their lives. But an important part of this is also how, as a method, it means that researchers relate to the animals whom they're trying to understand. One of Mickey's big goals is to try and develop an ethical way of thinking about animals using sonic communication. And we're bouncing this around a lot throughout today's conversation. And by the end of the episode, I think we're both pretty excited and energized about the potential of using sonic methodologies and understanding animals as well as understanding research. I want to say thank you to Animals and Philosophy Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring this podcast, as well as to SAP Lab and the Sonic Arts Studio for sponsoring the season. If you are interested in sponsoring a season of the Animal Turn or have ideas on how one could be structured, feel free to reach out to me. All of the details are up on the website. Hannah Hunter joins us again at the end of the episode, giving us an animal highlight that focuses in on lemas. It's a good episode. I hope you enjoy it and uh I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments. Hi, Mickey. Welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Hi, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_05 2:44

Uh yeah, we we were just actually chatting uh from the green room that uh we're both feeling a little bit uh well not both, actually. I'm projecting now onto you, that I'm feeling slightly slow today because um I didn't sleep very well last night. And uh you were saying that that's okay because your household is used to to late night interruptions.

SPEAKER_03 3:05

Yes, and no, brokenness and slowness are my normal now, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 3:09

Good. So hopefully we are on the same wavelength today, and uh everyone else who's listening uh is following us and and enjoying the conversation. So we're on opposite sides of the world right now, I think. You are where whereabouts are you?

SPEAKER_03 3:24

I'm in Calgary, Alberta. It's um eight in the morning, and the sun is just uh just coming up. Where are you?

SPEAKER_05 3:31

Uh I'm in Vienna, uh Austria, and it's 4 p.m. So it's nearing nearing the end of the day. We've still got some sunshine, so we're not that deep into to winter yet. Um but yeah, so it's it's wild time zones. I'm actually giving a presentation later this week to an audience in New Zealand, and I have to do it at 4 a.m., which is so as great as these uh connections are, you do end up with strange sounds. So, Mickey, you are with us today because we're going to be speaking all about bioacoustics. And I know you've written a fair bit about bioacoustics, but before we get to the concept, uh, let's learn a little bit about you. So, what kind of work do you do and how does it relate to animals?

SPEAKER_03 4:13

Um, animals I came to um uh quite uh quite a roundabout sort of way. Um and because I was coming, I was coming, I came to animals about five years ago after working for a few years as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge. And I'd done um my doctoral dissertation and my uh the uh my work after after that on philosophies of recording technology, mostly about how the recording technologies, recording technology, sound recording technologies get folded into the aesthetic experience of sound. And with every kind of technological change, you know, we have like a different kind of uh growing perception of the world through our sound recordings, um, and how you know it's it was very much centered on like studio work, listening work, uh, talking to people about listening, look at the history of listening. And um, after a short, a small grant on um on Glenn Gould uh and his recording philosophies, especially with his his uh radio documentaries, I was looking for something new. And uh and what uh what I mean by new is I needed to find something that was beyond this sort of uh human-centric confine. So how how that became a point of interest to me, first of all, was the you know, was was essentially, I think what happens in research sometimes is you end up writing the same paper over and over again, you know. And to to do that, you know, you might have a perspective that you've carved out from years of research. But if you do that over and over again, then you're not really engaging in the sort of the joy of research, right? Which is your own self-discovery. But the second thing was this um group of people in 2015 or might have been 2014 or 2015 at a Brock University, who were hosting a conference called uh, I forget, I think it was Deleuze and Beyond or something like that. It was a conference on Gilles Deleuze. And the keynote was Rosie Bradotti, who was a post-humanist philosopher. Now, I had heard of post-humanism before, but I hadn't in really uh and uh alongside other sort of concomitant uh field developments like new materialism, ethic theory, and anthropocene literature and such and animal studies. Um but post-humanism I hadn't really explored before. Um, and so I was exposed to it for the first time through a keynote lecture by Berdatti. And their their programmatic, I thought, was a really refreshing one uh compared to other theoretical developments that were going on. Um, and it was uh it was it was a it was a principle of carrying on the work of the Enlightenment, essentially, but what was shaking off the yoke of humanist and human-centered thinking. And uh they were they're really open to uh as opposed to, let's say, like post-structuralist or postmodern movements, um, they're really open to scientific research and really open to cross-disciplinary collaboration, and they're really open to multiple standpoints and to uh expanding the field of sensation and expanding the field of sense, um, expanding data collection and uh what it means to be social with others, uh other non-humans, right? I mean, sociology is you know a discipline that's really enchained by you know the question of human experience, right? The question of human civilization, the question of how humans make worlds together. The question of the animal is uh is one that came up uh a few times and it was one that persisted, but I didn't know, you know, A, how to incorporate it into my work, or B, whether I could justify moving in that direction. But then um coincidentally, I met someone down the hall uh at the University of Lethbridge, it's a small university, and he was a researcher in uh bioacoustics, and I didn't know what that was. And uh, I mean, obviously it was biological organisms and their acoustic properties, right? And what was interesting about it to me is that they used all the technologies that I had been studying for years, um, where I'd been studying, you know, sound recording. And the the world of bioacoustics was a uh a world where in which people understand the constitution of organisms and their the the through their communication systems. And the way that they understand it is by capturing it through microphones and recordings, and what they do with that was like a this uh this this whole other world where the microphones are intended to pick up senses and sounds that were beyond human perception, but like roping them into human perception so that we can we can make them understandable for environmental change, for understanding evolution, uh, for understanding human voice disorders and things like that. I uh I went to uh so I ended up meeting some people at the University of Alberta where they had a much bigger lab than they had at the University of Lethbridge, and I did a um not an immersive ethnography so much as sort of like on-the-ground observation about what they do in order to capture the sound of an animal. And that that led into a bigger research program where I followed conservation biologists around through Waterton, which is a park in southern Alberta near where I live. Uh, and then I did some of my own bioacoustics research down in Crozness Pass, which is a little a little corridor, uh wildlife corridor town, where people living with animals is a is a very normal thing. So, and so this this world was opened up to me more through technology uh than it was through a direct interest in animals. But I mean, since then um the research program has built up into now uh sort of more creative explorations of using bioacoustics as a research method. So um I don't know if I could offer much insight into the very complex world of bioacoustics from a bioacoustics researcher necessarily, but I'm kind of more on the outskirts exploring how it is that bioacoustics researchers work, what they what they do to gather data, and uh what that implies for their relationships with animals and uh and then the sets of assumptions that underlie their their relationships with animals through technology as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 10:22

Well, I think those are exactly the types of conversations we we need to be having. So I guess you're kind of doing, you're you're doing like a meta, a meta-analysis of you know, your understanding of the world of bioacoustics, not only um practicing it, but understanding kind of, as you said, there, the underlying assumptions and and thoughts related to using bioacoustics as a method. But I really love what you said there, kind of about the history of listening and that that was part of your project and and kind of how you had done a whole history of listening and considering what that entails, but that it had been, you know, primarily um human-oriented or human-focused. And then you're introduced to the world of post-modernism, post-modernism, post-um-humanism, which obviously entails a lot more than animals. Uh, you're also looking at technology, you're looking at uh, you know, biomes, you're looking at things that stretch far beyond um, you know, humans uh and also far beyond animals. So I think that's really, I mean, you could be talking about rocks, you could be talking about rivers. Uh, post-humanism entails a wide array of uh of organisms. So it's really fascinating how you've done this kind of journey from listening to post-humanism and now with with some kind of the entanglements of technology and animals coming through, which is really, really interesting. Could you tell me a little bit about that history of listening? What are some of the the key things that you've kind of identified in your research and understanding listening as uh something we do?

SPEAKER_03 11:53

Well, um, probably in the in the in the cultural area, you know, the the point to start is usually with the you could start um, you know, there's so many places to start. But one one of the points of interest that I have is with uh R. Marie Schaefer, who's a Canadian composer who had uh passed on recently. And he was a um uh he had just he was a soundscape composer, so taking sounds of nature and everyday life and technology and such, and then uh and and in a sense uh sort of making an ethics of listening to the world. And he had uh come up with this term called schizophonia, and that was around the turn of the uh 20th century or so. Um, and so it's at this point schizophrenia, which is a splitting of sound from its source, um, where we became much more attuned to the singularity of sense in listening, right? And becoming attuned to disembodied voices, right? And you see this around the turn of the 20th century or so, listening machines or machines that we listen through, we start to relate to sound as a culture, relate to sound as something that is apart from a live experience. Now, I mean, that's problematic to say it's apart from a live experience, but it's um, I think that there's any kind of dominant strain that typifies listening in the 20th century, it's probably this question of um of listening towards or straining towards, right? And it's captured in this actually an animal image, which is the image of a little nipper looking into the cone of a phonograph. Uh, and you might recognize this from RCA Victor from their their uh or RCA. It's a it's their long-standing image of a Jack Russell Terrier peering into the phonograph, uh, the cone of a gramophone. And uh the the what we know this image is called the the image is called his master's voice. Um there was a uh a painter, the painter who'd done this image in particular, uh, noticed something peculiar about the dog that he inherited from his uh deceased brother. And he noticed that um his his his brother's dog would peer into a recording machine, a phonographed machine, every time his brother would play a recording uh uh of his deceased brother's voice. And so the animal, the Jack Russell Terrier, would go over and look into the machine. My dog does this all the time with um uh with with with whistling in particular. I communicate with my dog through whistling. So anytime it's a puppy uh hears whistling on uh on music or anything like that, she starts running around the house looking for me, right? So there's this very famous image of the of Little Nipper straining, and and the particular gesture that the dog has is one of leaning the body towards. And I think if something kind of typifies the listening experience in the 20th century, especially through these sort of devices, it is a moving the body away from itself and towards this kind of virtual bodyscape, you know. And all throughout the 20th century, we've been experimenting with new ways of becoming closer with the performance that only could have been made available by splitting sound from its source, splitting sound from its source, right? And so, but that's there's an underlying assumption with that, which is as if there is sort of a natural sound and source kind of kind of natural coupling there in the first place, right? But at least this what it marks, you know, is a change in the listening habit, which is that straining towards that which is absent, right? It's a present absence. And I think that it typifies a lot of the literature that's devoted to sound recording technologies throughout the 20th century. As and trying to get, you know, trying to get like a it's not like gazing at a photograph where you're looking at a representation of something, it's lifting off the energy of uh of a sound source and being in the presence of the transduction of that energy, right? And so there's something like fully embodied yet absent, absent of bodies at the same time. I think that would probably characterize a lot of to sum up the 20th century in a in a in a short statement. That would be there'd probably be a way of summing it up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 16:09

It's really interesting because um, you know, I remember the first time I saw someone talking, what seemed to me to be in like mid-air. I I was on a I was on a bus and and someone was just talking, and I actually thought something was wrong until I realized that they were wearing um they were wearing headphones that I couldn't see. And they were speaking, you know, they were leaning towards a sound that was disembodied from me, I guess to some extent, um, or absent or invisible to me. And I remember that being a really jarring experience, uh, seeing someone talking and hearing something that I wasn't privy to. So I guess it also creates all of these kind of different uh sonic spaces and sonic experiences because that person was listening to someone else and um it subverted my reality in some ways. It changed my experience of how I was um interacting with my environment at that time. But what I really like about your your description there about the the dog leaning towards the sound is this also said to me, and in that expression, saying his master's voice, there's a lot of multi-species stuff going on there, right? So you're speaking about someone who's doing sound um analysis, who's working with the sound recording. This is a representation of an animal listening to a device. Uh, and and then on top of that, you've got kind of the hierarchy between the human and the animal also being represented there, his master's voice, which it isn't inherently necessarily um bad. You know, it's like you said, a dog would likely lean towards their person or their human. But it's really interesting to kind of think through these sound entanglements uh and whether the dog was listening to the person's voice or maybe picking up on a sound that, as you said earlier, is was maybe perhaps imperceptible to the person doing the recording, which is fascinating. So is this um coming to bioacoustics? I did in the first episode a conversation about soundscapes, which I understand is now kind of understanding the broader, almost connectivity of a whole bunch of different sounds, how sounds come to us at different levels and different scales. How is bioacoustics as a concept or an idea different to soundscape?

SPEAKER_03 18:32

Well, it's it's a very much a field that is tied to conservationist and evolutionary biology. Um, and and so it's not uh, you know, there are other kinds of acoustics that grew out of this, right? Which is um, you know, the I think some of the latest uh movements, like when you were talking to your uh soundscape guests, for instance, you probably ran across terms like acoustic ecologies or eco-acoustics. And I mean, now the conservationist biologists understand, you know, they always understand that an animal is not separate from its environment, right? But for lack of a better term, they used bioacoustics as a way of uh, this is a way of sort of like framing like early, early on when bioacoustics was was first starting as like a field of study through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, um, it was like a tech, as far as I understand, um, it was like a taxonomic system, right? It was a it was a way uh and they found that sound was a was an easier way of classifying and identifying birds than was seeing them. Because birds hide their bodies, right? But they display their voices. And they display their voices for all kinds of reasons, right? They display their voices in order to uh to uh attract the mate, or they display their voices in order to deter a predator, or display their voices just to territorialize, right? But their their voices are always on display. So they found that recording them, um, once the technology was good enough to record uh their voices, was a much easier way to isolate and determine what was what organism. And you know, that's the you know, talk about the master, right? It's that masterful classification system that they have. But before that, I was looking for a source of this last night, though. They uh um, but I couldn't quite find it through my computer records. Uh, but there was uh there was there's rumored to be these ornithology booklets uh of people classifying before recording technology was popular, of people classifying uh birds, scientists, uh according to onomatopoeia, you know, so um that chickadees are you know classified by their cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger sound, or uh or other nuthatches. And and they're like these the ornithology books from back then are like these little books of poetry, with like like what uh but they're at the same time there's scientific classifications and they're these these wonderful tone, like wonderful booklets of um, you know, of people coming to these really funny kind of sounds and these these words that sound like the animals, but when you say them out loud, it's like, oh yes, that is connected to the the sound of the easier to say it. It is, and apparently I yeah, and I read this, and I read this um this passage, and I can't find it since, which makes me think maybe I made it up. But there was like that feeling. Yeah, you know, when you want your data outcomes to be what you're doing.

SPEAKER_05 21:25

I think I've asserted myself into other people's memories before, like I was there.

SPEAKER_03 21:29

Um there's this wonderful passage of people describing um researchers at conferences having heated debates over whether the sound of a nut hatch is a chga, chga, chga, or a chkoo, chkoo, ch-koo. And it's you know, it's this image of scientists kind of mimicking these sounds. There's this wonderful, like it sounds like Professor Challenger in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus turning into a lobster live on the spot. Is these scientists turning into animals in these rooms debating over what sound a chickadee made? Right.

SPEAKER_04 22:01

I love it.

SPEAKER_03 22:02

So when the when yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 22:04

And the different kind of engagement with sound to what we kind of do now with just recording, and then that's somehow real. It was a different kind of embodiment of sound. Like you had to actually emulate the animal's sound. Um, you know, how many of our dogs learn our language, and how many barks and growls do we learn of this? And here you've got scientists in a room trying to figure out the sound, which is just oh, this sound the outside the door.

SPEAKER_03 22:31

Like the these, I mean, I imagine these places sounded quite, you know, hilarious, right? I mean, and I and I love science from back, you know, before paradigm shifts happened, before like when when new methods uh take over because they're more effective. But these older methods of the more defunct they feel like, or I mean, back in like right until up through the 1930s, they thought that starlings communicated by telekinetic powers, you know, was it was some what like right right up in into the 1930s. So it's interesting to see like how we think now, we wouldn't we wouldn't assume that, but you know, not so long ago it was it was the the paradigm to think that there was some kind of psychic transference amongst animal bodies, and somehow the psychic transference manifested in the sounds that they made with one another. But I mean it's not it's not far off. Um it is it is a vibrational milieu, right? Like um if if in sound studies, what is assumed anyway, in sound studies is that uh sound moves a body through changes in air pressure, right? And so so through these fluctuations in air pressure, you can you know determine the movement of another starling, right? Uh while while they're flocking in those massive uh those massive murmurations, right? But um those are so beautiful, yeah. And you must you must see them out in in in Vienna. You must uh you must you must see them from time to time.

SPEAKER_05 23:51

I haven't I haven't seen any big ones yet, but like murmurations of any. And I know when I spoke to Jonathan Belcom about fish, we also spoke a bit about this, and just in terms of how, you know, because you think of fish, they don't have ears, but they also use these vibrations and they use their bodies to kind of keep their distance from from other from other animals. Um, and this is how they can do these massive, these massive shoals. And same thing with the murmurations. I I love the idea. You know, you're speaking here, people didn't necessarily have the same vocab as we have, they didn't scientize it. In some ways, it seems like the animals have more agency if you were talking of it being like some telekinetic way that the animals were communicating. Whereas now we're just like, oh, it's it's instinct, oh it's um yeah, it's it's really fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 24:35

Well, they talk about starling, they talk about it almost like an algorithm now. It's a rule, it's a set of rules that starlings follow, which is that they follow the uh they're I think they've isolated the numbers, the number seven. You know, they follow the seven closest neighbors, and so it's a topological, it's a it's a topological relation. And so every bird is following its seven closest neighbors and is followed by its seven closest neighbors, but of course that expands out and out and out, and they all move in these movements to evade the uh to evade predators, right? Well, part of that movement is you can't find any bioacoustics research on starlings unless the bioacoustics researcher is looking at an individual starling, but the mass murmuration of starlings, like it's an old Xeno's paradox. It's like the sound of one starling is not the sound of a murmuration of starlings, that can only come about through this massive orchestration, right? And it's a disorienting kind of sound, it's a swoosh, it's a physical kind of feeling when they could they come up over you, right? Although I shouldn't speak, I should only shouldn't speak too boldly about my experience with starlings because in Calgary they come in murmurations of like 10 somewhere.

SPEAKER_05 25:42

Hey, 10? I think in Vienna they're in the thousands movements of 10 of anything are probably shifting some air and making some movement. So um it's still you know, fair enough. But you you brought in bioacoustics then. I think this is kind of uh speaking a bit to the focus of today. And so are bioacoustics a set of methods? Uh are they all uh is it very particular types of methods, or is bioacoustics kind of a philosophy? So soundscape, I get is almost um a noun, it's a thing that you can like record and you've got soundscape studies, so you want to understand all the elements. But are bioacoustics the methods that one would use in order to understand the sound of something, or is there a broader kind of philosophy or idea behind bioacoustics?

SPEAKER_03 26:34

The the only um, as far as I know, again, um, and and this is still from um an outsider perspective, the the bioacoustics theoretical literature is devoted to evolution, you know, adaptation, environment, mate selection, right? And so there's this sort of um, and and again, I don't, I don't want to practice in a critical bioacoustics and you know, talk the but I do want to talk about the limitations of that kind of paradigm of thinking according to the you know the organism's evolutionary development and in in in correspondence with other evolutions, right? But um with the the bio the the theoretical literature and bioacticism research seems to be limited to that because there's so much pragmatic work that's being done, and most of it is methodological. And so, you know, if you have there's people working at the um, I think it's I I forget what zoo it is, it's either Indiana or Indianapolis, I think. Um they work with orangutans and uh and record the vocal grunts of orangutans and find that deep within the vocal folds of orangutans, that there's a some human component there with it, which is with their emotions, right? So, I mean, underlying all the words I'm saying are these intonations, you know. You know, the murmurations that you probably that you know the fetuses are exposed to in the mother's womb and such, and there's this sort of like interconnected soundscape between bodies and the world, and that's contained in the vocal folds of orangutans, and they do that by recording closely on a microphone the sounds that an orangutan makes every time it's offered a cookie, and they find, you know, it makes the same sound, right? And so that's a really isolated experimental situation. And uh bioacoustics, uh another method, that's one method for studying bioacoustics. Another method is to do like field bioacoustics, right? And this was through uh field research I did with Waterton, where we would hike from post to post to post through the mountains, and there are these listening posts, and you sit down in your listening post and you'd have I I don't have the microphone on me actually. Sorry, I was gonna show you. Um, you go from post to post to post and you do a 10-minute recording, um, and everybody stays silent, you know, and you kind of find your like everyone's wearing backpacks and you know, Patagonia gear and stuff like that, which is loud when you walk, right? So you have to stay perfectly still like a rock and press record for 10 minutes, and you just do this at different listening posts. And then when you take the recordings back, you have them all marked down about where those listening posts were, and they're all for recording a Dawn chorus over the course of about an hour. And those recordings are sent to somebody who listens to them to identify species variations, right? And they do that by ear. And then there's another kind of bioacoustics. I'm just reaching behind my computer here to show you what other kinds of bioacoustics methods there are. And they use these devices called um oh yes. Yeah, I'm not sure if you've seen these, they're called ARUs, uh uh automatic recording units or automated recording units.

SPEAKER_05 29:36

I think Brian showed us a similar thing. So these are the ones you attach to the tree, like a box.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

Attach it to the tree. Exactly. And this is this is my favorite thing. I've taken this on many hikes because you can you can really I do a lot of damage to my to my machines. And uh this one is this actually made by if you have an iPhone, um, the uh you know, the otter box shell for an iPhone you can buy uh at best. By these this machine is made by OtterBox as well. And so they're there, there's all sorts of like industry connections with these with these machines. But these are um, yeah, they strap these to trees and they record, they can record up to a year or or possibly a couple of years. And it's very if they're cheap to they're easy to maintain, they're cheap. And these were the ones that they use up at University of Alberta. And there they have boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of these machines. It looks like, you know, it it almost when you see these together, it looks like a murmuration of starlings. It's like the uncanniness of seeing something repeated so many times like that, like Pink Floyd's The Wall, you know.

SPEAKER_05 30:38

And those uh and then that data goes automatically, that data goes automatically.

SPEAKER_03 30:44

That's automatically uploaded, and that's called computational bioacoustics. So the first one is like evolutionary bioacoustics would be listening to orangutans vocal folds, right? Field bioacoustics would be like doing field recordings, like longitudinal bioacoustics would be doing field recordings at every post and then sending those recordings to somebody who physically listens to the recordings after to identify through their listening what animals are making sounds at this time of year. And these are listeners, professional listeners. That has a whole interesting aspect to itself because there in that case, there was the story being shared. And I haven't interviewed this guy yet, but how he identified that there was this uh one of these listeners identified that there was a declining population of bird species. But it actually turns out that he was losing his hearing at that frequency where that bird species occupied. Oh yeah. So there was um, you know, so they had to backtrack and hire another listener, and they found out that species of bird wasn't, you know, wasn't I haven't had that verified yet through the interview, but it was a story shared by a couple of people that worked down at Waterton parks. But I mean that's an interesting idea.

SPEAKER_05 31:51

It shows it inserts the researcher into the research, right? Um because a lot of this starts to, like you said earlier, sound a bit disembodied. Um even even those three kind of types of bioacoustics, you said evolutionary uh bioacoustics, then what was the second one called now?

SPEAKER_03 32:10

Field. I just called it field bioacoustics.

SPEAKER_05 32:13

And then the one with big data is computational bioacoustics. Computational bioacoustics.

SPEAKER_03 32:18

Because they go onto a computer and then analyzes it. Sorry.

SPEAKER_05 32:21

And that's where you've got kind of really big data and um you've kind of got machines that are figuring out what the they've got algorithms and they're figuring out what they're listening to. Um but in in a lot of these as an animal study scholar, I'm listening to this and I'm and I've got to say I'm starting to think like, where are the animals in here? You know, it seems to be quite focused on on sound and the collection of sound and the understanding of sound. And yes, it seems to be oriented towards conservation and preserving kind of environments, uh, which of course animals are implicated in there. But increasingly I'm like, okay, where where where are the animals and their experiences? How could sound help us to understand animals? And the closest you came to that, I think, was the orangutan enjoying a cookie, where you're saying, okay, um, but then that's also kind of reductionist to to some extent, where you're not really uh you're, I don't know, you're trying to kind of create a sound situation. And I know like lab science has been critiqued somewhat for that. So, how how could sound studies or bioacoustics possibly be used to better grapple with the experiences of animals of actually trying to understand whether they are conversing with one another or are having conversations or disagreements? Um, has this been done at all in bioacoustics or is that a different kind of field or something?

SPEAKER_03 33:43

Well, I mean, the um the experiences uh is what I was is what it was after. I mean, of course, with the sound recording is where it was coming from. But what I was interested in, how how does the sound recording change when those who are catching the sound are engaging with animals? And you know, and there is a there's a lot of labor put into the production of nature, you know, like in the field recordings, we had to stay very still uh in order for the sound of our coats not to be picked up by the microphone and thus ruin the natural experience. Or you have to isolate a lot of variables in order to get the orangutan to grunt for a cookie to hear its natural sound. Um, and I think the labor of the computational bioacoustics researchers, and and I mean, not to classify them because they're also evolutionary bioacoustics researchers or conservation biologists, um, the labor that they put in up north in northern Alberta uh was really fascinating. And the and to talk about, for instance, one of the most in-depth areas that I looked at was uh was research on night hawks. Um, and it's been a couple of years since I've done the since I've joined the field research on researchers for nighthawks, but the nighthawk population they were looking at was just north of the Alberta bitumen sands. Um, and so it's about from Edmonton, that's about a five, six-hour drive or so, uh, like quite far up north, and then through the bitumen sands, which is quite is quite a sight to see from from within. Um it the the massiveness of it isn't quite captured in the Anthropocene documentaries and videos that we have of it. Um, you know, being in it is really interesting. And then so you drive through the bitumen sands and you go up uh north on a dirt road using your garment and your, you know, so that you don't you don't get lost. There's no cell service up there or anything. Um, and they are uh they're they're stationed in um in a trailer, essentially, and they live there for a couple of months in a trailer. Uh, and uh they they go out every night because nighthawks are of course night animals, and every night they go hunting for nighthawks and uh night jars is also what they call them. And uh so we we go out and it, you know, the you had to have a really good truck to get through that sand because it just it sinks so deeply. And then when we got out to the field eventually, we had to be very quiet and start listening to them. And nighthawks don't have uh they're unusual for bioacoustics, I found. And what I found attractive about them was that they they don't make a beautiful sound or anything like that that you can mimic. They soar through the air, they dive, and as they dive, their wings make a whistling kind of sound. And then in between those dives, they're kind of like an explosion of air, like a little sonic boom. And they do it, I think, to disorient their uh the uh disorient their prey, right? And um, that's what they they kind of speculated anyway. But when they're when they're hunting them, they're or hunting them, sorry, they're trying to capture them, right? Um, they put up these uh giant mist nets, which were invented in the 1940s as like humane ways to capture the animal. And then in the mist nets, they put a little ghetto blaster, uh, which are like a little, they call them ghetto blasters, right? A little sound speaker, and they place that inside the mist net, and the sound speaker plays out, uh, does a playback methodology where it plays out the sound of another nighthawk. And so the sound of a nighthawk is just a short peint kind of sound. It's not nothing beautiful, it's nothing worth like listening to. It's it's not going to put you to sleep in your in your noise machine at night, right? Um, but it lets out this peint sound that the machine makes. And then they put decoys all through the mistnets, and what they find is that the nighthawk will dive into the mist net, and that's how they capture the nighthawk. And what they do with it after that is you go, they have like several researchers all talking on walkie-talkies, talking about, okay, I got seven nighthawks here, I got three nighthawks there, let's go collect them. And I went with them, and you're tromping through the sands, holding out these little canvas bags to put the nighthawks in these canvas bags and take them out, and they're very gentle with them, right? As far as I could tell. And they would go back to the truck, and that would be their station where they would start to analyze them and wire them up. And what they were doing was they were putting little GPS tracking devices on them, and they were putting little sound recording units on them, very tiny little microphones on the on the nighthawk. So they could hear it making it sound as it was migrating and moving through space and time, right? And uh and this was the experience of capturing, capturing the nighthawk. And there were these, um, what was interesting about it was that again, this isn't about the animals' experience, but it's about the researchers' experience with them, is through these this sort of sonic collecting, they were able to individually name the animals according to the sounds that they made. So not only could you classify, this is what one of them was telling me, not only can you classify an animal according to its species, according to its sound, right? But you could add an you could classify particular animals to their particular sounds. Like people are identified by their voice prints. Now, my voice print is unique, like your voice print is unique. There's no one voice print, right? And so they attributed all these uh musicians' names to the Nighthawks. There was Tom Waits, there was Gord Downey, there was uh there's uh and Gord Downey was very special, I think, because Gord Downey, I forget where Gord Downey was was found, maybe at the end of a rainbow or something like that. Like it was a really it was a it was a special one for the for the researchers themselves, but they developed these kind of intimate relationships with them based on their sounds and their sounding. I mean, all of this, of course, is to track the population of nighthawks, which are some of the oldest, I forget what they call it in evolutionary biology, but original design animals. Like the way the nighthawk looks today is probably what it looked like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. Um, and so there are these weird, it's like holding a toy from the night from the uh when when you're looking at them, it's like holding a toy from like the 1910s or something. Like there's something as antiquated looking about them, but they're just like there's such simple, perfect design. And that's a that's how they got into like I'm not sure about the ex, I think with that, that became kind of a methodological point of interest for myself, because when I I started doing this sort of second phase of bioacoustics research, which isn't critical bioacoustics, which would be like the study of the context under which nature is possible, you know, like uh, but more rather the ethical relationships with animals that people have through their sounds. So some of the research I'm doing right now is on uh on bear awareness and living with bears in Crozon's Pass, as well as uh ethics of relating to animals through their voices and throats. So there is no animal's voice in this kind of research. There's a sort of like zone of intertwined uh entanglement between different animals' voices, because an animal doesn't voice because it has the capacity to do to do so, it's primarily relational. And that's something that's kind of missing from the bioacoustics theoretical literature. And so what I'm trying to do is not discount it, of course not. There's so much gratitude I have for the people that showed me this world, but is to take their findings and use that as an opportunity for thinking about bioacoustics relationally instead. So how people live ethically with animals on a daily basis, like with bears, they live to avoid the bears in order to not have an encounter so that the bear becomes human, uh human savvy, you know. Um so all the different techniques that people have. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 41:22

And in my question earlier, it wasn't to kind of disavow the work of uh scientists going to these remote places. I mean, you there's a lot of work being done, I think, in a lot of remote places by people generating and gathering knowledge and ideas that that help research and that help conservation and that do a lot of great work. Um, but as I guess as someone who's interested in animals and the ways in which animals experience the world, as well as trying to think, like you've touched on here, kind of the ethical relations of being with animals. Uh, we we know, for example, that different animals have different kinds of voice annotations. You know, I think anyone who's had a dog or a cat in their home knows that individual's sound and also kind of is aware of what different sounds mean. Like when Linus barks, I know a particular bark for help, and I know a particular bark when he's seen something outside that's irritated him. Uh, and I think what what I'm what I'm sensing and what I think is really important about your work here is kind of asking these questions. They seem impossible to answer. How could we better understand how sound could help us to understand the worlds of animals, um, you know, in the umwelt, the and and I think some of this kind of theoretical work has been done in some animal studies circles. And it would be really fascinating to kind of see these worlds come together, the technological realm that's gathering all of this data and is saying, yes, we're seeing these ecological differences. But yeah, I just there's something exciting there. I don't think I know enough about sound to really know what it is yet. But I I just find that the animals are absent. And then you paint this picture of the nighthawks, and I really I could see it. I could imagine you guys walking through the sand, and I could see the labor of all of that. Uh, but what did you think about the the kind of the the ethics of doing that kind of research, of capturing an animal and of tying these devices to them? Do you think there are problems with doing that kind of work?

SPEAKER_03 43:24

I I think I do, and I think that the researchers did as well. I don't I don't think any of them go forward doing this thinking that this is a really awesome thing that they're doing for them. Because an animal in distress is obvious obviously in distress, right? But it's a um it's it's a question of accessing the umwelt, like with every new technological development, they try to they try to minimize their interference with the ecosystem. And that's why, like with the ARU, you know, that's why that's why the ARU is so important for them, because they it's minimal interference, right? Now, I don't I don't know how they're going to, you know, how they're going to pursue the questions that they have without without interfering in a sense. But like the very question of uh uh, you know, the very the very question of scientific abstraction is one whereby a human needs to interfere in order for it to be abstracted properly. I mean, but then there's a whole the kind of problem you're unpacking there is not a problem of whether they're they're good, ethically good to the animals in that concrete experience, but it it's it's an underlying question of the whole abstraction process that's involved in scientific research, right?

SPEAKER_05 44:33

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 44:34

Yeah, you know, and they they are aware of that. Like, like like they're and it's interesting you mentioned Umwelt because that term has crept into bioacoustics research, umwelt, uh, because it's of its overlapping interests with biosemiotics, right? Um, and so they're aware that these are these are worlds that you know that are limited, like the original, what was it, the original example, the umwelt, the most simple umwelt, the world of the tick, right? Is a very limited world that, you know, if you interfere, if you put the wrong elements into it, the umwelt changes, right? So, like when I think of umwelt, I like the um the book, the what would animals say if we ask them the right question. It's like uh is knowledge of an animal's world, it should make it seem more alien and challenging than our previously held assumptions, rather than helping us feel that we're more approximate to the generalizable truth about an animal species, right? In the the place that is kind of a repeated point of study, which is this little wildlife corridor in uh southern Alberta, just a couple hours north of uh the Montana border, um, the relationship with animals is um, you know, well, it's one where the people there consider themselves living on the animals' land, you know, like living with animals means living on the animals' land. So, you know, even though, you know, uh one of the great pastimes is fishing, and another pastime is hunting, and other pastimes are like, you know, local agriculture and things like that, it's um it's it's one, it's it's it's a it's a it's an interesting world. And that it just leads me to like one of my bioacoustics recordings that I have, which I'm actually uh I'm not I'm not allowed to share um right now is my my uh we had a long conversation with about this particular recording uh with my uh ethics committee in uh at my university. And uh and I was invited, like we had a we had neighbors there up there when we live when we lived there who were having a uh a pig slaughter party. And uh they had uh raised four pigs from from from piglets, and they were part of their family out in the yard. Uh they built a pen for them, and the my my kids used to go and play with the pigs. And uh we had a um uh I got a call one time saying, I'm wondering if you want to come and help us. Uh the dad called me and asked if I want wondering if I wanted to come and help with the pigs, because they're ready. And I said, Well, what are they ready for? And he said, Well, they're ready to slaughter. And um I asked if I could record it uh because I wasn't, I didn't want to go. Um, I didn't want to see this happening, but it was it was it offered some interesting insights, especially into the question of can an animal anticipate its own death? And what happened was I don't want to go through the details of the recording because my job in this situation was to hold back a pen of uh hold the door on the pen of the other pigs as they were awaiting their execution. And when the first pig was out and it happened, he used a 22-caliber shotgun to do this. Uh, the sound that the pig made was so distressing. To me, it was it was it was distressing. It was uh a change in the composition of how I was embodying the situation, whereby at one point I knew that what I was doing was holding these other pigs back in their pen while wanting to let them go, you know, mostly because of the kinds of the sounds and the movements of their bodies that they were that they were making. So one let out this horrifying kind of squealing sound as it passed on, as it passed away. And while I was holding the door for the pen, the other pigs inside the pen went entirely silent, right? And as this one pig was fading out, the other three pigs started coming up with this vivacious sort of force and started slamming their bodies against the door. And it was a it was a very grueling, real kind of moment. And the recording is you hear a lot of like scuffling and sounds, and it's a lot of people sounds yelling instructions at each other, but it's these pigs that are over top of one another that are, in my only conclusion, is anticipating that something bad is happening to one of them, and thus that something bad will happen to all of them. And the and so the you know, something that I I think I kind of learned from the bioacoustics researchers is that engaging with the sounds of the situation as as the situation is is happening, you know, um, is it's really important to kind of get into that moment into into um uh it's hard to talk about that. Um but to uh but to but to uh kind of like to hear within that, like what like what is an umwelt? An umwelt in that case is not a world of the animal, you know, where where you isolate all the natural variables or all the variables of humans in that case, like it's a it's a sound of trying to flee, of trying to deterritorialize, of trying to leave the situation through the voice. And what the voice does is, and like animals do this, right? Animals' voices will make the animal seem larger than it is, you know. Um, uh elk will do this, like they're they're their their voices sometimes are so massive, right, that it causes you to get out of their way. So again, the changes in the air pressure can cause bodies to move, like the like the starling memorations. Yeah. And that comes up with the ethical part where I'm trying to hold the door back. And it's this it was a very challenging, that was the most challenging bioacoustics recording that I'd done was the pig slaughter. I mean, I'm still trying to write about it. I still I still start and then I can't uh proceed.

SPEAKER_05 50:28

Well, I mean, yeah, it's a and of course a difficult situation for for the pigs, right? So they they they know what's coming, and um and and I think even my my my heartbeat kind of uh increases there because I I know that sound. I've I've watched enough videos to know that that sound is a sound of terror. And I don't think I need to speak pig to know that that kind of um like I just I I know that that's fear. And of course, there are a lot of psychologists and and and folks that might talk and say, well, what you think you know and what is are but um yeah, I think as you kind of spoke to kind of their embodied reaction there, they've been pushing against, kind of actively resisting what is happening, uh, I think speaks to that. And then I think what what you did there was really interesting is you've got this whole scenario, and thinking about it from a from a sound perspective now, um, you've got this whole scenario of these these pigs and the squealing and the sounds they're making to push up against and to get out, and you're holding the door, and there's people shouting instructions. If you were to remove those human sounds from that clip, it wouldn't make sense, right? It it wouldn't, you would lose the structure and the context of what is actually uh compelling these pigs to slaughter. What's what's what's happening? Um, if you were to be able to drop a microphone into a slaughterhouse, you would hear a lot of pigs and you would hear a lot of clanking, you'd hear, but the second you try and isolate pigs from the the sounds of the factory working, you lose the structure, you lose the thing that's going on. And and I do wonder to some extent about what you were talking about earlier with regards to field researchers also walking and having to stand still so that they don't make the sounds of their jacket. There is a similar kind of structural disavowal, I think, where where if you no longer hear the jacket walking through what's supposedly pristine nature, um, then you also kind of lose sight of the fact that there are humans in Patagonia jackets. I don't want to slight Patagonia, I love Patagonia, but you brought them up.

SPEAKER_02 52:36

But uh in in They'll sponsor your research too. They'll they'll give you free gear if you tell them that you use their gear when you do research, they'll send you free gear. Now everybody knows because these are animal studies people.

SPEAKER_05 52:45

But still there's something to be said about um also recording those sounds. And I and I wonder how something is is fundamentally lost when you also remove those sounds in terms of understanding the actual structure of the world and the ways in which I think inequality and power dynamics shape uh shape these spaces and these experiences, not only for humans but for for the animals involved too. How does the sound of a parker jacket or or of a gunshot influence them and their reactions to that would sonically perhaps tell us a great deal about their their worlds? Um I think it's it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 53:24

I mean you think during the anthropause, you know, like last year, the anthropause, there was a explosion of sound research because they said finally we don't have the noise of humans so that we can access the deep sounds of nature, right? And the deep sounds of nature is only, you know, we've only really, you know, like it's all the humans disappeared there for a little while. So we had this sort of utopia for the animals. But but there's something important about the pigs I just wanted to I wanted to mention actually. And that was one of the I was trying to look up some of my original notes for for the pig slaughter, and there's this, you know, like the mechanistic way that we think of animals' voices in bioacoustics research as you know ref, you know, as if the animal's body is this, you know, convergence of different evolutionary forces that comes to a point where the animal's sound is this uh merging of different evolutionary paths. Um the argument for an animal is that it's it's in a constant state of presence, right? And so it's it's it can't anticipate in the way that a human can, the old uh you can't tell a dog to sit next Tuesday, right? Kind of thing, right? But this moment was the pigs anticipating something happening, you know. Um, but that wasn't what was strange to me. What was strange was that we we have this sort of like this um these these conflicting points, right? One is that they're constantly present, but another is obviously they're anticipating something, which would say to me at that at that moment, at least with this small ethical farm, is that ethical farming can't exist in that situation. Because it because it doesn't matter how many years that the animal was living gloriously on that farm, in that moment of anticipating its own violent death, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, I'm not sure. But it's not important to come to the fact of that. But in that moment, I don't think it was thinking linearly if it has a constant presence. So if an animal has a constant presence and doesn't have that same kind of linear path that humans have in order to create self-consciousness, then that ethical farming doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that they had that and this was a lot that led to my own uh it brief flirtation with vegetarianism after that pig slaughter. But um it was because it was it was sharing something at that moment. It's like it didn't, it didn't matter that it was uh that that uh it it's life before that with a constens of presence. Because if it's in a constensated presence, its constant presence at that point was that it was certain that something bad was going to happen. Anyway, I think it only made sense at that point, it only made sense for the guilt of the farmer, you know.

SPEAKER_05 56:05

I think this is a really important conversation, and I hope for for for many uh you know folks listening or doing research with animals that it I think it continues a flotation with things like vegetarianism and veganism because I think it's it's a hard conversation to have, especially uh, and this is something that we haven't really brought up much in the show. As as a as a researcher, that's how do you navigate kind of these really difficult spaces, right, that are politically fraught, that you you can get a lot of um flack for speaking about in either direction, um, but at the same time kind of living with integrity with your own ethical standpoints and also taking into consideration the experiences of the animals involved. And um I mean, at least for me, I know when it comes to not not to go too far off bioacoustics here, but when when it comes to kind of the argument of you know, a good life is okay for a good death type thing. Uh, I'm not too sure I would accept that for any of my friends, you know, if if I had if if my friend Joe had a really good life, and I was like, well, he's had a good life, so let's kill him. The the logic just doesn't sway there for me. I think um, but that's a maybe that's a conversation for for another another time.

SPEAKER_03 57:18

But thank you so much for it was a lot, it was a logical, sorry, it was a logical issue that came up, and that was like yeah, it was it was a much more uh it was a much more like a visceral kind of feeling than it was, you know, reading about Glenn Gould's uh recording techniques. That's important.

SPEAKER_05 57:33

Introduce me. Your body reacts. Your your heart beats going up, you're sad, you're thinking about it afterwards. And I think that sitting with those um those kinds of feelings is is part of it. And and the fact that sound can do that in a way it does it differently when you're in the room, I think. So we've maybe become so desensitized. Uh, speaking a bit back to what you were talking about earlier with regards to leaning into sound, leaning into getting things closer to our ears. In some regards, I think we've become so um habituated to particular types of sound, to particular types of violences, but that there's something very different when you're standing in the room and you have that sound next to you and it's there. Um yeah, it's anyway. Um, thank you. Thank you for for sharing that. And I think these are really important conversations we have to have. Because maybe this is a realm for bioacoustics. I think bioacoustics is being used by uh animal agriculture. I know that uh there are massive pig farms in China now that are using face recognition software, so as in pig facial recognition software, because they've figured out how to tell when the pigs are content or not, and they're using this to figure out um, you know, a variety of things as to when to slaughter them and how. And in that is also some voice recognition software. So I don't know if that constitutes bioacoustics, but I think there is also an ethical thing to be thought of here in terms of how these technologies have lives, you know, beyond conservation, beyond the and and that's not something in in any any individual researcher can necessarily um you know be responsible for, but it is it's it's one of those thorny conversations, right?

SPEAKER_03 59:23

Fascinating. Nicely said, thank you.

unknown 59:26

Sorry.

SPEAKER_05 59:28

I'm going on my own, like my own tangent there. Um okay, so uh we're nearing the end now. Um so now's the opportunity to just kind of switch gears a little bit and uh and listen to your quote. So do you have one ready?

SPEAKER_03 59:42

I'm just gonna find it here. It was by Jean-Luc Nancy. Um, and I think it's one of these uh uh quotes that sort of stayed with me for some time. The quote was by Jean Luc Nancy from his little book called Listening from 2007. He writes a quote. uh what is a being that gives itself over to listening uh that is formed by listening or in listening that is listening with all of its being that was that was my quote from his his his book on listening.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:17

That's beautiful and I I think um what I like about that is there is no kind of the human is not necessarily centered there. They say being right so you could also imagine a dog listening or a a nighthawk listening or a pig listening you can imagine what it means for them to listen maybe as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:37

And it means um you know it's uh it it it's it's it's always uh it's something to come also back to Armarie Schaefer's observation about schizophrenia which I don't know if it has so much to do with splitting sound from its source but sort of splitting sound from the other senses right and uh and the the literature like the posthumanist literature or or wherever these you know the deconstructionists sit and where they're sitting today you know listening is uh that sort of idea of straining towards an understanding you know and if you take listening like from you know etymologically at least it shares more in common with the idea of an entendre like in in the French which is to attend to you know which is it which isn't an audiocentric definition of listening right it's it's the ways in which different bodies come together in shared spaces and how they push each other out of those spaces or include one another in those spaces. So there's lots of different kinds of sense in that there's senses data uh there's senses world making like with umbelt right um there's all kinds of different psychological stimuli that are connected through the amplitude of vibrations and all kinds of senses and more senses than sense. And so like part of my part of my research program and I'm I'm sitting in the tail end of the first phase of a Canada research chair right now is to take the observations that I've learned about isolating sound and trying to use that again as a methodological sort of as a methodological area to understand how people, you know, and animals and technology strain towards a mutual understanding of one another. And um the the the straining towards understanding is always sort of like capturing a concrete experience right as opposed to an abstraction. Listening is also a practice it's an ethical practice which Jean Lev Nancy is saying in this book anyway is that it's quite anti-philosophical because listening isn't a rendering abstract of an object like the more you look at an object the more you understand what is beyond the qualities of the object the more towards its substance right listening is a continuous concrete concrete experience right you can't you can't listen without a concrete experience and and the more that you listen the more the more grounded you are the more perspectival you are. And so I think it's like he's saying that listening is is impossible it's impossible to be philosophic when one is listening. So it's an odd philosophy that's non-philosophy right and I I think this this sort of like expanding empirical world of listening with and through animals is to understand that the animal is not making a sound and I am making a sound as we're all sounding together and we're sounding apart and we're sounding together and much of the sound is just this continuous movement or this continuous flow. Like there's a lot of the the research being done right now as to how sound connects us with this sort of Heraclitus kind of sense of flow like the river is always changing right but um that's that's uh that that's sort of where I'm going with it. And that that quote is always sort of stuck with me of Jean Luc Nancy all throughout these different recording sounding processes.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:47

It was poetic listening to you there. That was really quite beautiful. And and I think you're right there is an attentiveness to to listening because I think everyone's had a conversation with someone where they know that that person's itching to speak next and you can tell that they're not necessarily listening. And I think that maybe that's what it kind of means to not philosophize while listening. But then there's a moment for speaking as well and how does how do listening and speaking coexist uh I really yeah I really love kind of what you're talking about just sounding together and and also kind of the different experiences of sound that sound is not just something through our ears it's something it's the vibrations we feel it's it's how space moves between bodies it's all of those those wonderful things. And it's also smell and and and other senses too. So you said you're near the the tail end of a Canada research chain now and you're working on this project.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:42

Is there anything else that you're currently working on that you'd like listeners to be aware of oh yeah well um and just to comment on that too I think that's really nice a mutual mutual sleep deprivation makes for a mutual poetic because you're probably just kind of you know teetering on the horizon of sleep which is where the poetry comes from right so maybe that's maybe that's what does it too but um well right now I'm trying to write this book uh so I'm trying to look at the pig slaughter and I'm trying to look at bear attacks and I'm also looking at euthanasia um and the uh the point of you know like like there's an there's a a a large amount of I've been talking to people who work at veterinarian offices and things like that and they say that there's a there is an enormous amount of their clientele who do not stay for their pet's death right um and so I'm trying to look at a way of capturing a bioacoustics recording of uh of helping a pet pass on. That came with my experience of losing my dog this year. But uh it's it's the voice in that moment. It's it's it's it's a it's a hard situation to be in where you have your life that you know a companion that you lose and then they go into an anonymous room and they don't know where they are and their family's not around and the sounds around them are just clanging and strange amplify like the people try to make it good for them. But what they need is they need their master's voice as they pass on. You know and uh that maybe that brings us back to a little nippering that's one thing I'm looking at. So these different chapters I'm trying to write for this book that I've been trying to write for about four years. I've been trying to look at these are very difficult situations to look at so you know you dive in a little bit and I come out and two months goes by I'm like okay I think I'm ready to look at that again. And and that's one thing I've been struggling to work with. I think that'll take another five years to write. But the other thing I'm looking at but I do have I do have to do a yearly report so I have to have publications out there and stuff. But uh the second phase of the Canada Research chair that I'm working on right now is moving into the area of uh solitude and voice composition. And so I'm I'm trying to um construct this sort of elaborate global composition of people's voices speaking about their experiences with solitude since COVID-19. And it's gonna it's it's extending again it's visiting uh Glenn Gould's radio compositions but I'm trying to I'm trying to create a uh web platform where uh you can type in search terms and uh any number of voices come up that can be played simultaneously which create this sort of vocal composition which speaks more to the affected dimension and this sort of like creation of community around voices in solitude and it's it's supposed to sort of update us on that stuff. And so it's going to touch on a lot of different things like um you know there COVID is one of those paradigm shifts right so uh the way that people related to their pets during COVID, you know this was this was very good time for dogs for some some for a lot of dogs. But people had more connections with their pets and their and their homes and things like that. So it's it's trying to get people's testimony about their experiences with solitude. And that's that's the big project that we're just sort of doing. We're starting our data collection now.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:49

Interesting it would be with the research it would be fascinating to have that database kind of right next to database of all the sound recordings of animals recorded at the same time and kind of how how ideas of of solitude and freedom or solitude and because those were kind of parallel narratives that happened at exactly the same time kind of ideas of isolation being caught up inside while at the same time there were just stories proliferating about animals running through cities of of making noise in ways they'd never made noise before and there's an interesting um like who's in isolation when right do other animals feel like they're in lockdown at every other time of year. Anyway so I'm um just riffing off you there.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:34

It's it's a fascinating it just opens to a new new world.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:37

So that's the yeah that's the next that's the next big project I love how you look at these really hard spaces and you think about them uh related to sound because you when you're in these the thick of difficult situations you don't think about how important sound is to you in that moment how how sensitive you are to it how how raw it can feel and how important it can be when you when you feel hard. So thank you thank you so much for for these really great insights uh if folks want to get in touch with you to learn more about your work or to connect with you what's the best way to do so oh uh I didn't think of that I'm I'm on Twitter way too much so I have a skim messages through there I see who's following me and stuff I don't have a big following or anything but I just that's that's you will after this podcast episode thank you and um and then just email uh you you'll find my name Mickey Valley is uh it's it's pretty googlable and I'm I'm all over the first page I'll make sure I include details in the the show notes too but I I think that's that's it for now uh thank you so much for for teaching us a bit more about bioacoustics and also kind of opening up our minds a bit to the value and the significance of sound and thinking about animals' lives. Thank you that was a tremendous conversation and a wonderful opportunity thank you welcome back to the Animal Highlight everyone uh so Hannah what are we talking about this time?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:06

Today we're gonna talk about the injury lemurs um I know a bit random we didn't talk about them in today's episode but the last two episodes we talked about um European and American species so I thought it'd be fun to go a little bit further afield um and I didn't know anything about lemurs beforehand so I learned some fun things I'm gonna share with you all today. Well I like whenever I think of lemurs I think of Madagascar right of course I mean maybe maybe it's my generation but I like to move it move it that's literally what was his name I forget what was the name of the um was it Maurice I think it was Maurice maybe Maurice yeah I think so yeah that's literally that's that's what I know about lemurs so um I'm looking forward to what you have to say well um Injulemurs are a critically endangered species of lima which are found only in Madagascar um and Madagascar is home to huge numbers of endemic lemurs and in fact Madagascar is pretty much the only place that you might find a wild lemur um save for some tiny neighboring islands so hence their uh foregrounding in the Madagascar film series. And the Injury Lima is the largest of the lemurs um it's about 60 to 70 centimetres long or about the size of a small child. They're a striking black and white they have long arms and legs that you might expect from a lima um and they almost seem to fly they travel from tree to tree and because they have these really long arms and legs they can really propel themselves. And they look a bit like dogs or teddy bears but they're actually primates and related to humans. So lemurs all Indry lemas also have incredibly cool songs so that's what I'm going to talk about today. They sound a bit like the shriek of a balloon quickly releasing air. Others say it sounds like the cross between a humpback whale and a crying baby. Oh and while I was reading all these descriptions I was thinking about um something that you and Mickey talked about about how um before the advent of recording technologies the ways in which people would describe bird song um and I was thinking that you know even though we can record them that descriptive quality hasn't gone away there are still times you have to describe an animal sound. But in these descriptions they're kind of sounds like ones so like a humback whale or like a crying baby rather than phonetic. But here's my phonetic attempt to describe the injury song it's sort of a it's an ooh ah ooh that's how I describe it. That doesn't do it justice. It's a lot more dramatic I don't know if we're gonna play the sound if I play it from from can you hear that you can kind of get that like balloon escaping sound.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:26

Yeah like when you when you hold the top of the balloon kind of open a little right and you're like limping up really slowly yeah for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:35

They have laryn laryngeal air sacs which make that sound so I think I don't know that much about laryngeal air sacs but I imagine the balloon sound kind of comes from that inflating and deflating. Wow um but yeah very striking sounds um and what's interesting especially about them is they are the only kind of lemur that can sing. So yes that's counted as a song and what's funny about that is that every time you read about the Injury Lima song the word song is kind of in scare quotes because people are kind of struggle to call that a song but it is technically a song. Other lemurs do make sounds like barks and hisses but only the injury has a song and they're actually one of the planet's large loudest mammals the sounds can be heard up to 1.2 miles away. They were described so the the song pattern of the injury lima was described by a bioacoustics researcher in 1986 and he said that the each song is introduced by this communal roar of the injury group for a few seconds and then select adults will begin singing together in carefully synchronized manners. There are several functions to these songs which include finding sexual partners and establishing territoriality and group identity but how injury lemurs came into my purview was a recent article in the New York Times which described some research from researchers in Madagascar and the University of Turin who actually found that lemurs have rhythm. So this is really cool so the Madagascar film uh what's the word I'm looking for they they they uh envisioned that this would come you know they knew but um they uh this is actually the first time that a mammal other than humans have been found to have rhythm so this is like a huge kind of discovery um so what the researchers did is they recorded sounds from about 30 animals for 12 years. So this is some bioacoustic research in the flesh um and they searched these songs for rhythmic features that are found in human music. So they found examples of the one one rhythm and a one-two rhythm um which the lead researcher said are the same uh rhythms that can be found in the first verse of we will rock you if that helps anyone think about that rhythm structure um we will rock you too rock you okay so that would be the one two I think but yeah so so the researchers suggest that that lemurs actually do have a sense of this beat this isn't just us kind of searching for this rhythm in um in their structure um and they think that it might be like through learning more about this they might find why humans are able to find rhythm as well um but yes this is cool because musical cognition is one of those things that kind of feeds human exceptionalism like we think we're the only ones who can make music um but seeing how other mammals are capable of it too um might kind of help us appreciate them a bit more and I don't know maybe restore some urgency to halting uh the injury lemurs extinction uh because it is quite urgent.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:01

The species is critically endangered due to agricultural habitat loss as well as um illegal hunting um but yes very cool suave singing rhythmic lemurs for you today that's terribly sad and um it keeps it makes me think a little bit about uh in season two when we spoke about animal culture right like music and dance there there are cultural elements there are things that uh we attribute to culture so these lemurs have a particular way of singing and dancing which is really quite something thank you so much for for teaching us a bit about lemurs and I hope that everybody has I like to move it stuck in their heads right now but that's it for this uh this episode's animal highlight thank you so much a huge thank you to Mickey Valley for being a wonderful guest to Hannah Hunter for doing the animal highlight to Jeremy John for the logo Gordon Clark for the bad music thank you as always to Animals in Philosophy Politics Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast and to the Sonic Arts Studio and SAP Lab for sponsoring this season. You can also support the show dear listener if you want to please leave a review. These reviews go a long way in terms of helping the podcast and if you feel like giving a bit you're also welcome to do that. You can find us on Patreon on Buy Me a Coffee and we have a tip jar on good pods. So there's many ways if you'd like to support the podcast. But there's no pressure to do that either I'm just happy to have you here and listening with me and for now the season's going well so yay anyway time for me to say goodbye.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:34

I hope you enjoyed the show this is the Animal Turn with me Claudia Hurzenfelder for more great iRule podcasts visit irulpod.com that's ir o arp dot com hook