Group items tagged

"Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being - to the inevitability of others, human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies. Advertisement "

"Why do birds sing? Could we call what they sing and how they sing music? Of all nonhuman animals, birds teach us to check anthropocentrism in music, or, as David Rothenberg puts it in Why Birds Sing (2005), birds check "the conceit that humanity is needed to find beauty in the natural world." But how do they learn songs? Do they invent and compose them or "parrot" what they hear? Join us for a discussion between animal behavioral psychologist Professor Ofer Tchernichovski (Hunter College) and distinguished professor of philosophy and music, composer and clarinetist, Professor David Rothenberg (NJIT). Visit our site for more event information: "

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"For the first time, researchers have found a nonhuman animal that seems to have a sense of the beat."

"Ed Yong's book urges readers to break outside their "sensory bubble" to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings."

"Living under the paving stones, consuming our refuse, and incubating our diseases, the city rat is a ubiquitous part of global, urban capitalism. The revulsion rats inspire actually speaks of our closeness to them-rattus norvegicus burrows through the supposed human / nature divide. And just as we continually negotiate our place in a dynamic city, so have rats developed elaborate social codes intertwined with urban architecture and geography. We are not usually privy to the vocal address of one rat to another, however, as they primarily speak above the (20khz) threshold of human hearing. For Urban Intonation, I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of NYC with an ultrasonic microphone. I then resampled and pitch-shifted the result into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system, repositioning rat noise in public space as something that is recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech. "

"Translocality seeks to unite human and nonhuman communities in the Bay Area socially, physically, and sonically as a living network of sentient beings. This open call invites applicants to propose soundscapes to activate sound art in Bay Area locations to: Recalibrate our sensitivity to living realities existing beyond the individual self Connect us to the complex weaving of stories, histories, and ecologies of place Investigate vestiges of memory materialized through objects, land, and architecture Imagine future possibilities for collective transformation in the SF Bay Area"

"In Krause's world, everything is seen through the lens of sound. He even maps by ear. In one fascinating passage, he surveys a Costa Rican jungle, dispensing with the "100-meter square grids," which anyway "nonhuman animals don't understand." He ends up with "amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.""