Why Listen with Animals? Straining toward an Environmental Resonance

Abstract

This article summons John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?”, reframing its analysis on human–animal relations under Modernity (with its emphasis on the gaze at a distance) through the entangled reflexivities of listening together with more-than-humans others. If for Berger, animals “in zoos ... constitute[d] the living monument to their own disappearance,” field recording helped enshrine their extinction while archiving their voices. Here, I intend to stress the significance of more-than-human vibrations and sounds as transformative zones of contact, especially in our increasingly impoverished urban biomes. And by arguing for an expansion of vibrational attention to such social-environmental contexts, re-assess listening as an eco-sensible methodology that understands both humans, more-than-humans and technology as part of integrated ecologies.

Keywords

• Technology arts and ethics
• Field recording
• Acoustic ecology
• Listening