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April 15, 2021. Recording of American Toads, taken at 5 PM on 4/13/21

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April 15, 2021. Recording of American Toads, taken at 5 PM on 4/13/21

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Below is a recording of some American Toads in the small pond by the Hampshire College Farm. I originally assumed that they were extra mellow spring peepers and thought that maybe, since it was early in the evening, the peepers were calling quietly; I didn't know anything about other anuran sounds. Listening to this recording again now, after reading about their sounds on the Music of Nature site that we looked at, I think that I am hearing the male toads' advertisement calls. I hear them most notably in the beginning, but if they are those calls, they last throughout the recording, which would make sense considering the way that these toads overlay their calls with one another and the average length of those calls (five to thirty seconds according to the Music of Nature description). At about 0:25, I hear some small chirping sounds amid the cacophony of vibrational calls. I wonder if this might be an instance of the "release chirps" that the Music of Nature website described, the sound that "males and unreceptive females give" when mounted. Interesting, and very calming for me to listen to.
There are also three different birds whose calls made it into this clip whose species I can identify: one is a mourning dove, the second is a crow, and the third is a red-winged blackbird. I feel excited about the progress that I have made in identifying species throughout this class- a skill that I have developed solely by intentionally listening and paying attention to the creatures around me. I would love to be able to identify the other birds whose calls can be heard in the background of this clip- I will continue to listen and watch for them!

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I was so thrilled to see this bird and make the connection between the species and the call that I had been hearing on my walks. I heard this bird on a walk by the Hampshire Farm, and the red-winged blackbird was perched in the brush by a small pond. It was at about 5 PM today. This audio is particularly special to me because when I went to edit it, I noticed the voices of small children in the background - a learning group shouting and playing in the forest beyond the field I stood in. I decided to leave them in and embrace the cacophony. In the recording, another red-winged blackbird begins calling back to the first, more audible one, and I thought that the trilling sound and pitch of the birds’ differing calls was beautiful and intriguing. What might they have been communicating? Like the children’s voices dissolving into chaos in the background, I can appreciate the harmonic notes in their calls and the understanding that they are telling each other something important, but I cannot make out the meaning in their messages. At the moment I am in, that makes my experience of listening all the more beautiful to me.

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April 11, 2021. Response to Sayigh and Janik, Individual Signatures 2019, Gordon, et. al, Acoustic Enrichment 2019, and Sonic Sea viewing. 

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April 11, 2021. Response to Sayigh and Janik, Individual Signatures 2019, Gordon, et. al, Acoustic Enrichment 2019, and Sonic Sea viewing. 

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I found the Sayigh and Janik article immersive and fascinating. While reading, I thought a lot about the tendency that many humans have to anthropomorphize animals, because I think that dolphins are often targets of this way of thinking. I myself fall into this habit frequently, and I wanted to be mindful of that in approaching this topic.
With this in mind, I want to bring up, in regards to dolphin "vocalizations," a question that was initially posed in regards to human communities.
In our recent reading, "Deaf Music: Embodying Language and Rhythm," a quote from David Levitin stuck out to me, and I kept coming back to it. Levitin is quoted as questioning the role of the musical brain "in shaping human nature and human culture in the past fifty thousand years." This is followed by a broader, perhaps more philosophically-toned question: "How did all this music make us who we are?" Levitins's words, framed by Summer Loeffler's chapter, of course, are specifically referring to music and to people: people in Deaf/deaf communities of music-makers and appreciators. I was fascinated by this question, though, as a potential doorway to asking about the lives and social structures of other creatures with other experiences of sound. If I reimagine what "music" could mean in the context of that question- expanding the definition to include dolphin signature whistles, for example- I am led to wonder how the experience of whistling and communication amongst dolphins has changed their groups' abilities to do different things both in the wild and in captivity.
I was intrigued by the passage in Sayigh and Janik's paper that discussed the ways in which dolphins vocalize when they are in captivity versus when they are together.
Intuitively, it was easy for me to imagine why dolphins would vocalize less when they were in sight of each other. I imagine that they are likely able to communicate in other ways. What about body language? (Though it strikes me, also, that pehaps dolphins don't "communicate" in the same ways that I might imagine communication as a human.) This led me to wonder in what other ways dolphins might communicate within their groups and in response to dolphins outside of their pods- and how the sounds that they make might interplay with their other methods of communication. Do the sounds that they make work to emphasize body language, or are their "vocalizations" sonic embodiments of separate messages?
I wonder about the meaning and necessity of different modes of dolphin communication, what messages the dolphins recorded in captivity might have been trying to convey. To whom were they whistling? Are the dolphins recorded in captivity whistling in an attempt to make contact with their group? And as to the theories posed in this paper that dolphins' signature whistles are "good long-term indicators of identity," I have been wondering about what the identification of individual dolphins within the group by their sounds might mean for the group dynamics of different pods of bottleneck dolphins, as they are stated to "function in... maintaining group cohesion." Again, Levitin's question emerges for me: how does all this sound make these creatures who they are?

I also found the Gordon, et. al. paper incredibly interesting. I was struck by the reason for the ecosystem change (the degradation of 60% of all live coral on Lizard Island by hot ocean waters "bleaching" of reefs) as well as by the creativity of the authors' proposed potential solution. I was curious about what the different kinds of fishes' experience might have been of the sounds being played by the underwater loudspeakers. I understand that many fish were drawn closer to the reefs and towards settling within the coral when the healthy reef sounds were played at night, depending upon their trophic grouings, but I am so curious about the deeper experiences of these species. How does sound move through their bodies; how do the different species percieve and detect sound? Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this article and it has led me to wonder lots about the sensory lives of aquatic creatures in their search for places and resources that will allow them to thrive. A final question: are coral reefs themselves affected by sound?

After watching "Sonic Sea," I think that my most compelling question is simple: Where are we in our noise pollution right now? If the noise pollution from cargo shipping, along with navy sonar practices, has been a prominently destructive force against whales and other cetaceans in the oceans, how has that changed or remained a significant threat in the six years since the documentary was produced? Ever since reading about the impact of traffic noise pollution on white-throated sparrows in the Bay area, and the way in which that population has been slightly yet significantly relieved from that harm during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been thinking about what the impacts of COVID-19 on other species might be. That question, of course, is considering the ways in which human behaviors have changed in response to and throughout the duration of the pandemic. For sparrows whose habitats and abilities to communicate have been negatively impacted by the incessant sounds of traffic and other land and air travel for years, the slowing and halting of human movement across these spaces during this time is a positive change. But I wondered about what that shift in human activity towards the indoors might mean for other creatures. When many populations of people remained largely indoors for months on end, what did we do? Many of the people that I know turned to online shopping, especially as in-person shopping became less and less possible, safe, or easy. (Anecdotal evidence, yes- but it led me to ask larger questions of our larger populations!) While these folks themselves became quiet, only moving about inside of their homes, they busied themselves by browsing and ordering more international merchandise than ever before. So I wondered, watching Sonic Sea, if the human noise pollution that we read about a few weeks ago had not, in fact, diminished, but perhaps gone underwater, towards another species and through a different generative medium?
As I researched a bit about this online, I found that the answers- and questions- surrounding this topic were more complicated than I'd initially imagined. However, I found some evidence of increased oceanic cargo movement that is directly correlated to the documented rise in online consumerism during the pandemic. This Washington Post article, published this past January, 2021, stated that "inbound cargo volumes in December were more than 23 percent higher than one year earlier." (The link to this article is attached at the bottom of this post.) Shipping costs have risen sharply in response to both the increase in demand of nonessential goods, but also as a result of lower numbers of able workers at ports due to the virus's impact on human mobility. Many orders have been backed up and unable to cross the ocean. (I will include a few more of the articles that I looked at while thinking about this at the bottom of this post.) I think that there is an interesting question here. If rates of cargo shipping orders rise without shipping industries having the immediate ability to carry out streamlined orders (orders that were causing noise pollutant harm in the first place), will they compensate for delays by upping shipments in bursts? If so, how might that impact our oceanic mammals? Hypothetically speaking, what happens when the noise pollution in the ocean goes relatively quiet? Do animals begin to readjust? In Sonic Sea, I learned that the healing from the kind of noise pollution that cargo and navy ships produce is not as simple as it seems, as animals can remain stranded, discombobulated, separated from their groups. But if they are met with enough space and time to begin a healing process, what would happen when shipping industries figure out the blockages, begin again to carry out deliveries in an economy more demanding than ever before? Creating quieter ships, as I learned while watching Sonic Sea, can be a key tactic towards the creation of more efficient ships. But I am thinking about the ways in which humans created ships for the purpose of industry in the first place: with the intention of working faster, harder, and with a sense of efficiency that did not consider the well-being of non-human life. I know that we are in a time now where the long-term value of working sustainably is widely understood, but I wonder how and if this value is put into practice by cargo shipping industries who are facing the complex demands and barriers of the global pandemic. It seems to me that when a capitalist economy is in peril, its industries push ahead with little thought to anything but money. Creatures like ocean cetaceans seem to be the victims of this dynamic, and I am incredibly curious to learn what this moment might mean for them and their futures.

Here are links to some of the articles that I looked at:
"Pandemic aftershocks overwhelm global supply lines":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/24/pandemic-shipping-economy/

"Shipping markets in turmoil: An analysis of the Covid-19 outbreak and its implications":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7381896/#fn0025

"Shipping industry responding to the COVID-19":
https://www.pwc.com/gr/en/industries/shipping-covid-19.html

"COVID-19 cuts global maritime trade, transforms industry":

https://unctad.org/news/covid-19-cuts-global-maritime-trade-transforms-industry

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April 5, 2021. Recording from time spent nannying

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April 5, 2021. Recording from time spent nannying

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I made this recording when I was working as a live-in nanny in British Colombia. This is an excerpt from a longer recording, and I made it while reading to the little ones that I was taking care of on the couch. I don't want to provide too much context in this annotation, because I want anyone who listens to this to use their imagination. I will say, though, that I think that this short clip is an simple example of the ways in which different sounds can impact children's stress levels and their abilities to relax and play. Once the child who was scared by the loud sound was given a moment to listen to our now-quiet surroundings, she came back into a calmer state in which she could sing, play, and listen to others. Recently, I have loved listening to the recordings I've made of my interactions with these little ones in new ways, noticing how the tension in these clips often ebbs and flows in accordance with the noisiness of our surroundings. I feel that I am almost equally as sensitive to noisiness as small children can be, and when the children that I'm taking care of articulate the ways in which they are affected, I'm better able to focus in on my own reactions and emotional responses to sounds.

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Reading nursery rhymes, R. scared by loud noise

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April 5, 2021. Sound recordings from Hampshire!

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April 5, 2021. Sound recordings from Hampshire!

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I have missed a couple of weeks of sound recording updates, although I have been making recordings almost every day. I put together a few of these sound recordings from the past two weeks together in Audacity: here they are.
In the first recording, I mixed some windchimes and bird song that I heard while on a walk. This fades into a recording that I took of my friends' hands, tapping and rubbing a smooth, hollow log, transitioning from the sounds of a human-made instrument, the windchimes, to the sounds of a naturally occurring instrument, the hollow wood. From here, I couldn't help but include a recording that I was super excited to make last week: it's the call of a female fox, crying out beneath my window in the middle of the night! The recording has a white-noise-like background hum, but I didn't edit it out because the "noise reduction" tool in Audacity also made the fox's call less audible when I tried. I also like the fuzziness of the background noise, in a way: it is evident that our setting is very very quiet, locating the recording at night, when few cars can be heard.
I read that female foxes vocalizing in the night around this time are likely signaling to potential mates. I also read that this call may be answered by a "hup-hup-hup" vocalization from a male fox, although I have yet to hear that response when listening for foxes at night. I wonder what particular species the fox I heard was. I know that both red and gray foxes are abundant in Massachusetts, and I wonder in what ways their vocalizations might differ, and what qualities their vocalizations and habits might share.

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March 24, 2021. Response to "Casey et. al, 2017 Noise Exposure" paper.

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March 24, 2021. Response to "Casey et. al, 2017 Noise Exposure" paper.

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I found this paper interesting. Having little to no prior experience looking at scientific graphs, I took extra time to consider the work in this paper, and while I still find it to be a challenging read, there are a few trends that I can identify.

The first trend that I noticed was an association between lower noise levels and higher populations of Native American people (referred to as American Indians in this paper). I wonder what reasons there might be for that. I also wondered if there are negative implications to quietude in some places. In some ways, could it be quite negative for an area to have less car traffic and less accessible transportation? These are both generators of noise, yet also important parts of many peoples' daily working lives. I would like to discuss this in class.

The second trend that I saw was that anthropogenic noise levels were consistently about 2 decibels louder among urban block groups of (majority) Black residents than among urban block groups of (majority) white residents. (I noted this from Table 1, p. 5 of the reading.)

The third trend that I saw was that quietude tended to be a major indicator of affluence (and generally higher socio-economic status). I thought this was interesting. I also noted the passages in the paper that discussed the ways in which people with power who live in quieter area have the ability to dictate decisions that would affect the noise levels in their areas, and the way that that often means sending noise to other, less affluent areas. I thought that the correlation between the presence of influential regulatory offices and quietude, versus weaker citywide regulations on things like construction work and noisier nights, was also quite interesting.

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I took this recording of water that was dripping and gurgling on a rainy day on campus. Pools of water had formed in the grass near the Kern building, and these little puddles were great little reservoirs of sound-generation. I crouched down to listen to water dripping from nearby pipes and passing through stalks of deadened grass. I edited this file in Audacity to clear up some of the background hum of the nearby building, and I find the sound of water, its bustling, soft yet rapid "plink, plank, plunk" incantation, to be soothing. To me, having edited out the noisy background hum a bit, the higher notes that I can hear in this file sound to me a bit like music. There is a slight whistling sound that I pick up, fluttering around the edges of those higher tones. It reminds me of the sound of flutes; that light, sweet sound of air passing through something thin. I wonder if any of that effect might have something to do with the soft bed of grass that the water was moving through and falling upon.

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March 19, 2021. Thoughts on Sharmi Basu: Decolonizing Sound

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March 19, 2021. Thoughts on Sharmi Basu: Decolonizing Sound

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After taking a look at Monday's assigned reading, I wanted to put this quote from Sharmi Basu up here, because it feels really important:
"when we, who are women,
queers, trans people, and people of color,
talk of creative music, we do not
unassumingly refer to making music outside
of the conventional or classical or popular
forms of music; we mean we are creating
new worlds for our bodies to exist in"

Given what I have learned about the way that sound profoundly affects each organism on Earth, this idea really resonates with me. I think about dancing, and the way that our bodies respond to sound means that for some of us, listening to different sounds can literally lift us upward. Listening can be a transcendental experience even without an explicitly political context, and I appreciated the way that this article helped me to expand my imagination of what listening can be and what paths people might be able to create through sound art.

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March 16, 2020. Ice music on Mt. Sugarloaf during the early melt, two weeks ago.

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March 16, 2020. Ice music on Mt. Sugarloaf during the early melt, two weeks ago.

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This is an Audacity edit that I made of two recordings of water dripping from icicles and ice structures, found by the top of Mt. Sugarloaf in South Deerfield, MA. This water was making a subtle sound as I made my way down the mountain, and I didn't notice it at first above the sound of my boots in the snow. I stopped for a moment to listen to the sounds of the forest, and the ice sounded at first to me like a faint tinkling, a few paces away. I made an initial recording of it in one spot, where large cliffs of ice hung over rocks on the side of the mountain, and it sounded fairly asynchronous. You can hear that first recording in the first 22 seconds of this clip. Then I moved to another spot a little further down the mountain where more water was dripping off of the ice that had formed on the mountain side, and this time I was struck by how much the dripping water sounded like music. It has a distinct rhythm and beat! From 0:23 on, that is the sound you will hear in this clip. Enjoy!

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March 14, 2021. Response to Ted Levin reading: Where Rivers and Mountains Sing.

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March 14, 2021. Response to Ted Levin reading: Where Rivers and Mountains Sing.

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In this reading, I couldn't stop thinking about the human desire to represent our environments through art-making. I think that cultural arts that involve the body, such as dance, song, and sound, are some of the most potent keepers of memory both cultural and personal, and some of the most resonant with empathetic viewers.

I have found myself thinking a lot about the viewer, or the listener's, place and responsibility in the taking in of different forms of art. Poetry, for example, asks readers to invoke their respective imaginations, to conjure vivid and personalized imagery from often-simple words on a page. Dance performances do not require, but are made incredibly potent by, an invocation of viewers' sensory imaginations. If I, in the audience, watch the dancers move their bodies, my own body will begin to imagine what that movement would feel like. With the steppe kargyraa that we listened to, another kind of imagination entirely is required of me if I am to fully appreciate the sounds coming through my headphones: I need to remember who I am in the context of my listening, who my environment and upbringing, sound knowledge and previous listening practices have shaped me into.

Valentina Süzükei, ethnographer from Tuva, is quoted in "Where Rivers and Mountains Sing," as saying that listener experience is key to understanding meanings of and distinguishing differences between steppe and taiga kargyraa. "If you haven't lived in a particular locale, you won't be able to make the association between sound and place. Listeners themselves make the music from what's performed." And so my imagination is required in my approaching this reading: I imagine what it might be like to sit, like the throat-singer Grigori Mongush, on a hill bristling with wind, where he grew up, and this imagining allows me to enter the soundscape sketches in a more relective way, and then my imagination returns me to my own home soundscapes, where I wonder what I might have whistled, if I had learned to map my landscapes with my voice.

I enjoyed taking in the readings and listenings for this week very much. I'm going to continue to think about them (and maybe re-read them) and to think about the complexities that they're bringing up for me: questions of who I am as a listener, how I might map and re-imagine my own familiar landscapes through sound, and what my responsibilities are when I am listening, particularly to people of different cultural backgrounds than my own.

I am struck by the kind of voice work that we're reading about, and I'm thinking of how it might capture or render a landscape for a speaker/singer after the person has left that place: how the sound, in a person's mouth, might work to conjure and hold a memory, as well as an imagination, of the contours of a person's homeland or a place of significance, and all that is beloved within it.

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March 11, 2021. Compilation of tufted titmouse calls, and my thoughts on noise pollutants on campus.

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March 11, 2021. Compilation of tufted titmouse calls, and my thoughts on noise pollutants on campus.

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This is a compilation of tufted titmouse calls- all from the same two birds. I was sitting on a rock and reading yesterday in the bright sun when I heard the first bird calling in the trees behind me. I thought it might be a tufted titmouse, and I followed the sound. (Some of these recordings were taken while I walked as quietly as I could towards the bird calls, so while I have tried to edit out most of the loudest footsteps, there is some audible crunching in the beginning.) I was so happy when I saw that it was in fact a tufted titmouse! This is one of the first times that I've correctly identified a bird whose call I didn't quite know yet. I listened to this titmouse and later, another titmouse, call for about 15 minutes.

At 1:21, the titmouse goes quiet for a moment and there is a small peeping sound. Listen closely for it; I'm not sure what it is. At first listen, I thought it sounded like a baby bird, but of course it is only early March and too cold for babies yet! Could it be another sound that the titmouse is making? Or perhaps it is a different forest sound from the bird calls altogether.

At 1:53, you can hear that another titmouse has begun to call back to the first titmouse that I had been recording. This was really exciting to hear. The birds began to call back and forth to each other, the second titmouse sounding almost like an echo to the first, and I wondered about what they might be communicating to each other, or to the other creatures around us. As the calls sounded very, very similar to each other, I wondered if they might be two males or two females. I also wondered if they might be part of a flock of some kind, given what we learned in our class this week about the way that flocking birds unify their calls in order to defend their territories, among other reasons. Their conversation, or their signaling, sounded robust to me, and it went on for quite a while. Then, suddenly, they stopped, and I wondered why, until I heard the leaf blower. In the absence of the titmice's calls, I took a short recording of the leaf blower's noise to include at the end of this recording.

The leaf blower noise is much less pleasant to listen to than the titmice calls are, but I think that it is important for humans to tune into the sounds that disrupt biophanies. We may be able to tune these noise pollutants out to a certain extent in our everyday life as we communicate our way through the world- with headphones or by amplifying our own voices, as the white-throated sparrows of the Bay Area have done. (Perhaps we are simplifying our own messages to each other and to the world around us as well when we do so, even without our noticing.) If we tune in and feel these louder noises overwhelm the fainter sounds in our environments, if we focus in on the noisiness of leaf blowers as it runs through our bodies, rather than consistently attempting to block it out with headphones, we might be able to better understand the disruptions that those noises cause. Members of the biophany cannot afford to tune out noise pollutants- as we learned from Gordon Hempton in class this Wednesday, creatures in natural spaces whose hearing abilities are compromised in any way will not be able to survive.

Considering the importance of bird communication (at all times, but particularly at this time of the year, when titmice are searching out territories for breeding and future nesting), I have been thinking about the frequency with which these titmice are likely interrupted throughout the day by anthropogenic noise pollution. The PVTA bus, for example, is one of the loudest sources of noise pollution on campus- I notice that I myself am jarred and frustrated by its frequency and amplitude when I am trying to listen to birdsong or have conversations with friends. I hadn't quite noticed the leafblower sound until it came close enough to us that the titmice stopped calling.

For the next few weeks, I would like to begin to listen in, rather than tune out, the noises that disrupt the biophany. Perhaps I will be able to build a greater sense of intuitive empathy for the titmice, and learn more about their patterns of communication as our anthrophony meets their biophany.

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March 10, 2021. Bird calls after a red tailed hawk call.

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March 10, 2021. Bird calls after a red tailed hawk call.

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This recording is unedited, because after my attempt to reduce the loud wind sounds, I noticed that the bird calls were also being dulled, and there are some faraway calls in this recording that I don't want to be missed. I took this recording of smaller birds calling out immediately after hearing the call of a red-tailed hawk resonate loudly across the green in front of the Harold F. Johnson library.
The birds seem to call back and forth to each other in the moments after this hawk called out. (I didn't see the hawk, but based on the range and length of its call, it sounded to me as if it were nearby and in flight, maybe among the trees.)
I'm not sure yet what kinds of birds are calling here, nor how many, exactly. But I'm very curious. The birds seemed to make themselves known from all sides of the green, bursting up and out of the trees. They flew above the heads of my friend and I, and we stood still on the walkway and watched them. It was beautiful- the way that it seemed neither of us could help but stand still and watch as the birds called attention to the moment at hand.

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March 5, 2021. Responses to Bernie Kraus talk, David Monacchi's sound art, Halfwerk reading, Both and Grant reading

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March 5, 2021. Responses to Bernie Kraus talk, David Monacchi's sound art, Halfwerk reading, Both and Grant reading

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This week's assigned readings and "listenings" are some of my favorites so far. I enjoyed Bernie Kraus's TED Talk so much, and I found that his insights accentuated my experience of listening to David Monacchi's "Integrated Ecosystem" sound art pieces. Kraus said at one point in his talk that "visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us." As I listened to Monacchi's sound art, I thought about this quote. One of his sound pieces, Nightingale, really struck me. As I listened, I could feel my whole body wake up, both enveloped by and moving towards the sounds. It occurred to me that this experience was so deeply engaging because of the way that I take in soundscapes with the full 360 degree scope of my perspective. For those of us who can hear, and perhaps even for those of us who can't, but experience vibrational signals, sounds call us (literally) back to our bodies, where we experience them with a full 360 degree range of inner awareness.
On top of these thoughts, I was really moved and intrigued by Bernie Kraus's way of documenting changes in ecosystems by way of making visual the shifting soundscapes of those places. I was drawn in by his graphic illustration of sound, and I found his guidance of the audience's perception towards what had changed for each of the different landscapes that he presented incredibly helpful to my learning.

I thoroughly enjoyed both Both and Grant and Wouter Halfwerk's papers. Something I thought about while reading both papers was the way that sound inhabits us. I don't only mean this in a poetic sense. I mean that it literally moves through us, and I was thinking about the way that this speaks to both the severity of the damage that noise pollution can incur, yet also the way that it leaves us as it fades. Long-lasting damage from noise pollution is incurred by the changes made to natural environments that come in response to that pollution: bird species leaving habitats or frogs facing lower numbers and disrupted breeding cycles, for example. But there is more hope for restoration and ecological recovery from noise pollution than with other kinds, as Halfwerk writes, given the ephemeral nature of noise.

One last note: I found this line from Both and Grant's "Biological Invasions and the Acoustic Niche" really intriguing: "(Invasive species) provide invaluable insights into ecosystem functioning and evolutionary processes that complement and inform broader scale studies in systematics and biogeography." Having no experience conducting biological research myself, I was struck by the angle of this perspective. I've been exploring this kind of perspective (viewing disruptions of balanced systems as tools for understanding what those systems need to thrive) as I learn about cultural anthropology, and this quote put words to that perspective choice so well.

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March 3, 2021. My best theories for which human anatomy sample is which, based on the sounds of each working piece of anatomy.  

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March 3, 2021. My best theories for which human anatomy sample is which, based on the sounds of each working piece of anatomy.  

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Having viewed the samples of the human heart, lung, and intestine under a microscope in the lab, then listened to the sounds of my own heart, lungs, and intestines as well as the YouTube video recordings, I came up with some thoughts as to what each sample might be.
Sample #1: I thought that sample #1 was a human heart. Because the sounds that the healthy human heart makes are steady and regular, I connected that sound with this tissue sample. The tissue that I saw in sample #1 looked sturdy, made up of consistent textures. To me, it looked like a tissue that would be hearty enough to pump blood, and which could create those slow, consistent sounds of the human heart.
Sample #2: I thought that this sample might be the intestine. The patterns and textures that I saw looked almost viscuous to me, and varied across the sample. I thought about how sounds change based on what they reverberate against, and the sounds of the large intestine-  the borborygmi, what a fantastic word- sounded to me like the least consistent of the three, the most prone to change, and so this varied little landscape of tissue within the sample that I viewed had me imagining the borborygmi passing through here.
Sample #3: I thought this was the lungs. The porousness of the tissue in sample #3 had me imagining that air could both move through and be propelled by this tissue. Listening to my own lungs, I was struck by how much my breath, moving inside of me, sounded like wind. It makes sense, of course, as the sound of wind is air moving through and meeting obstructions, but I think of wind as needing space to move in order to make sounds at all. The inside of the body is such different territory from an open field with grasses, for example. But the tissue in this sample looked to me like it could hold that kind of sound, giving it space to rush and flow, as well as the filtering treatment that could create wind-like sounds, within a human body.

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Feb. 28, 2021. Brown Sparrows under Arts Canopy, 10:15 AM.

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Feb. 28, 2021. Brown Sparrows under Arts Canopy, 10:15 AM.

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I went out with Katharine to find some sounds and make some recordings with our sound equipment today. As we walked beneath the Arts Canopy towards the Hampshire Woods, both of us were struck by the multitude of brown sparrows beneath the canopy making all kinds of sounds! Their calls and songs were echoing slightly against the metal shelter of the canopy, and it was a gorgeous moment to listen to. I thought that I had successfully recorded all kinds of sounds by the time we finished our walk, but I must have done something wrong because when I checked out my SD card contents, nothing I'd recorded was saved. It was disappointing for sure, but I did get this recording with my phone (the sparrows were so cool, I wanted to be sure that I'd have some recording of their sounds) and I'm so glad I did.

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Feb. 27, 2021. Mixed audio recording of wind whistling

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Feb. 27, 2021. Mixed audio recording of wind whistling

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Here's a recording of the wind whistling outside my window during a rainstorm a few nights ago. It was a lovely night for writing poetry, and you can hear the clattering of my keyboard as well. I really enjoyed mixing this little audio clip up in Audacity, because these sounds are quite ambient and relaxing to me. I'm hoping to make some more clips that incorporate different relaxing sounds when I have a bit more time.

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Feb. 24, 2021. Response to question after Franjou, Buehler, Roosth, Beans readings

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Feb. 24, 2021. Response to question after Franjou, Buehler, Roosth, Beans readings

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What is a protein and why would we care about its sound?

A protein is a molecule, and protein structures are made up of amino acids that can be linked together in different ways. When I think of a protein, I think of the kind that make up the spiky outside of the COVID-19 virus. I am pretty sure that the virus's spiky outer proteins are the part of the virus that allows it to attach to the cells that it's attacking.
I think that we would care about a protein's sound- or, a sonification process such as the one Buehler describes, because it provides scientists (and students like myself) with a new way of looking at things like a virus's activity and structure. With this process and new perspective on proteins, people may be able to understand how viruses work. As I also learned about from reading Buehler's paper, understanding and listening to the vibrations of proteins might be able to clue scientists in to changes in virus activity. There's also a range of uses for protein sound data and processing that scientists are finding as they figure out how to disrupt virus progression & infection.
Personally, I care about the sonification of proteins because I think that it's incredibly cool that scientists and artists are taking such interdisciplinary approaches to their studies and to the problems that their work is tackling today. Taking on specific issues (such as virus activity) from diverse disciplinary perspectives reliably allows for more ideas and pathways towards solutions & breakthroughs.

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After editing and posting the chickadee call, I went online to seek out the bird call that I heard. I was almost certain that it was a chickadee, and I wanted to find out for sure, and I also wanted to learn a bit about what the call might have meant to that bird. After doing a bit of research and listening to many samples of chickadee calls, I am more confident that it was a chickadee! The call that I heard may have been the chickadee's "gargle" call. According to a few different birding blogs and articles, this call is linked with male territorialism and courtship.

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I edited this recording in Audacity to reduce the humming background noise, and I think it worked really well. The call of the bird can be heard much more clearly than before.
I am 99% certain that this bird is a chickadee, because I'm really familiar with chickadees and I was able to get a look at it from my balcony after I recorded its call from below. This was striking to me, however, because I had never known a chickadee to make this call before! I had no idea what kind of bird it was until I saw it clearly after making this recording. I'm really curious about what this bird might have been signaling.

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Feb 18, 2021. 11AM. CHICKADEE! in Dakin quad- white breasted

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Feb 18, 2021. 11AM. CHICKADEE! in Dakin quad- white breasted

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Feb. 17, 2021. 0:56 compilation of sounds based on verb from Amy Sillman's talk. 

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Feb. 17, 2021. 0:56 compilation of sounds based on verb from Amy Sillman's talk. 

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Here is a compilation of sounds that I created in Audacity with recordings that I took while considering the verb “WASH".

My compilation opens with a clip of quiet birdsong. For most people, I imagine that the verb “to wash” has an immediate, obvious connection to water: the sounds that come with water’s varying pressures: the gurgling, tinkling layers of sound that come from its smooth motion. Certain birds’ songs sound to me like bubbling streams of water, and their sounds “wash” over me in this way. This kind of birdsong, however, also invokes a different kind of aural “washing” for me, one that I thought about as I worked on this piece. When I listen to birds singing, I feel the emotional memory and imagination of springtime envelop my whole body, and in this response to birdsong, I experience a certain washing of my senses. A renewal, a rejuvenation, a relaxation towards the future.

From the clips of bird songs, my compilation transitions into a recording of a stream, bubbling after a snowstorm. Then my compilation moves into the sound of a gutter’s harsh water flow following yesterday’s alternating freezing rain and quick snow melt. In this way, I wanted to direct listener attention to the different levels of intensity that the verb to wash can take: from the soft and hopeful birdsong to the busy, melodic stream, to the water in the gutter creating a loud, almost clattering symphony of sounds. In between clips of loud gutter water, I interjected clips of bird calls, hoping to connect and contrast the different kinds of washing that we can experience or imagine through sound.

In my mind, washing is a verb that, when connected to sound, often invokes a certain sense of being enveloped. It carries a sense of calming, welcome overwhelm. Wind washes over me as I walk into the open field behind my friends’ home and I feel both renewed and held when I close my eyes and listen to its rhythms. I myself can be a vessel for and generator of wind and song, washing other, smaller things with my sounds. In the last part of this clip, I included a recording of my own exhale, whooshing air down into a brown glass jug where it resonated quietly back upward.

I thoroughly enjoyed this project; I want to continue to make sound compilations in relation to words throughout and beyond this course!

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Feb. 16, 2021. Response to Oliveros: "Auralizing in the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding" 

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Feb. 16, 2021. Response to Oliveros: "Auralizing in the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding" 

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I appreciated this reading so much. I keep thinking about it. Engaging with Oliveros’ work has led me into a deepening curiosity for all aural experiences. In this piece, she asks, Why would one want to listen to sounds beyond our human range? In response, I thought: why would I be content with never imagining other sounds, other experiences of listening? For as long as I can remember now, I have been curious about the sensory experiences of other creatures. For me, developing an understanding of the fact that humans see, hear, and feel only a fracture of the sensations that affect all of the Earth’s creatures has allowed me to move through my human life with a sense of reverence for the mystery that is consciousness.

Knowing that I don’t hear all of the sounds that other creatures hear leads me to ask more questions of what other creatures' aural experiences might be like. I imagine what it would be like if I could readily listen to the sound of blueberries ripening, of my heart beating when I feel proud or sad, of wild roses closing for the evening. I think about the sounds that bats make- the kind that we listened to at the start of our class last week- and I wonder what it would be like to hear those sounds without recording them and slowing them down.

I’ve been thinking about last week’s reading in comparison and connection to this one. As Voegelin points out the ways in which each person and their listening is inextricably connected to their participation in the generation of sounds in their soundscapes, so Oliveros’ work reminds me of the imminent interconnectedness of all beings. My understanding of Pauline Oliveros’ writing this week is that with this work, she is inviting readers to expand our understandings of what is worth listening to, or what we could at the very least imagine- or perhaps auralize- an experience of listening to. What does the newborn bird experience? What does the hungry bat? What might forests of trees need when it comes to their soundscapes in order to thrive? Every human has their own particular relationship to sound: we all have different voices, and different capacities for listening. Birders who use listening practices to identify species say that the same is true of birds. Oliveros calls my attention to another reality that exists whether or not I develop the capacity to tune into it: the humming, roaring, mumbling, singing aural experiences of other creatures, other inhabitants of this earth whose lives are interconnected with my own.

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Feb. 15, 2021. My description of sound clip on Listening Across Disciplines website.

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Feb. 15, 2021. My description of sound clip on Listening Across Disciplines website.

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Listening to this sound clip, I hear people talking to each other- the sounds of voices crossing, touching across space, and fading out. The audio brings to mind an image of people congregating in an art gallery or other space where strangers and acquaintances speak about things. Or maybe the reception hall after a particularly controversial but interesting show. From my listening, I interpret some underlying, yet not super serious conflict-  banter that sounds like it holds both levity and sincerity. Some social posturing, too: posturing that seems to be holding and/or obscuring underlying truths about how people feel towards each other and about themselves in this interactive situation.

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Listening Across Disciplines II (LxDII) is a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It systematically investigates the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities, science, social science and technology. The project positions listening as an emerging investigative approach that is able ...

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Feb. 14, 2021, 6:05 AM: Edited (Great Horned?) Owl Call

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Feb. 14, 2021, 6:05 AM: Edited (Great Horned?) Owl Call

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After my initial recording of the bird call this morning, I took this longer recording and edited it in Audacity.
One striking thing that I noticed while listening closely to this audio as I worked with it was the sound that comes at the end - or maybe in response to?! - the owl's call. It sounds to me like a whistle or a slight screech, and at first when I heard it I thought that I was hearing my own breathing. But the sound repeats, with slight variation in length, tonal quality, and in how quickly it follows the hooting of the call, in the first two calls in this recording. I'm so curious as to what it might be, and if it is a part of the call.
I edited this recording so that it would be silent between calls (there was a lot of fuzzy background noise). I don't think that this is a choice I will likely make again, but I think that it worked for this clip because it makes it easy to tell how many calls occur throughout the 1:21 clip. There are 4.
Something I noted: after the first call, the two calls that followed had an average of 13 seconds of silence between them. Then there a 33 second-long moment of silence before the last call.
As usual, I'm left with more questions than answers and am so excited to listen for more calls like this in the coming weeks.

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I woke up a little bit late this morning, and I'm so glad I did, because the first thing I heard was this gorgeous delight of an owl call. After sampling lots of owl sounds on Cornell's ornithology site, I think it is a Great Horned Owl, but I'm excited to hopefully check in with faculty who will know for sure. This is my initial recording of the call; in the connected post, I've attached a second, longer audio recording which I edited in Audacity.

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Feb. 12, 2021: Edited Kern Cafe sounds: Hampshire College soundscape

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Feb. 12, 2021: Edited Kern Cafe sounds: Hampshire College soundscape

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Here is my recording of a Hampshire soundscape that I edited with Audacity for this week's assignment. Although at first this little soundbite of Hampshire's Kern cafe sounded mostly like confusing, fuzzy noise to me, it grew more familiar to me as I listened to it again and again while making my edits. There's my friend Yarrow's voice, and there's the sound of coffee being made, sugar being ordered on the side. I can hear friends' laughter in the distance. While editing, I copied Yarrow's greeting and slipped it into the beginning of the audio, playing it twice in a fun little remix! I wanted my recording to showcase the lively, friendly atmosphere at the Kern's opening a bit more clearly. I cut away some of the static, and some of the sounds of my shuffling boots. I also shortened the audio at the end, cutting it off as the sounds of clanging pots in the cafe become a bit loud. I was thrilled to be able to work with Audacity a bit this week, and I'm so excited to learn and work with audio more throughout the semester.

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Feb. 12, 2021. Response to Vogelin, Listening to Noise and Silence.

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Feb. 12, 2021. Response to Vogelin, Listening to Noise and Silence.

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While I found much of Voegelin’s writing about her complex, gorgeous ideas surrounding sound and silence to be slightly beyond my range of understanding, I still felt that I drew a lot of meaning from this reading. I was particularly moved by her writing about her experience of listening to “Waterlow Park at Dawn,” where much of what she wrote about resonated with me in my own experiences. In one passge I'd like to focus on, she writes, “The birds’ song, the traffic hum, the runner’s breath and the master’s whistle recall a sonic objectivity as a residue of all my earlier subjective generative appreciations of such sounds. The objective beings with it the park as cultural notion, and all the parks I have ever visited.”

This notion of an experience of listening being shaped and subjectively defined by a person’s history with similar sounds and their cultural understanding of each sound, particularly as such sounds are linked in a person’s mind to visual experiences, struck me. Last spring, I was living in Squamish, British Colombia as the pandemic began. I lived in the mountains and went hiking every day, and listening to the sounds of the forest was a meaningful aspect of that daily experience for me (in part because I had to be cautious of predatory wildlife, but mostly because I was just interested in listening). As the pandemic slowly began to shift my perception of the sounds around me- in a culture of avid joggers and dog walkers, similar to the culture that Voegelin writes about- I found myself thinking and frequently journaling about something that almost exactly echoes Voegelin’s words. “This birdsong is the same birdsong that I have heard before; my reaction to it is informed by my past experiences and cultural understanding of this sound. But I’m skittish on the trail around people now. Every hiker’s panting breath as they come up the mountain behind me is the same sound of every hiker’s breath that I have ever listened to before, and now the strangeness of this time is changing it. I’m in the middle of a cultural shift in perception of this kind of sound. I used to feel safe knowing there was another human breathing in the woods.” (Excerpt from my journal, sometime in early spring, 2020.)

Reading Voegelin’s work now, I’m curious to learn more about this “residue” of “earlier subjective generative appreciations of such sounds” that she describes. I can’t help but relate this to the pandemic. Different sounds that used to be comforting, such as the exhale of another human being in a quiet wild place, or simply ordinary and expected, like a siren in the streets of New York City, have become causes for reactions of skittishness, panic, and dread. What happens to us, as generators and observers of this changing culture, in this constantly generative soundscape?

How does this shift in the cultural perception of sounds like these affect our perception of ourselves, if we are a part of this soundscape of sirens and exhales: not quite such objective, separate listeners as we might think we are? Whether or not we understand ourselves to be intimate participants in the endlessly generative world of sound, I gather from Voegelin’s work, we are those participants; feeling the sirens pass through us as our understanding of the siren changes, and then, perhaps, however implicitly, our understanding of ourselves.

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Feb. 09, 2021. Stream, under snow, in Amherst woods (unknown trail). 

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Feb. 09, 2021. Stream, under snow, in Amherst woods (unknown trail). 

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This stream was running downhill, seemingly across flat rocks. If I stood still on the trail, I could hear it ever-so-faintly beneath the layer of ice and snow. That soft background sound was really intriguing to me, but unfortunately I don't have a recording of it. Instead, I held my phone by a small hole in the snow and ice, where the stream could be seen bubbling on its way.

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Feb. 9, 2021. Stream in Hampshire Woods under snow

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Feb. 9, 2021. Stream in Hampshire Woods under snow

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Feb. 10, 2021. Raven in the Hampshire woods by soccer fields, 10:30 AM.

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Feb. 10, 2021. Raven in the Hampshire woods by soccer fields, 10:30 AM.

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I have been so excited to hear these ravens recently on campus! Three days ago, I was lucky enough to notice two crows swooping across the sky above the Dakin dorms, and when I looked around to see what they were swooping at, a raven's throaty "roc-roc-roc" rang out and I saw that the two crows were chasing the larger bird. It was a beautiful and intriguing moment, and I wished that I had had my phone on me so that I could record their calls. These raven calls, though, which I caught while walking in the woods before class on Wednesday, are just wonderful to have for now.

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Feb. 08, 2021: Unedited Kern Cafe Sounds- Hampshire College soundscape

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Feb. 08, 2021: Unedited Kern Cafe Sounds- Hampshire College soundscape

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This is a little recording that I made as I thought about what sounds and sound environments represented Hampshire College to me. Today was the beginning of phase 3- a reopening of sorts on campus, where those of us who have received two negative test results can venture out to in-person events. The campus cafe re-opened for the semester today, so I made my way over, expecting a lively soundscape. Immediately, I found some friends- you can hear my friend Yarrow greeting me if you listen close- and the atmosphere among the students gathered in the Kern was bright, warm, and celebratory. I hope that that energy comes through to listeners. This audio recording is far from clean or perfect- I walked as I took the recording, and although I walked as quietly as I could, you can definitely pick out the shuffling of my boots against the floor. I chose to upload this file partly because it isn't quite what I'd like it to be. I'm entirely new to sound editing and so I am excited to see what I might learn to do with this sound file, and many others throughout this course!

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Feb. 06, 2021, 7:30 AM bird conversation in fields

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Feb. 06, 2021, 7:30 AM bird conversation in fields

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The patterns of these birdsongs caught my ear this morning. The back-and-forth that seemed to occur between what seemed like two or three different birds (the ones whose voices come through most prominently in this audio clip) was really beautiful and curious to me. I couldn’t see the birds, but I want to know who they are, and to perhaps interpret some of the meaning or reason behind their calls.

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Unknown bird conversation by fields, 7:30 AM. 

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Unknown bird conversation by fields, 7:30 AM. 

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Feb. 04, 2021. Brown sparrows at a gas station, late afternoon

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Feb. 04, 2021. Brown sparrows at a gas station, late afternoon

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Listen in- you can hear them warbling to each other till 0:16, then they go quiet, letting the hum of route 9 traffic enter the soundscape for a moment. At 0:17 comes the soft sound of the birds moving closer to me as I step forward. My hand is in the air, holding my phone out to them. There is a flickering of wings and tiny clawed feet, lifting off of branches as they swoop deeper into the bush, yet closer to me. Listen until 0:35, and their songs emerge again, quieter this time. We stand close to each other as their songs increase in tempo and tone, at 0:57. Perhaps these are the sounds of both safety and curiosity for these birds.

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Brown sparrows at a gas station early afternoon

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Brown sparrows at a gas station early afternoon

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Feb. 05, 2021. Snow structures and sound, 6:45 AM. Second recording.

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Feb. 05, 2021. Snow structures and sound, 6:45 AM. Second recording.

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For this second recording, I crawled into the snow fort and crouched at its corner, where it seemed to be the quietest.

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Feb. 05, 2021. Snow structures and sound, 6:45 AM. First recording.

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Feb. 05, 2021. Snow structures and sound, 6:45 AM. First recording.

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Walking across the Dakin-Merril quad at 6:45 this morning, I noticed a super cool snow fort that someone made, sculpted against a building, somewhat like a sturdy lean-to. I had been listening to the sounds of the Hampshire campus throughout my run, and when I checked the fort out, I immediately noticed the soft quiet inside. I know that snow has a muting quality to it. Mostly, I’ve gotten my understanding of snow and its muting qualities from my years of building snow forts as a kid, and from each morning or midnight after every snow storm since, where I’d sit up in bed and listen to the world. I always marvel at the exquisite quiet it brings when it’s freshly fallen.

So, listening to the world inside of this three-day-old snow fort had me wondering a little bit more. I remembered hearing once that it is the air pockets that are created by the gradual falling of snow that make for that quieting, post-snowstorm sound we all recognize. Maybe gradual snowfall is different from a hand-crafted snow fort, but I wonder if the air pocket theory still applies in some way. What happens to the sounds outside and within the snow fort when the snow is packed hard, and has maybe melted a little bit? What did it sound like inside this fort when the snow was really fresh?

For this recording, I stood very still outside the snow fort, about 4 feet away from its opening.

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At 2:56, Oliveros says, “Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound.”

At 4:36, she says, "When listening, there is a constant interplay with the perception of the moment, compared with remembered experience. Listening, or the interpretation of sound-waves then, is subject to time delays. Sometimes what is heard is interpreted anywhere from milliseconds to many years later, or never."

While I listened to Oliveros' words, I thought of my mother. Throughout my life, I have often recalled my mother's voice in my head when she was not with me as clearly as if I were coming into the world and hearing her again for the first time. Taking in Oliveros’ words, I imagine my life-long listening practice through a new lens. What if the listening practice that I was born into and have cultivated throughout my life took the form of one long, continuous experience?

If listening can be imagined as one long, continuous experience, my mother's voice has threaded longitudinally through the soundscape of my life, and my experience of her voice in that first moment I emerged from her womb has not ended yet. When do sound waves fade into nothingness, both in the memory and in the unseen physical world? Perhaps they never do. Toni Morrison said, “We die. (…) But we do language.” I’m thinking about her words in a new way now.

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Mary Catherine Bates, anthropologist, made this statement in her interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. I find her words to be deeply relevant to our topic of listening to the world, and the collective, yet potently individual, listening and sound-making that we all participate in on our Earth.