Biologists singing: Collective vocalization, posthuman listening, and interspecies audibility

Abstract

Disciplinary background A. This research draws on the tightly woven intersection of science and technology studies, posthumanism, and animal studies by investigating modes of listening and observation between species and the interfacing technologies which mediate these relationships. A field work component undertaken in collaboration with a bioacoustic amphibian laboratory interrogates the roles of ecological sciences in the formation of cross-species listening modalities. Disciplinary background B. This research critically considers notions of vocal emergence within a sound and soundscape studies context by zoning in on nonhuman acoustic communication. By considering how the embodied and participatory musical logic of choral singing might offer an experimental imagination for more-than-human choruses, I try to think alongside critically endangered chorus frogs in a speculative and arts-based form of 'choral' ethnomusicology. Abstract The aim of this research is to develop an expansive notion of chorusing which might challenge humanist notions of vocal participation. By looking to bioacoustics as a site of sonic acoustic knowledge and interspecies relation, this inquiry considers the disciplinary production of listening modalities and the musical aesthetics of ecological inquiry. The construction of the humanist liberal subject voice is bound up in a history which relies on a systematic separation of listening and sounding subjects and objects. But what about when voices join? From Greek theatre to Western musical traditions, the notion of a chorus has muddied the individuation of voice by assembling an observing or narrating mass rather than invoking a self-realizing human subject. By performing a kind of ‘audienceship,’ choral voice beckons listeners into its fold with aggregational sonic momentum. While interpreting such a phenomenon as musical may be circumscribed to the human, vocal and indeed chorusing behaviours are prevalent across species. My research focuses on locating multispecies voices as features of sympoetic (collectively making) systems as a way to interrogate the primacy of the human within interspecies sonic relationships. This inquiry into voice binds sonic materiality with auditory perception– the two caught in a perceptual loop,