Attunement as Method

Listening and Possession

Listening is often assumed to be neutral; the passive act of openly receiving the information around us, shaped by our attention, our histories, and the conditions under which we listen. What we hear, and how we hear it, is entangled with our positions in the world: social, spatial, and ecological. Our conversations revealed how it can reproduce colonial epistemologies—ways of knowing based on separation, possession, and control.

Through their fieldwork and reflections, AM Kanngieser reminds us that permission to listen and record must be sought again and again, each and every time, from everyone and everywhere. “The academic and artistic white [possessive] is demonstrated in the sense of entitlement to environments and peoples.”¹

We pause as we lower the hydrophone into the water — what does this place wish to share with us, and under what conditions? How can we avoid recreating the dynamic of entitled tourists? We take our time, state our intentions, and sit with the forest for a moment longer.

From Palestine to Treaty 7 territory, our guests describe how colonial infrastructures—highways, checkpoints, and drones—overwrite the acoustic ecologies of land. Listening, in this sense, is not innocent: it’s shaped by systems of dominance. But naming this is also a way to listen otherwise—to hear what colonial sound tries to erase.

In Palestine, Rehab Nazzal encounters this sonic violence every day; sound in Palestine is always political. The drones, the bombs, the sonic booms—they are part of the landscape. “You cannot separate them from daily life,” she explains, “It is a form of control. Even silence is a weapon.”²

Rehab exposes how colonial power operates acoustically: domination through noise and surveillance. Listening becomes a site of occupation itself; sound functions as both evidence and instrument of control. “When I record in Palestine, I don’t need to look for the sound of occupation; it’s everywhere—the sky, the checkpoints, the walls. It’s inescapable. The occupation produces its own soundtrack.”

Similarly, seth cardinal dodginghorse listens to the sonic displacement of their family’s land by the construction of the Calgary ring road—the highway replacing the songs of birds and ceremonies with the endless hum of traffic.

“Every day, we saw things change. We were gone, then our house was gone from the land, then the trees were gone, and all of the animals were gone. Then it became like a pile of dirt. Then, it became asphalt.”³

In their performances, seth loops the voices of politicians and chiefs who sanctioned the project, making them echo through the gallery space. By doing so, they reclaim the soundscape as a site of accountability.

These contexts reveal that listening is not an act of passive perception, but a political gesture: one that determines whose voices are heard, which sounds are valued, and what forms of knowledge are allowed to resonate. Listening is entering into a field already structured by power and history, a way of tracing how infrastructures, languages, and technologies [can] overwrite the acoustic life of a place and of resisting that overwriting through attention, documentation, and embodied sound.

Listening and Consent

If colonial listening is about possession, perhaps decolonial listening can begin with consent.

During our recordings in the Azores, we noticed how the island seemed to oscillate between invitation and refusal: the calm, welcoming sounds of the forest one day, the restless motion and danger of an approaching hurricane the next. Both demanded a kind of acceptance. We began to understand that these sounds were not simply acoustic events, but suggestions of a relationship with, and reflections of, the shifting environments and the contexts in which they were heard.

Establishing a relationship with our environment is essential. Chantal Dumas reminds us that we hold agency even within urban spaces, inviting us to become active, wandering ears—to engage with infrastructure and architecture as living partners rather than passive backdrops. “How spaces reveal themselves is also a function of us, how we position ourselves in this space, us as listeners.”⁴

AM Kanngieser, by contrast, asks us to introduce ourselves to the natural environment and to request permission: “You have to say who you are, what you’re there for, what you want.”⁵

These gestures of slowness and respect reframe listening and recording as relational acts rather than extractive ones. They suggest that both environments and listeners possess agency—that listening is not only something we do to the world but something we enter into with it.

seth cardinal dodginghorse embodies this same ethic in a different context, watching their home transformed into a highway. They document the process and remember each detail of home so it may re-emerge later in a dream. Their listening through loss—to what remains, and to the silence that follows—becomes a model for environmental consent. It is an act of grieving with, rather than speaking for, the land.

To listen ethically, then, is to acknowledge that not everything wants to be heard—that sometimes the most meaningful act is to stop recording, to step back, to be still.

Listening and Resistance

If sound can enact violence, it can also resist it. The artists we spoke with use sound to make oppression audible, to expose what images cannot.

Rehab Nazzal records the buzzing of drones and the hum of surveillance towers. Her sonic testimonies document the invisible architectures of occupation. Listening becomes political witnessing: bringing attention to what saturates the air but evades the eye.

Amanda Gutiérrez situates sound within collective feminist action: recording marches, dialogues, and embodiment workshops, and reproducing and disseminating these collective sounds as power tools. For her, sonic collaboration is a form of solidarity; an embodied network of resistance that challenges patriarchal and colonial systems of representation.

“How can we take action through sound production, through dissemination of artworks [...] I'm so faithful to radio because radio has been an important tool for colonial thinking and decolonial actions.”⁶

Sandra Volny extends these politics to a planetary scale. In collaboration with geophysicists, she transforms seismic data into sound: a cry of alarm about climate change. Her work, Fossil Sonore, makes audible the Earth’s distress call, turning scientific data into a sonic protest; visceral and encompassing moans that cannot be ignored, a refusal to go silently. The vibrations of melting glaciers become memorials to ecological loss, a counter-archive against forgetting.

Nazzal also reminds us that the sound of nature itself—waves, birds, rustling leaves—can be understood as resistant, persisting in spite of extraction and transformation. Listening to these uncontrollable forces is to recognize that life continues to sound, even under pressure.

Listening and Resonance

If resistance is the act, resonance is the relation that follows. To resonate is to listen with, rather than to.

Sandra Volny describes “listening as touching at a distance,”⁷ likening echolocation to a way of moving through the world: a means of perceiving space through sound, of navigating by emitting a wave and receiving its echo. It is a form of active listening, a listening in search of clues.

Kanngieser deepens this perspective: “Attuning to the environment takes time. The environment is never static; it never repeats itself. If I stay still long enough, the insects start singing again, the birds resume. There is always reciprocity listening going on; the environment listens back.”⁸

Resonance, in this sense, is mutual attunement and slow co-presence with nonhuman agencies. It’s a way of being with rather than extracting from. When the boundary between listener and environment dissolves, sound ceases to be a resource and becomes relating in itself.

Even for Rehab Nazzal, surrounded by the noise of occupation, resonance persists: “Even in these conditions, there are sounds of life — children playing, the call to prayer, the wind in the olive trees. Listening to these reminds me that resistance is also about continuity.”⁹

To listen deeply, she says, “is to acknowledge the coexistence of violence and beauty.”¹⁰ It is a practice of staying connected—of refusing to let despair silence the world’s liveliness.

We’ve learned that listening is never passive. It is shaped by histories, by bodies, by the conditions of the land itself. The artists we spoke with remind us that to listen is to enter into relationship; sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes healing, always active.

In our own fieldwork, whether waiting out a storm or lowering a hydrophone into the water, we learn that sound asks for patience and humility. We listen for the approaching hurricane, the winds moving across the ocean. We attune ourselves to what is not immediately perceptible: the pulse of the earth, the reverberations of history, the ongoing conversations between human and nonhuman worlds.

Perhaps to practice environmental sound today is to remain in this tension, between the violent and the vital, the human and the nonhuman, between what has been silenced and what still sings.

Julia E. Dyck and Amanda Harvey are artists, working collaboratively since 2016 on projects including radio productions, sonic experimentations, performances, installations, and interventions. They’ve co-written and produced 2 seasons of their podcast, A Kind of Harmony.