Editorial—Issue 02

One way to think through this—in the terminology of many of the entries in this issue—is that the potential for listening-with and hearing otherwise is coupled with an understanding of sound’s manifold and deep entwinement with environment. In previous writing of mine, I refer to sound’s formation as an active material plane;² "soundscape" being only a convenient sound-image for describing a world of acoustic relation. Deep acoustic materials form a heterogeneous network through which subjectivities and auralities are formed, meet, conspire, mask, occlude, and amplify. As sound meets (other) material, it is forever changed, marking a transition not only of time but of content and character; sound’s ephemerality as well as its materiality constitute this radical sensory network of sound-based knowing. But when one uses words like “knowing,” “listening,” and “environment,” close attention to our sensory modalities reveals the structures, limitations, and entanglements of our individual experiences and worlds: different, yet consistently interacting, constitutive and enmeshed.

Pluriversal listening to pluriversal worlds // pluriversal listening for pluriversal problems.³

Famed biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s groundbreaking enmeshment of sensory narratives with biology in the early 20th century revolutionized how the anthropocentric Western sciences conceived of ecological interactions: a constant collaboration, antagonization, and flourishing of lifeworlds, or Umwelt ("around-world," i.e., an organism’s perceptual world). At the same time—and central to Uexküll’s theory—these lifeworlds are not only incommensurate with each other, but they in fact might even be completely different planes of relation. To participate in the lifeworld of another is to be part of a series of crossings, translations, and near-misses. Said differently, our lifeworlds are wholly inseparable, yet they are not fed by a consensus of world, nor constituted by a vitalist material vibration-in-common. Our worlds collide: access withheld, “asymptoticly”⁴ occluded and obscured—a world of “thickets”⁵ that sideline cause and effect.

The paths delineated by Uexküll’s writing heavily influenced the contemporary field of sensory ecology and figure prominently in the study of more-than-human acoustic communication, bioacoustics conservation practices, and robust technoscientific experimental designs that feature in several of this issue’s entries. Environmental sound—figured as a material, ecological layer—becomes part of these overlapping and striated perceptual worlds, not reduced (solely) to language and communication. It is an elemental transect, a medium of relation between and among species, landscape, and time. It is not simply that one sounds, but one participates in a number of sounding worlds, whose pathways and relations are continuously discovered anew. To follow sound, as a lure, is to auralize the many meeting points of these lifebound reverberations—to see where these sonic articulations meld in the expression of environmentally-changed lifeways, in violent constitutions of border zones and sites of exclusion, as well as how they form meeting spaces for memory, ritual, attunement, and relation. Sonic relations across geographic and temporal media are a way of navigating pluriversal encounters.

Yet, Uexküll’s reconfiguration of sensory landscapes also influenced and resonated with groundwork for the early stirrings of ecological “blood and soil” philosophies of the Third Reich and Nazi legal philosophies, both of which shared an important essentialist quality linking lifeworld to environment.⁶ The musical metaphors that run through Uexküll’s work illustrate a grand "harmony" among diverse lifeworlds and Umwelten, yet all take place as “Planmäßigkeit” (according to plan), within which these worlds exist in circumscribed spaces and, importantly, orders and hierarchies.⁷ The ease with which both biological and sonic discourse find themselves embedded in racialized renderings of perceptual worlds should surprise no one. As many entries in this issue are quick to identify, there is a direct line linking the legacies of acoustic technologies—as well as "expansive" modalities of listening—back to militarized state actors. And through these technologies—legitimized by way of Western “dominant science”⁸—sonic data practices are nurtured whose valence for contemporary state surveillance and campaigns of violence have quickly come full circle. Advances in sonic technologies and the sciences that utilize them have furthered possibilities for datafying sound, and for engaging in types of listening that analyze, categorize, and assess; datafication of sound, in this sense, is just as easily used to surveil, partition, and enforce as it is to conserve, to think-/hear-with, and to attune to. Similarly, Uexküll’s groundbreaking Umwelt Planmäßigkeit strove to explain not diverse and intertwined environments composed of variegated sensory worlds, but rather a concretization of one’s "place" and "function" in the Staatsbiologie (biology of the nation-state) by virtue of a systemization of an individual perceptual world.⁹ Listening apparatuses—whether social, technological, or environmental—surely provide a form of access, and with access comes ethics. Otherwise, a different type of hearing emerges: extractive and violent auralities that presume to know before having heard, and a circumscription of sound-based knowledge within the logics of white Western colonial hearing.

Therefore, here I contextually reframe Max Leboiron’s self-reflexive question “How will we do science today?”¹⁰ to:

How will we do sound today?

That is: how will we choose to listen?

And how will we choose to sound?

Where do our motivations for listening lay?

Of course, not all aspects of listening and hearing are choices; to say that one can "choose" how to do sound indicates only the necessity to reflect on one’s own listening patterns, and to notice the possibilities for transforming our everyday experiences of sound into heightened sensitivities towards political materiality. And "to choose" (in Leboiron’s meaning) means also to be responsible and accountable for sonic power relations over which one might have positional agency.

In this issue’s entries, I listen for echoes. I pay close attention to the reverberations of sound, following its pathways as it traverses lifeworlds, geologic temporalities, court cases, and transgenerational memories. These echoes orient me in space; the echoes I hear can never be the same as my neighbor; they uniquely position me. Yet through these echoes, I sense my own unique bonds to sound: that which resonates (me), which moves (me), and that which is inaudible (to me). It signals worlds of (inter)action that my hearing catches glimpses of, but perhaps sonic narratives can more fully express. Therefore, the positions highlighted in this issue show how being in the midst of the echoic—a self-reflexive journey through our own listening, through the listening of others, and through the turbulences of adopting a sonic lens—primes us for understanding spaces and instances where “sound makes a difference.”¹¹ These are listening positions that trace the material flows of sound, and activate its potential not only as an indicator of violence but also as a method of reclaiming memories, geographies, histories, and futures. They speak to singular positions as listeners, as well as to the complexities that unravel when auralities and sonic lifeworlds meet.

This issue’s positions collide and resound with cases of sonic ethics, positionalities, and responsibilities, resisting a utopian impulse towards listening that is often so easily a copilot of sound-based discourse. Alongside a forensic and scientific journeys with sound, we find a throughline of calls for situatedness, self-reflexivity, attunement, and incompleteness; in these works, listening and sounding unfold and echo off each other in complementary and surely sometimes turbulent ways.

We follow sound as it winds through artistic engagements with a multitude of materials, at drastically different scales from lithic histories and stories of Palestine, Cyprus, and England (Jewell) to a speculatively futuristic—alternate past—Tunisia (Sarsam). It traces the technoscientific paths of microphones dipped into water (Garland) to emerge and traverse through the murky, complex incompleteness of listening, memory, and material (Hwati, Ðinh, Dyck/Harvey). Sound appears in the forms of both repair and resistance (Thompson, Hanley), and where landscapes and ecologies meet their technologically mediated twins (Möller/Machine Listening, Andreani). Lastly, transmissions beam between volcanoes, rivers, and infrastructures as the fiction of transparency fades (~pes, Radio Otherwise), leaving us to attend to each other in the midst of the echoic.