Listening to Soundscapes Otherwise: Infrastructures as Environmental Sound

Across our recent projects, there has been a recurring return to infrastructures, not as a passive backdrop but as active agents. Each project has approached this from a different angle, but together they trace a continuum of engagement with the material and invisible systems that shape our collective (human and more-than-human) lives, systems we rely on yet rarely perceive. These works are not merely about mapping infrastructures but about listening to them: tuning into infrastructures as non-naturalistic forms of ecological awareness that attune how we move, orient ourselves, and sense within technological and environmental worlds; the works do not display "nature," they disclose systems.

In this sense, the practice foregrounds positionality, particularly the privilege of withdrawing, observing, and aestheticizing. This is not incidental but integral: from within such positions, the challenge is not to claim neutrality but to expose the conditions of listening itself, along with the technologies that make such listening possible. Infrastructures are never neutral: they condition access, perception, and power. By engaging them through experimental radio, the works do not merely listen to representations of the environment but to the processes and dynamics that generate it as such.

This essay explores how these projects listen to infrastructure itself, not simply as a conduit for sound, but as a non-naturalistic ecology. It asks: how does listening to the structural, coded, and invisible make the politics of where we are and how we hear audible?

Recent scholarship across geography, the humanities, media studies, and STS has expanded the notion of infrastructure beyond its technical or urban connotations. Rather than seeing infrastructures merely as built systems or background structures, key scholars on infrastructure emphasize their relational and ontological dimensions:¹ infrastructures are “things and the relations between things,”² dynamic sociotechnical formations that organize the movement of matter, energy, data, and life. Barua calls for “a wider ontology of infrastructure,”³ one that exceeds anthropocentric views centered on human-built systems and instead recognizes infrastructures as world-sustaining relations that configure both human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Whether we speak of roads, rivers, pipelines, or data cables, infrastructures are always mediating environments: they connect and separate, enable and impede, and through these patterns of circulation and distribution, they shape how beings inhabit and sense the world. All infrastructure, therefore, can be understood as communicative and medial.

Jussi Parikka proposes understanding infrastructures as media ecologies, which can be understood as material assemblages in which technological, environmental, and cultural processes co-evolve.⁴ This ecological turn reveals media systems not merely as channels of information, but as planetary processes of energy, materiality, and maintenance. Lisa Parks’ media infrastructures foreground the physical and ecological dimensions of communication, emphasizing physicality and materiality, processes of distribution (rather than production and consumption), and transterritorial sites.⁵ Her notion of infrastructural imaginaries offers a critical method for mapping how infrastructures are imagined, located, and governed, stimulating new ways of conceptualizing the processes and effects of media distribution. Infrastructures thus emerge as the living mediations that organize life itself. Following Parks’ idea of medianatures as the entanglement of natural and technological ecologies,⁶ and Carse’s notion of infrastructuring as the ongoing negotiation between nature and technology,⁷ infrastructures can be conceived as continuously evolving processes in which material, biological, and cultural forces are intertwined; as Lemke suggests, they are simultaneously "the matter of government" and "the government of matter."⁸

A political ecology of infrastructure must therefore attend to both the monumentality and mundaneness of these systems: their power to connect and separate, to regulate flows and perceptions, to sustain some forms of life while exhausting others. Following Foucault’s insight into infrastructures as the canalization of circulation and the coding of reciprocal relations,⁹ we can understand infrastructural mediation as “a question that is political as much as it is ecological.”¹⁰ Whether conceived as roads or radio waves, infrastructures are communicative terrains where the boundaries between nature and technology, human and non-human, life and system, are continuously composed and recomposed.

The dialogue between human and more-than-human infrastructures displays a constant of our times: are we able to expand our notions of cross-communication into something more adaptive and relational that overcomes some of the many (deadly) impasses that Western techno-modernity has caused for the planet? Or do we continue knocking our heads on technocratic walls sedimented in the “looming logic of geo-engineering or technomanagerial fixes”?¹¹ Unfortunately, we see the first more in critical theory and some niches in the arts, while the second still dominates policy and applied research.

In the tension between critical imagination and technocratic application, listening acquires a particular force: to listen to infrastructures is to enact, rather than assume, the natureculture of mediation itself,¹² to practice a responsiveness that moves beyond the dead ends of naturalism and technocracy toward forms of awareness that register how the material grounds of communication shape the conditions of living and sensing together.

Ecological radio,¹³ as many other practices orbiting acoustic ecology, inevitably has a thread connecting to R. Murray Schafer’s notion of soundscapes¹⁴. Generally, projects that combine both ecology and radio attempt to raise environmental awareness through listening to soundscapes, hoping to contribute to multispecies preservation, or at least, to preserve threatened worlds in sonic form. However, Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape has been criticized for its roots in binary and naturalist assumptions about the environment, largely shaped by European and North American worldviews.¹⁵ Like many strands of environmentalist discourse, Schafer’s work treads precarious ground in its notions of wilderness, pristine natural purity, and their opposites, as well as in its framing of ecological conservation and protection. Schafer’s notions of noise, quietness, and “unnatural” sounds, alongside frequent use of gendered allegories that position humans as “men” and nature as a feminized object, have been critiqued by Annie Goh as sonic naturalism,¹⁶ by Marie Thompson as aesthetic moralism,¹⁷ and by Tara Rodgers for reproducing stereotypically masculinist and colonialist histories.¹⁸

While field recording traditionally involves capturing and containing sound as an object—something extracted from its environment and relocated into archives, compositions, or exhibitions—live transmission foregrounds continuity, contingency, and relation. The act of recording has often been entangled with the extractive logics of colonial knowledge production: the microphone as a tool of capture, inscription, and possession. In contrast, live radio and audio streams resist closure. They unfold in real time, remaining bound to the temporalities and material conditions of the places from which they emanate. Listening becomes less about collecting and more about sustaining attention: less about owning sound and more about being in its presence.

Collective listening is a premise of radio—even if such collectivity is dispersed—rather than the individualized listening of on-demand media. And this collectivity also emanates out of an understanding that the sonic environment is shared and collectively produced, inhabited, and perceived by human and more-than-human actors, which is known as the acoustic commons. In terms of listening, we call attention to the live, durational ecological transmission projects such as Locus Sonus¹⁹ and radio.earth,²⁰ which offer another way to engage with environments: slowly and over time, including the possibility to return, to notice nuance and change; this is a marked difference from bioacoustic monitoring from a scientific perspective, for which sound becomes quantifiable data. Ecological radio can also relate to sound transmission as part of material, energetic, and relational systems. Some approach radio not merely as a medium for and about the environment, but as a medium within the environment: an active participant in the circulation of matter, energy, and information across human and more-than-human worlds.²¹

Along those lines, Radio Otherwise is an ongoing artistic-research collective that explores the plurality of experiences in radio-making through ecological thinking. Our work favors reception over transmission, attentive to more-than-human radio ecologies—including solar, atmospheric, and environmental signals—as well as the material infrastructures, histories, and spatialities of radio. Navigating free, community, and MiniFM radio practices, and informed by decolonial and feminist perspectives, Radio Otherwise foregrounds situated relationalities across human and non-human actors, linking radio with experimental bioacoustics, media ecologies, and critical environmental awareness.

As a collective, we locate our practice within Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges”: listening from somewhere, not everywhere.²² Our positions, as artists with access to specific technologies, infrastructures, and institutional contexts, shape what and how we hear. Acknowledging this situatedness is part of our method: rather than seeking an impossible neutrality, we approach listening as a relational and accountable act, attentive to the asymmetries of power and access that structure who can transmit, who can listen, and under what conditions.²³ Following decolonial and feminist scholars such as Anna Tsing, we understand infrastructural listening as both a privilege and a responsibility. As an engagement tied to epistemic privilege, it must continually negotiate its complicity within the systems it seeks to expose.²⁴

Working otherwise often leads to technological “failures” or disruptions, unstable streams, or interruptions, which we embrace as part of the practice rather than as faults to be corrected. Such moments often bring discomfort, not only for us as practitioners navigating unstable conditions, but also in the listening experience itself, where harsh sounds, noise, or distortion can unsettle habits of perception and expectation. These instabilities become moments of exposure: when infrastructures falter, their material and political underpinnings become perceptible. In handling such circumstances live, we treat the breakdown not as loss but as method, an act of disalienation that repositions listening as a critical, adaptive practice of cohabiting with the systems and environments that shape, sustain, and exceed us.

Our interventions range from nomadic outdoor studios and small-scale transmission ecologies to experimental broadcasts that highlight the interdependencies of signals, bodies, ecologies, and knowledge production. As artists and privileged listeners, we feel we are in a responsible position to do things otherwise. In a time when "doing otherwise" has become a diffuse gesture, easily captured by reactionary or conspiratorial movements that use media to fuel isolation, distrust, and radical individualism, our approach insists on reclaiming otherwise as an ethics of responsibility rather than refusal.

Since 2022, we have developed four projects consecutively that share the conceptual frame of infrastructures of flow.²⁵ These projects materialize Radio Otherwise’s approach to ecological radio, translating its theoretical commitments into situated, durational practices of listening, reception and transmission. Each intervention foregrounds the entanglement of human, technological, and more-than-human actors, using live, generative, and participatory formats to reveal the interconnectedness of energy, matter, and information that shape environments.

Infrastructural Eddies (2024) was an intervention by Radio Otherwise that took place on the Insola at Rummelsburg Bay in Berlin. At the invitation of Soundcamp, as part of their project S AM FM. Experiments in Ecological Radio, we set up a temporary outdoor radio studio on the floating platform, with the intention of tuning in to the plurality of waves in the area—electromagnetic and watery—for a durational transmission from 11am until 4pm. Building on the modes of attention developed in our first two projects, Infrastructural Eddies highlighted radio as a spatial practice attuned not only to sound and electromagnetic flows but also to the contested politics of access and use of waterways and electromagnetic space. These floating methodologies emphasized Rummelsburg Bay as one of the last free spaces in Berlin, where communities and collectives like the Insola insist on intervening, experimenting, and negotiating these political ecologies in real time.

Over the course of the work, we tuned into multiple frequencies using different devices: hydrophones suspended from the platform revealed an underwater world where motors roared, canoes glided, and currents shifted—a soundscape dominated by human activity despite the sensors’ ability to capture the stirrings of freshwater life. A handmade copper-loop antenna extended listening into the electromagnetic spectrum, mostly registering nearby devices and networks but occasionally catching faint atmospheric clicks. A geophone traced low-frequency vibrations—the tremors of our steps and the structure itself—while other signals folded into the mix: a walkie-talkie intercepted construction workers’ communication: “nach rechts… halt! Perfekt!”; their coordination of cranes drifting through the air as sonic evidence of the bay’s ongoing redevelopment. A streambox²⁶ relayed the water’s collisions and the subtle presence of shore life—joggers, residents, children—while contact and directional microphones added layers via microFM. Together, these devices produced a dense acoustic ecology where environmental, technical, social, and more-than-human elements intertwined. This convergence of bioacoustic and electromagnetic listening foregrounded the site’s plural trans-scalar ecologies,²⁷ revealing how overlapping sonic and transmission spectrums expose the interconnectedness of environments.

Slowing Down to Infrastructures (2025) was a six-month-long, generative web radio project commissioned for the 2025 Copenhagen Architecture Biennial, which was themed on Slowness. Broadcast live, with five streamboxes installed at the Copenhagen Architecture Forum, the work transformed the office and gallery space into both a studio and an instrument, attuning to the everyday infrastructures that sustain it. Airflow through vents, electromagnetic activity around routers, the pulse of water pipes, and vibrations from the street were streamed alongside the hum of machines and muffled traces of life and voices in the background of what we considered the protagonist: the subtle, often unnoticed infrastructures themselves.

Interwoven with these live transmissions was the series Conversations on Slowness, a series of nine recordings by guests inviting guests into conversation, each beginning from a simple premise: to reflect on slowness and temporality in a single, unedited take. The exchanges moved at their own pace, contrasting with the urgency of most commercial media. Fragments of these conversations were interspersed within the ongoing soundscape, contributing to an evolving composition that drifted between speech and infrastructure, between listening and reflection.

The generative radio format was technically composed by integrating the live streams with snippets from the Conversations on Slowness. These elements were processed and arranged in SuperCollider to create a dynamic, generative composition that continuously shifted over time. The system modulated frequencies, periodicity, rhythm, and cycles, allowing the program to evolve organically while maintaining a subtle dramaturgy across the six-month broadcast.