Turbid Listening

At a time when the voice and vibrational force of other-than-human bodies is increasingly resonated through posthumanist and new materialist discourse as well as through the work of field recordists, this translation remains tied to human conditions, soliciting the question: what is at stake in the moment of amplification? Researchers have come to think and practice with concepts that focus on attunement between human and other-than-human sonic worlds or attempt to liquify their divisions altogether. Yet contact persists as a critical endeavor when one stays attentive to through which measures and based on which histories and materials the other-than-human is made intelligible. In the context of what Marisol de la Cadena calls “the one-world world,”¹ a world of colonial and extractive expansion that assimilates everything it touches, this text is concerned with when, how, and if one should listen (at all). What I want to point to, and perhaps materially rehearse in what follows, is the composition, the grit, the echo of a contact zone in which this question is approached through engagement with the material and its conditions of emergence.²

To situate a mode of listening that subverts logics of transparency from below, I propose the submerged condition of turbidity. Turbidity in a direct sense describes how cloudy or murky a substance appears by measuring the density of suspended particles and is used, for example, to describe pollution in bodies of water. My thinking along this term is indebted to the work of Bridget Crone, who, in her text “Turbid Images and Bodies in the Field,” links the notion to qualities of immersion and presence, resulting from an obscured sight.³ She points to turbidity as “a condition that has the potential to envelop us within it, sweeping us up into its midst. [...] Imagine swimming in cloudy water or being caught up in a dust storm.”⁴ The haze of suspended particles in her view disperses the gaze and opens the possibility for another kind of seeing. While Crone's work is primarily concerned with the optical and oriented towards another type of visuality, it is also deeply suggestive for rethinking modes of listening. Suspended particles not only obscure sight but also affect the propagation of sound waves and can cause frequency shifts. Turbidity, therefore, folds together the visual and the acoustic towards a shared mutedness. The listening I am exploring in parallel with Crone‘s conception is expanded towards embodied sensory immersion. Within this murkiness, the perceived is in confluence with the imaginary, with the barely audible, and the intentionally occluded. Most significantly turbid listening does two things: it immerses us in the material, attuned to texture, grain, and noise—while its opacity throws us back into the conditions from which it emerges.

Taking the idea of a more turbid listening seriously within the practice of field recording starts by attuning to the “snag” in the recording—the histories and technologies the practice depends on. Resounding a line of thought engaged in dismantling the vestiges of military and extractive projects in acoustic technologies, it becomes apparent that “media are never innocent.”⁵ Media theorists have mapped these entanglements, from the origin of vocoders as WWII encryption devices, to the haunting use of recorded sounds in the psychological warfare operations of the US Military in Vietnam.⁶ Mitchel Akiyama traces the violent reverberations in the apparatus of recording itself, pointing to a "latent predatory impulse" embedded in the history and language of field recording.⁷ He points, for example, to the invention of the “shotgun” microphone by Fritz Sennheiser, drawing on his cryptography experience from creating secure military communications systems for the German Army during WWII.⁸ The presence of predatory impulses carries through to present-day field recording practices, recalling those of a hunt. The “capture” of sound, the elimination of “unwanted background noise,” and the need for proximity to the “subject” without being noticed all point to a masculine, predatory approach in which the hunting rifle is replaced by the field recorder. This extractive epistemology, which presumes a right to access and capture, is what Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson calls “hungry listening”: a settler-colonial mode of engagement that demands universal access and transparency without regard for consent or protocol.⁹

If sensory technologies are employed in the field without an awareness of the material and ideological histories they carry, fieldwork risks becoming complicit in obscuring the legacies of an Anglo-European colonial project. At the frontier of the “one world world,” apparatuses—technological and taxonomical interventions—¹⁰ dissect and assimilate all other worlds to be rendered intelligible within colonial categories such as “man” and “nature.” Through the writing of Ana M. Ochoa Gautier, the geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser traces an account from the explorations of Alexander von Humboldt along the Magdalena River. Humboldt—who has been named the “forerunner of the acoustic ecology movement”¹¹ —notes in his diary an irritation with the “unbearable racket” of his local guides, while taking refuge in a supposedly quiet nature.¹² Significantly, Kanngieser points to how this aversion seeps into his philosophical framework, writing a colonial epistemology into being, through which the sonicity of Indigenous guides is framed as "noise" to be filtered out, making space for a de-peopled, silent "nature."¹³

The term turbidity itself does not appear from a void; it carries the sediment of a scientific metric. Turning to the scientific and aquatic context, from which the framework of turbidity emerges, extractive binaries and taxonomical operations echo through technologies of underwater sound detection. The main device for submerged listening, the hydrophone, was born as a military tool.¹⁴ With listening as the only means to pierce the opaque ocean, it was developed during the WWI era to detect the propeller and engine signal of enemy submarines, while the vital sounds of underwater communities such as shrimp crackling and echoes from the seabed, were dismissed as unwanted and disorienting noise.¹⁵

During the Cold War, the same logic was expanded by the US Navy's SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System), which deployed vast hydrophone arrays across the seabed of the North Atlantic. The system, detecting sounds up to several hundred kilometers in distance, rendered the ocean as a panoptic space penetrated by a military logic of surveillance.¹⁶ After the end of the Cold War, some of the hydrophone-mounted buoys were then repurposed for scientific use, such as “hydrothermal vent and whale vocalization studies, as well as the monitorisation of water temperature, underwater eruptions, and climate change.”¹⁷ When scientific projects today operate the devices for environmental conservation purposes, they activate a technology that initially proliferated a paranoid, predatory, and reductive mode of listening.

The hydrophone becomes the interface through which the complexity of ocean worlds is transduced into data. Alongside other sensors and AI, hydrophones are networked to create a version of a connected “digital ocean,” which ocean scientist and transmedia artist Mae Lubetkin critiques as a “techno-solutionist array of interconnection,” linking scientific, corporate, and military infrastructures.¹⁸ Datafication is fundamentally tied to a reductive logic of transparency, as Lubetkin notes; “to be converted into a data body—a recorded entity, a number—is most often to be misrepresented and rendered incomplete.”¹⁹ The ambition to render the ocean fully accessible, oftentimes driven by acoustic technologies, mirrors the same extractivist logic that drove Humboldt's explorations as well as military surveillance projects: to dissect all other worlds into intelligible components and to hunt down and clarify all that remains murky. These data-hungry projects are entangled with a crucial operation to position the ocean as a new frontier for resource extraction: the installation of the idea of the seabed as a terra nullius. This conception of the ocean as a vast and empty space for business ventures, first lobbied by the transatlantic cable industry,²⁰ is continued by the act of rendering aquatic lifeworlds as noise against the signal of a legible recording. There is a snag in the hydrophone that rubs up against the mission of both the military SONAR operator and the field recordist seeking attunement with submerged lifeworlds.

Turbid listening vibrates right here, when the grit of troubled legacies and silenced lifeworlds seeps into the contact zone. Here, the grit sublimates with the murky, noisy, and opaque unruliness of vital materiality. In this state—submerged, the senses somehow heightened but suspended—turbid listening does not always offer orientation nor a clean way out. Instead of clear and universal answers, within unsettled histories and disturbed audio-visuality, it opens up sensory immersion through the whole body and material engagement in an immediate context.

These formulations are soaked with their own histories. Crucially, when I, as a Western-educated researcher and artist, evoke concepts like relational listening or material engagement, I must acknowledge their indebtedness to Indigenous thinkers, traditions, and non-Western knowledges. Submerged in writing this text, I recall moments of listening with a hydrophone into the Cikapundung River in Bandung, alongside collaborators and friends from the Rakarsa collective and the Tjbogo community.²¹ Listening, here, was a way to open up exchange and discussions with the wider community around changing relations to the waters and its turbidity, which, in the case of the Cikapundung River, is linked to its pollution. Our friend, river activist and community leader Mang Dian, generously shared and involved us in his practice of engaging with turbid conditions. While he initiates efforts of waste management for the river and leads them with his knees deep in the clouded water, he adheres to specific Sunda protocols when he interacts with the current. The refusal to treat the river as a dead object after the catastrophic harm done to it—to stay with its messy condition through physical labor and relational protocol—resonates with what Ailton Krenak calls the “most vital act of resistance” to reductive and extractive forces: to insist on relatedness.²² As a guest, I am listening from a point of gratitude to what is shared, while remaining careful that this is not an invitation to copy, and therefore, appropriate these gestures, as much of their significance will stay opaque to me. Again, there is no easy way out. Listening to learn from each other remains a murky endeavor, and indeed it can fail. Yet the grit in the contact zone is not just the trace of historical violence, but also the noisy confluence of sovereign worlds that refuse to be assimilated. And perhaps to subvert the extractive listening that filters out the vital noise of lifeworlds—to listen turbidly—starts by committing to the difficult, murky, sometimes dissonant practice of listening for confluence, not avoiding, but yielding to its opacities.

Kosmas Phan Ðinh (he/him) is an artist and researcher working with sonic and spatial methods, through anti-extractive frameworks and personal mythologies.