Songs of Despair, Songs of Beauty: Multispecies Listening in the Anthropocene Age

In the age of the Anthropocene, all ecosystems, no matter how remote, are influenced by the power relations between humans, technology, and other organisms. Within the contact zone these power relations can be understood as geopolitical entanglements between species and technologies, played out amongst the landscape. I present a framework for listening that explores the contact zone as a site of human, technology, and multispecies relations. The framework is constructed of five enquiries for listening. The enquiries situate the listener as a dynamic actant within the soundscape and invite them to attend to the agential and political entanglements therein, via the lived sensations of their body. The enquires ask, how might the fleeting experience of sound be savoured through its ability to elicit experiences of embodiment, placing the listener within a web of relations between species and the systems of Earth.

Freya Zinovieff

Presented at the Livable Cities Symposium 2018, Anvil Center, New Westminster.