Introduction to Sonic Urbanism: Listening to Non-Human Life

Currently, the value of “nature” to human life in cities is mostly framed in terms of psychological impact, disaster mitigation (green infrastructures against flooding or overheating, for example), and the creation of spaces for leisure or aesthetic consumption in the form of parks and gardens. However, the non‑human lifeforms put to work in these ways are not usually considered constituents in their own right. Non-human life is rarely “heard” within the public sphere, yet it encompasses so many registers of communication such as sounds, chemical signals, electromagnetic waves or performative rituals. These messages – and the beings and entities that “speak” them – are active agents in the production of multisensory, multiform urban habitats. The question for humans, who so often consider these habitats their sole domain, is: how can we be in dialogue beyond the human to share and build habitable urban worlds for all life?

Staging collaboration

Theatrum Mundi’s work has its genesis in the metaphor that provides its name: of the world as a stage. In one sense, for us, “theatrum mundi” is about the stage as a set of physical and cultural infrastructures that underpin public life. In another, it is a set of crafts that construct the reality performed on this platform: choreography, composition, writing, lighting and sound design. Artistic experiments have, at times, reshaped theatres, remediated the relationships of performers to audiences and also provoked critical transformations in the politics of cultural institutions. This is why, when it comes to the slow collapse of the habitable environment on earth, urbanists, scholars and artists must come together to imagine practices and structures that can propose solutions to counteract these processes.

This, in our small part, is what we have aimed to do in the colloquium series Crafting a Sonic Urbanism, whose third edition is at the origin of this book. A sonic urbanism – as Gascia Ouzounian describes in an interview in this volume – is not simply about soundscapes emerging in cities, but about sensibilities, crafts and values learned from, and with, sonic practices. In this sense, “art might most productively be engaged as a force that can reveal the hidden processes and forces that shape the city”, helping to expand urbanism beyond the epistemological boundaries that have fuelled its participation in driving ecological collapse. ¹ The Sonic Urbanism conference and publication series attempts to map out some of those crafts, to build a body of knowledge and a network of practitioners to support this expansion.

For the colloquium hosted by the Parisian stage for art and technology Gaîté Lyrique, via their streaming platform Plein Écran, in March 2021, we framed a call for contributions by asking artists, designers and scholars what can be learned by listening beyond human voices and towards the ways that animals, plants, or indeed radio waves and crystals, make themselves heard in cities. We were interested less in the soundscapes produced by non-human lifeforms as end points in themselves, than in what these acoustic sensibilities might reveal about urban ecologies.

An urbanising world necessitates the greatest possible range of means and collaborations for imagining and enacting situations that can sustain life in cities. Buildings and physical infrastructures are evidently not enough for the task, and nor are the specialisms that design them. We need new imaginative – and cultural –infrastructures through which to articulate problems these specialisms do not see, and work beyond them to construct solutions.

In asking these questions, we acknowledge our own limitations. The previous colloquium, titled The Political Voice, assumed that speech was a human phenomenon, as Arnaud Esquerre pointed out in his introduction to the colloquium. ²

How, he asked, could non-human speech be heard in the public sphere? How might the sounds of animals and plants, but also mineral and technological entities, be recognised as voices and engaged
in dialogue?

Hearing anew

The so-called Anthropocene – an era in which humans are thought to be the most significant force shaping the Earth’s geology – has been marked less by an absence of non‑human voices than by a deafness to them. Diverse forms of cultural production point to a popular moment of hearing anew – a mediatisation and circulation of non-human voices growing with the technologies that allow for this circulation. Could this moment capture the interest of many?

For example, an Instagram account that transcribes animal calls into western classical notation can gain 34,000 followers. ³ There’s a temptation to translate non-human voices into our own systems – of writing, of knowledge and of values. It’s a start – it makes us feel like we’re reaching out. People like to feel like they can read from the same hymn sheet. But this still keeps humans at the centre. We see this too in the ways city governments, such as the one in Paris, talk of rewilding cities as a way to combat heat and pollution; a way of mitigating the harm we do to ourselves. We see it in anthopocentric descriptions of mycelium networks as an “internet of fungus”: if trees use an internet too, our addiction to networked technologies must be natural. ⁴

There is an origin story known as “stoned ape theory”, according to which magic mushrooms may have helped us become human, and there’s a growing belief they may also now help humans learn to be human in a way that will not bring about our own demise. ⁵ Whether or not this is the case, these natural technologies for cognitive enhancement have emerged from the countercultural and been adopted as part of a techno-aesthetics of productivity and creativity. This represents a readiness for an expanded way of seeing the boundaries between human, animal, fungal and technological as blurred. Take, for example, @mycolyco, a TikTok account that gained over a half a million followers by sonifying the chemical interactions between fungal entities – making mushrooms talk. ⁶

Does this moment, in which so many people are encountering the more-than-human world with a profound sense of awe and urgency, signal an opportunity? What will it take to go beyond “rewilding” as an appropriation of nature towards wildness as an ethic for city‑making in which humans have faith in the creative and civic agency of other beings? Vinciane Despret, in her study of avian societies, offers one potential answer. Animals sharing a habitat tend to organise their voices into “temporal and acoustic niches”, giving each space and time to be heard by varying pitch, rhythm and tone. ⁷ Human society, on the other hand, has colonised the full spectrum, drowning out other signals.

Sonic urbanism is certainly not about making cities quieter, but one could aim for a rebalancing of the spectrum: moving away from the hegemony of human acoustics and frequencies that drown out other forms of life to open up room for a cacophony of diverse forms of presence. Despret, paraphrasing Donna Haraway, suggests that “multiplying worlds could make ours more habitable” – when we take less space, the world around us becomes richer. ⁸

Multiplying worlds

The contributions presented at Crafting a Sonic Urbanism and published across text, video and sound in this multimedia edition reveal these multiple worlds through and with non-human voices. Nuno da Luz listens out for “invasive” bird species, resisting the labelling of their vocalisations as “noise pollution” and using sound recording to connect them to broader communities of beings who cross borders to find home in a new city. Elahe Karimnia and Sepideh Karami experiment with script writing to share voice with the parrots of Tehran, exiles whose presence tells a story of migration and (lack of) belonging. Ahmed and Rashid bin Shabib broaden the spectrum of avian communication, from the acoustic to the magnetic, describing the ways the navigational abilities of pigeons intersect with, and are disrupted by, architectural and technological infrastructures.

The next chapters expand the urban world not only beyond the human but also beyond the animal. The colloquium’s call for contributions framed waves, signals and energy transfer as forms of life.9 In response, Matt Parker draws our ears not only to the vibrational qualities of crystalline materials used in communication technologies, but also their appropriation by both human and non-human communities in ritualistic or biological constructions that attempt to resist the effects of those technologies. The reflections of Juan Guillermo Dumay and Ruth Oldham place the noise “pollution” of electricity substations in a musical frame, rethinking them as voices singing out from an underworld of urban infrastructure. The compositions of Matilde Meireles explore similar ground and, as discussed through a conversation with Gascia Ouzounian, these creative engagements with energetic transfer connect us to material transformations and less visible layers of techno-ecology that underpin everyday life. Meanwhile, the performance presented by Monaí de Paula Antunes with Tushar Hathiramani, Seetal Solanki, and T‑Shine‑baba posits “radio gardening” as a way of cultivating associative structures across locations and species, while they grow in the fertile grounds of unplanned and emergent technological networks.

Alongside the colloquium, an exhibition of film works brought together audio‑visual essays with science fictions and artistic investigations – each of which is available to watch at sonic.city. The Sousrealists imagine a world after the “great cacophony” in which a “sonic apothecary” tries to offer cures for the conflict between “rival factions” in the production of soundscape. Along with Sara Rodrigues, who asks musicians to “recall sonic memories” and translate them through their voices and instruments, both films upturn ideas about non-human agency and speech. In the films by Natasha Nicholson and myself, recorded observations of bird and plant life – in London and Beirut respectively – form the ground for meditations on the design of a trans-species public realm. Nastassja Simensky, in line with other contributions focussing on the lively materialities of non-organic matter, conducts a sonic archaeology of nuclear waste and its “entanglements” with the ecosystem of the Blackwater Estuary.

How, then, do we bridge these worlds – animal and vegetable, human and non‑human, visible and invisible? Nicola di Croce’s survey of critical theory argues for the importance of listening out for disturbance, when disturbance is understood as the irruption of one world into another in ways that destabilise anthropocentrism and affirm the senselessness of the “nature‑culture” divide. The Listening With collective, building from their Instagram takeover alongside the colloquium, translate these stories and positions into a set of written scores appearing alongside every text in the volume – each a guide for a small act of attention that together hope for larger shifts in the ethics of city making and dwelling.

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