Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds by Mickey Vallee

Author:Mickey Vallee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789813293274
Publisher: Springer Singapore

At what point does a boundary turn into a breaking point? Or, at what point does the edge of one boundary merge into the edge of another? Uexküll establishes his position against physiological accounts that would see organism and inter-organism behaviours as effects of stimuli reactions between different parts of an organism. Such accounts position organisms as isolationist, against their environment; further, they resist the notion that an organism possesses agency in the construction of its world and needs agency to converge with the edge of another world. Therefore, the organism does not create its world but, rather, its co-constructive capacity for going into other worlds.

Every melodic contour is an edge of another’s world. It is sound which accounts for the breakthrough between the edges of worlds. Sound, as I present it here, is the multiple transduction of individual energies from separate worlds, involving at once the assemblages of vocal tissue and environmental biotic and abiotic movements, including all other biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic sounds. When software has been programmed to detect a variant in sound, a transduction, this sonic information is registered significantly more accurately than with organic listening and pattern identification (though researchers often test-listen to samples to assure general accuracy). The use of this software introduces technical or mechanical listening (that is, inorganic) into the process of exploration and discovery. Longitudinal studies are often multisited and multimicrophoned, and record more sound (which is unstable and in flux) than it is possible to listen to organically, thus generating highly individual outcomes. Most important, they crystallize a node in a transacoustic community.

Imagination, to imagine, to image: these variations on a term point to the slippage (linguistically and otherwise) of image. Countless philosophical explorations of image and imagination can be found, but the question of how images come to be made through sound is quite another matter—one that is often grounded in routine empirics and the technics of observation. To reiterate the essence of transacoustic communities: bioacoustics researchers are less interested in sound as an object of analysis itself than they are in using sound (and expanding definitions of sound) for high-definition insights into environmental and social problems. As such, they open up sound to a cross-modality of senses and transductions.

We need to further think through sound as an emerging complexity with expanding boundaries. For instance, the world comprising the ghettoblaster and the mist-net releases us from thinking of a recording as a pristine reproduction of sound “as it is.” Instead, we think here through the image, imaging, and imagination of sound, as it affords the heard and the unheard; within and beyond, below and above normal human hearing, the capacity to live in resonance between objects and entities like ghettoblasters, mist-nets, nighthawks, and the global research teams that coalesce. There is more at stake than having the potential to capture more sound at a higher definition with a wider grasp at a longer rate, as the opening example of the common nighthawk suggests. To the extent that we imagine

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