Jacob Miller Smith, Doctoral candidate, Composition & Acoustic Ecology Researcher
Listening With – the theme of 2019’s World Listening Day, calls to attention the need to explore what we are listening with and the importance of not listening for. Particularly unwelcome may be the presence of unpleasant sounds commonly referred to as noise in our environment. These unwanted sounds are just as valid as sounds that many people may prefer. To truly understand a sonic environment they must not be quickly dismissed. Urban sounds —the oppressive roar of a truck engine, the sharp pulse of a coffee shop blender, the late night restless wandering of an upstairs neighbor shape the sonic world in a way that is different than oft-touted calming and natural sounds of wildlife. This begs the question, however, why one should subject oneself to unwanted and stressful sounds.
The point is not to inundate oneself with a barrage of unpleasant sounds but to recognize and accept those sounds as a part of a specific sonic environment, understand their place in it, and perhaps reflect on what they mean for it. This kind of acute awareness can serve to make us tolerate these sounds and allow them to exist as necessary part in an acoustic ecosystem. To dismiss such sounds as noise poses a risk: that of romanticizing sound to the detriment of the observer who wishes to listen with.
As I struggle daily with such sounds, I incorporate them into my listening practice and attune myself to them. Thus they become less jarring and hurtful and at the same time I am more aware of their context. In practicing acceptance and understanding of all sounds, I also become more conscious of my own contributions to my sonic environment, whether they be heard as pleasant or not . This is not to say that relaxed and passive listening should be frowned upon, as this is one of many modes to perceive our sonic surroundings.
For World Listening Day, let us all explore listening with, and not listening for.
Our sonic environments consist of more than sounds of organic materials and living beings, and sounds we are responsible for. It is important to refrain from romanticizing our sonic environment if we wish to truly understand and hear it.
The theme for World Listening Day 2019 is “Listening With,” as created by composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood:
“Listening with…
listening with the neighborhood
at midnight, and again at dawn.
Listening with an awareness that all around you are other life-forms simultaneously listening and sensing with you – plant roots, owls, cicadas, voles – mutually intertwined within the web of vibrations which animate and surround our planet.”
I find the idea of “listening with” intriguing. Through my own research, weekly soundwalks, and a Deep Listening Intensive, I’ve been encouraged to listen to, with, and through my body. During a past listening meditation, I distinctly remember sitting at my kitchen table and being aware of the refrigerator’s low groans, mid-range hums, and higher crackles in and through my left lower ribs with an almost dull tingling sensation. Something about the fridge sounds resonated clearly in my body, helping me better hear the range of sounds emanating from the machine. Feeling how my body interacted with the sounds also heightened my sense of sharing the space, both sonically and physically. Sensing how the groans, hums, and crackles moved through the room and my body, I could then reflect on how my own sounds pass through spaces and impact others.
This type of reliance on embodied and multi-sensory listening – detecting changes with our skin, absorbing sound in our bodies – elevates the listening experience. It can also better connect us to ourselves and the space we’re in. Listening with our bodies to discover resonance can reveal how we’re feeling, if we’re holding tension, how we’re moving through a space, and how that space is interacting with us. “Listening with” allows for the gathering of information, which in turn can bring about empathy and care for the intertwined vibrations of people and spaces around us.
The American Bird Conservancy warns that “Hundreds of bird species are on track toward extinction. If these species blink out, we’ll have just one species to blame: ours.” Climate change, habitat loss, overfishing, collisions, and invasive species are among the reasons for the dwindling of almost a hundred bird species in the Americas. What will this mean for our sonic environments?
The extinction of North America’s incredibly abundant passenger pigeon in 1914 was a sonic sea-change. Simon Potagon, a member of the Potawatomi tribe and well-known writer in the 19thcentury, remembered the mesmerizing and awe-inspiring sounds of the me-me-og – the wild passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius). To Potagon, the spring flocks of hundreds of thousands of travelling pigeons sounded as if “an army of horses laden with sleigh bells was advancing through the forests towards me” and like “distant thunder” getting “nearer and nearer.” He found the sound of such large flocks to be as stirring as that of the “grandest waterfall in America,” when “these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven.” He enjoyed the sounds of their gurgles, their flapping wings and their feasting on nuts and seeds in the forest.
Wisconsin’s newspaper Commonwealthreported in 1871 that hunters dropped their guns when confronted by the avian wall of sound: “Imagine a thousand threshing machines running under full headway, accompanied by as many steamboats groaning off steam, with an equal quota of R.R. trains passing through covered bridges – imagine these massed into a single flock, and you possibly have a faint conception of the terrific roar.”
When the settlers discovered that this bird was easily obtainable and delicious protein it only took about fifty years for the passenger pigeon to go extinct. Martha, the last member of a the species that once made up a quarter of North America’s bird population, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914 Martha died in Cincinnati Zoo (for more information see the Smithsonian Magazine
No field recordings or transcriptions of the pigeons’ calls are extant. Bohemian-born American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861) who witnessed large passenger pigeon flocks when he settled in America dedicated a symphonic work to this bird: The Columbiad or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons(1858). Listen to a live performance of the work by the University of Wisconsin Symphony Orchesta