Conference Agenda
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Birds, Bats, and Broken Ice: Rethinking the “Human” of “More-than-Human Musicking” (Roundtable and ESG Business Meeting)
Session Topics: AMS
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Birds, Bats, and Broken Ice: Rethinking the “Human” of “More-than-Human Musicking” (Roundtable and ESG Business Meeting) Organized by the AMS Ecomusicology Study Group. The AMS Ecomusicology Study Group invites new and current members to our business meeting! We will open with a roundtable discussion on the topic of more-than-human musicking and follow with our annual business meeting. The last decade of musicology has witnessed an outpouring of work that interrogates music’s relationship to climate change and environmentalism. Such work highlights the material challenges that accompany global warming, including indictments about the popular music industry’s contributions to pollution and energy over-consumption (Devine 2019) or discussions of sustainable instrument-making traditions and ways of listening that arise in response to dwindling natural resources (Dirksen 2019, Smith 2015, Tucker 2019). These investigations also probe music’s usefulness in conveying experiential knowledge about environmental phenomena, largely in terms of musical narrative or representation of natural elements and landscapes (Grimley 2018, Saltzstein 2023, Von Glahn 2003). Further still, discussions of listening as a mode of deepening one’s environmental consciousness emphasize the need to cultivate an embodied and self-reflexive awareness that counters the extractivist and colonial logics that directly contribute to ongoing climate crisis (Haskell 2022, Robinson 2020). Nonhuman or other-than-human musicking has also emerged as a central voice in ecomusicology and other “music studies of the Anthropocene” (Chung 2023, Sykes 2019). Many of these conversations focus on communication and meaning-making across animal species (Feld 1982, Steingo 2024, Tomlinson 2023), in addition to situating bioacoustic studies of animal aural communication in conjunction with species preservation efforts (e.g., Bakker 2022, Caorsi et al 2023). Others demonstrate how animal soundings expose the complex dynamics involved in negotiating identity in terms of race, species, gender, and ability (Mundy 2018), while also signalling the generative potential of human-nonhuman musical collaborations (Rothenberg 2002, Sakakibara 2020). Often, these considerations of human-nonhuman musical entanglements work to blur nature-culture binaries that, despite our best efforts, can be unintentionally reified in ecomusicological scholarship (Ochoa Gautier 2016). This ESG roundtable responds to this more-than-human turn by considering the following: how does decentering the human in “more-than-human” or “nonhuman” musicking contribute fresh understandings of environments, soundscapes, and other multispecies entanglements? Across five 10-minute papers, presenters illuminate the musical and sonic contours of multispecies communities and relationships. Their insights span genre, materiality, and medium to demonstrate how music inhabits an often uncomfortable duality: one where music and its discourses sometimes bolsters while also undermining expectations humans have about species boundaries and anthropomorphism; the meaning of collectivity and collaboration with non-living entities; and what it means to be musical. Over the course of the roundtable, we ask how centering more-than-human voices, sounds, and songs – as opposed to the human ones that music studies has tended to prioritize – creates alternative possibilities for grappling with musico-environmental experiences. We look forward to have a vibrant discussion among presenters and attendees on these questions. Afterwards, we will hold our annual business meeting where we will welcome new members, address by-law questions, and lay the groundwork for future ESG activities. Presentations of the Symposium Sounding Nature, Transcending Sentiments: An Ecomusicological Perspective on Ancient Chinese Guqin Music "Flowing Water" (Liu Shui) stands as one of the most iconic and enduring pieces within the ancient guqin repertoire. It encapsulates the distinctly Chinese perception of nature, reflecting an idealized harmony between humanity and the natural world. This composition also embodies a profound cultural legacy that has resonated throughout East Asia for centuries. This presentation invites an immersive auditory experience, guided by a live performance by the presenter, offering deeper insights into how this ancient musical tradition expresses ecological consciousness, philosophical reflection, and the transmission of cultural knowledge through sound. Following the live performance, a case study of a contemporary guqin cultural site will critically examine how the symbolic significance of "water" continues to reverberate in modern China. The study will explore its manifestation in spatial design, cultural heritage practices, environmental awareness, and evolving lifestyles in the 21st century. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the discussion will investigate how traditional aesthetics and values are reinterpreted in contemporary sociocultural contexts. This paper contributes to the expanding ecomusicological discourse on non-Euro-American perspectives of the natural world by exploring how these worldviews are articulated through musical instruments, thematic compositions, and indigenous knowledge systems. Additionally, it considers the role of guqin music in promoting sustainability and cultural resilience, offering a nuanced understanding of traditional ecological wisdom within the framework of contemporary environmental challenges. Atmospheric Sovereignty: Reclaiming Multi-Species Relations in Hawai‘i Exotica In the years leading up to Hawai‘i statehood (1955-59), jazz musicians in the hotel bars of Honolulu created a genre of music marketed as “exotica.” With birdcall vocalizations and diverse global percussion instruments, exotica provided a soundtrack for touristic fantasies of tropical jungles. While exotica seems to emblematize the extractive designs of U.S. empire on Hawai‘i and the anthropogenic climate change it has wrought there, this paper tells a different story. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, I demonstrate that exotica’s birdcalls grew out of Native Hawaiian and Hawai‘i-Puerto Rican musicians’ reciprocal sonic relationships with Hawai’i birds and animal life. Even while working within a tourist-facing genre, musicians Arthur Lyman and Augie Colón used performance to establish anti-colonial cartographic relationships to Hawai‘i, emulating longstanding Kanaka Maoli strategies of “sonic sovereignty” (Reed 2019). As Renee Pualani Louis (2017) shows, ancient hula lyrics and choreography chart atmospheric networks of beings, environmental processes, and relationships in Hawai‘i in extreme detail. From the 1980s to the present, Lyman and Colón’s son, Lopaka Colón Jr., have incorporated the calls of endangered and extinct forest birds from around the Pacific in their performances, reimagining exotica as a conservation tool. Building on Hi‘ilei Hobart’s (2022) concept of “ambient sovereignty,” which asserts the Kanaka Maoli right to determine the thermal infrastructures of Hawai‘i, I argue that Lyman and Colón Jr. practice “atmospheric sovereignty” by claiming control over the affective and vibrational dimensions of Hawaiian space and multi-species relations. PawkieTalkie: Human-Pet Ventriloquism, Pet Voice, and Narrating the Domesticated Animal in Internet Audiovisual Media Human-pet ventriloquism in the form of the digital pet voice — or “petspeak”— is a mode of speaking with and through animals to convey our very human emotions and thoughts. The communicative and aesthetic use of pet voice is also a persistent soundmark of the social media soundscape, but it is not a novel communicative function exclusive to online culture. Manipulating the timbre, pitch, and character of their voice, using baby talk, and incorporating pet slang (e.g., sploot, bork, mlem, zoomies), pet owners play with vocal sounds to imagine what they think their pet might sound like if they spoke and sung like humans do, often anthropomorphizing and infantilizing their pets in the process. This practice isn’t exclusive to internet screen media. According to historian Katherine Grier, as early as the 19th century, people exchanged letters to each other in the voices of their pet companions (Grier 2015). Prominent Pet Influencers have also taken to sharing performances of their dogs using recordable sound buttons, like the brand PawkieTalkie, showcasing a novel way of training their dog’s communication patterns with commands and requests recorded in their owner’s voice and enhancing mental stimulation and bonding, while also reinforcing their desire to discover what their dog wants and needs. I examine the vernacular creativity of pet voicing and lip-sync utilized by internet user-creators, including prominent Pet Influencers, detailing the aesthetic, narrative, and communicative audiovisual strategies used to voice the animals deeply embedded in our lives and craft unique characters that give voice to pets. Bat Fest(s): Situating Science and the More-than-Human Recent scholarship has unveiled the role of colonialism, racism, and misogyny in constructing the species boundary (Boisseron 2018; Haraway 2008; Weaver 2021; Wynter 2000). In musicology and ethnomusicology, such claims have been extended to consider the implications of animal musicking, and by extensions the very definition of human “culture” (Mundy 2018; Harrison 2020; Steingo 2024). Yet how is the division between species – in particular, a scientific focus on comparison – enacted in vernacular performance spaces? This paper considers the performance of species divisions at festivals geared toward animal conservation, specifically focusing on bats. I draw from participant observation at four different bat conservation festivals across the United States: Bat Fest in Austin, TX; Bat Loco in San Antonio, TX; the Indiana State University Bat Festival in Terre Haute, IN; and Bat Fest in Gainesville, FL. I argue that the performance elements of these festivals, which combine live bats with music, food, merchandise, and costuming to varying degree, seek to elide human-animal boundaries through imitative and empathetic gestures. While such anthropomorphism is perceived as contributing to environmental efforts, it ultimately upholds species hierarchies and their attendant ideologies, calling into question its intended purpose. Examining the disconnect between discourse and practice offers a provocative inroad to reconsidering the construction of “the human” in scientific, musical, and vernacular performance spaces, contributing to broader academic discussions about the status of “the human” in the humanities. Breaking the Ice: Percussive Encounters with Glacial Soundscapes For over 500 years the outlet glacier Breiðamerkurjökull flowed across the landscape of southeast Iceland. It grew and grew, almost reaching the waters of the North Atlantic, until it reached its glacial maximum in 1890. Since then the glacier has retreated. Like a deflating balloon it has lost both horizontal and vertical mass. It has recessed. It has down-wasted. It has transformed into water and disappeared from sight. In other words, the glacier has melted. The end of this narrative is familiar. It is how we know glaciers worldwide today. And it is how we will know them in the coming years—for scientists now tell us that all of Iceland’s outlet glaciers will be lost within the next two human lifetimes. How then does this anticipated loss challenge or reify an anthropocentric worldview? And is there something that sound or music reveals about such unprecedented glacial change? This paper explores the data sonification work, 2124—an art-science collaboration between the author, APEX Percussion, and glaciological researchers in Hornafjörður, Iceland. The piece sonifies speculative data sets that track the future recession of Breiðamerkurjökull, so that listeners might hear the projected change-rate of the next century. Drawing from over two years of fieldwork documenting the sounds of Iceland’s glaciers and curating art-science projects, the author grapples with notions of environmental care and control; explores the efficacy of musical activism; and argues for the temporal (rather than spatial) significance of glacial soundscapes. | ||