The Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota is filled with nonhuman sounds, yet it is famous among outdoor enthusiasts as a distinctly silent place. This “silence” functions as a sonic manifestation of settler-colonial wilderness mythologies (Cronon 1995, Gilio-Whitaker 2019), erasing historic and ongoing Ojibwe presence while trivializing animal sounds as part of a “natural” background to human experience. Drawing from my multispecies ethnographic research in the Boundary Waters, this paper examines animal sounds’ uneasy position within settler wilderness imaginaries of the area. While recreationists celebrate loon calls and wolf howls as important components of authentic wilderness experience, accounts abound of unwanted animals and their sounds. Bears and mice skillfully adapt to human presence as they sniff and squeak while searching campsites for food, and mosquitoes and birds buzz and call, disrupting moments of tranquil contemplation with unexpected or annoying sounds. These pesky animals fail to remain part of the timeless and controllable wilderness background settler visitors expect, disrupting silent Boundary Waters wilderness imaginaries and providing politically useful interruptions of settler colonialism’s looping self-perpetuation. I build on previous research critiquing listening practices that are both anthropocentric and colonial (Ochoa-Gautier 2020, 2023; Robinson 2020) by situating Boundary Waters animal sounds within Indigenous animal studies literature (TallBear 2011, 2019; Belcourt 2014; John 2019) to argue that the erasures of Indigenous people and animals in this place are not distinct but instead, co-constitutive. This paper thus contributes to growing ethnomusicological literature on human-animal sonic relationships as well as to decolonial sound studies.

Multispecies ethnomusicology has emerged as an important subdiscipline for thinking through the entwinement of sonic representation and power in a more-than-human world (Brabec de Mori and Seeger 2013; Graper 2018; Silvers 2020; Harrison 2020). Building on this research as well as studies of “the howl” in nineteenth-century European musical discourses (Ochoa Gautier 2015; Lockhart 2020), my paper examines figurations of human–coyote relations in the U.S. that oppose the extermination of coyotes as pests. It details how American popular music’s representation of (white) human–coyote kinship has contributed to the further marginalization of Native Americans; this is especially noticeable here given the significance of coyotes to many Native tribes through their knowledge of Coyote, the trickster (Vizenor 1990; Baldy 2015) and the interrelated forms of attempted eradication faced by Native Americans and coyotes under settler colonialism. Yet, drawing on Dylan Robinson’s work in Hungry Listening (2020) and scholarship on women’s vocality (Cusick 2010; Eidsheim 2015), this paper proposes that the imitation of coyote howls and yips in these settler performances may also inform a decolonial practice of performing more-than-human kinship (Haraway 2016). Emphasizing the sound of the vocal “break” between chest and head voice, these songs imbricate human and coyote vocalities while refusing to smooth over and thus render inaudible the “break” across species. I suggest that such examples of performed kinship—performances that work against the subsumption of existing hierarchies of species and racial difference under a “harmonious” surface—may help to unsettle settler colonialism.

Recent anthropological literature has questioned the label of “invasive” species in light of nativist politics (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Hartigan 2015; Raffles 2011; Tsing 1995). In particular, authors such as Van Dooren (2019) and Jerolmack (2008) have considered the ways that so-called “pest” or “trash” birds enact symbolic violences, conflicts over shard spaces, and the construction of human social categories. Such arguments, however, fail to consider the role of sound in constructing human-animal imaginaries, what Alexandra Hui (2018) has termed an “imagined ecology.” This talk examines a collaborative sound piece by Austin, TX composer Steve Parker, envisioned as an exploration of birding as aesthetic practice. Situating Parker’s piece within broader Austin mediascapes, Grackle Call (2017) considers how Austinites hear the Great-Tailed Grackle as a marker of gentrification, rapid urbanization, and the corporatization of a city with a countercultural reputation. Drawing from conversations with multiple participants involved in the project, I consider how grackle sounds mark the moment of arrival in Austin from distant locales; how embodying a bird constructs an Austinite identity; and how sounds enact “weirdness” in a city that is rapidly commercializing. This talk contributes to the rise of multispecies topics in ethnomusicology not just by examining the presence of animal sound in human musical spaces, but by considering how the very category of the human emerges through relations with other species.

Ajusco-Chichinautzin is a forested mountainous zone to the south of Mexico City which has witnessed mass-scale urban expansion in recent decades, especially by comparatively wealthy settlers from the capital. Where popular music has participated in the construction of this region as a site of desire for the wealthier classes, urbanization has altered habitats and disrupted the zone’s ecologies and economies of sound. The accelerating enclosure and sale of land has displaced wild animals, increased the number of domesticated animals, and drawn animals in captivity to a big cat sanctuary located in Ajusco-Chichinautzin until its closure in 2022. Aural interspecies entanglements in this context are unpredictable and often perverse. Newcomers’ noise complaints about local community festivities are expressed through the lens of animal welfare; the mistreatment of big cats is (mis-)recognized through attention to their calls; and the culling of rattlesnakes, endemic to the zone and vital to its ecosystems, misapprehends its aural expression of vulnerability as a threat.

This paper draws on Altrudi and Kelty’s (2022) argument that human entanglements with more-than-human animals in Los Angeles are characterized by arbitrary domination, in order to trace the arbitrary, changing auralities of interspecies care. It shows how sound is central to practices of differentiation between animals which are wanted (dogs, birds, big cats) and those which are unwanted (rattlesnakes), and how this differentiation connects to patterns of amplification and silencing of human voices. Beyond ecomusicology’s tendency to center audition within inter-species relationality, this case calls for listening “after entanglement” (Giraud, 2019).