The study of how sound shapes human–bird relations allows researchers examine how sonic practices define, negotiate, and unsettle the boundaries between human and non-human worlds. While ecoacoustic approaches frame avian–human relations as a series of interactions in which sound functions as both a biological bridge and a site of environmental tension, acoustemological perspectives foreground a dialogic engagement with the more-than-human rather than mere imitation. Less examined, however, is how artistic experimentation grounded in territorial coexistence intertwines human and avian sonic spheres, generating nuanced understandings of musicality and relational listening that challenge interspecies boundaries. This paper analyzes how interactions with the bay wren (Cantorchilus nigricapillus) and the great kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus) have informed the works of Latin American composers Simón Castaño and Adina Izarra, to explore how experimental music challenges anthropocentric assumptions about musical agency and authorship. Drawing on the notion of sentipensante beings—subjects who think and feel in integrated, relational ways—it approaches both humans and birds as embodied participants in shared acoustic ecologies. From this perspective, birds are not reducible to sonic resources, nor are composers detached mediators; rather, both participate as sentipensantes whose creative practices emerge through affective attunement, situated listening, and ecological entanglement. Ultimately, by engaging birds as co-present and co-constitutive agents, these works exemplify how reciprocal perception and coexistence can position experimental music as a critical site for reimagining music-making as a multispecies encounter and relational epistemology.

This paper argues that the musical anthropomorphizing of horses at a dressage riding competition in the UK (where riding skill was demonstrated through the performance of intricate riding movements to the accompaniment of a music track) afforded the staging of kinship—specifically, the kinship between a mother and daughter and between the women and their horses—as a matter of pedigree. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the 2018 British Dressage Winter Championships, the paper examines the performance of a young rider who competed using the same Glenn Miller music track to which her mother had previously ridden. In contemporary dressage culture, musical accompaniments to riding are typically bespoke tracks tailored to the personality of a specific horse and the tempo of its gaits. The rider’s reuse of her mother’s track—originally designed for a different horse—therefore raised questions about sound’s use as a tool by which to measure and compare bodies. The paper situates this ethnographic moment within scholarship on equestrian culture and pedigree (Cassidy 2002; Dashper 2017), animal studies debates on anthropomorphism (Parkinson 2020), and (ethno)musicological research on musicality and nonhuman animals (Mundy 2018; Steingo 2024). Building on the work of geneticists Jablonka and Lamb as well as feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, the paper also aims to move beyond listening for pedigree, defined as the measurement and control of blood’s flow across generations, through its theorizing of “epigenetic listening”—an acoustemology that listens for the emergent, multispecies processes by which kinship might be nurtured otherwise.

It is one of the classic tales of neuroscience. In the early 1980s, Fernando Nottebohm asked why canaries sing a new song every year. In order to answer this question, Nottebohm raised twenty male canaries over the course of the year, strategically killed them at varying moments during their song cycle, and examined slices of their brains. The result was astonishing: over the course of a year, nearly 30% of a male canary’s brain appeared to die and regenerate. The classic tale, however, is incomplete, for it is missing critical voices. These include the canaries’ songs, which were ostensibly the original subject of the study. Years later, those songs fueled Nottebohm’s regrets about his dead canaries. On closer inspection, his regrets are complicated by yet another missing voice, that of a young woman who was struggling to succeed in his laboratory at the time of the study. In this talk, I draw on the theme of silenced voices shared across our panel, suggesting in counterpoint with recent work by Marion Thomas that the emotional conflicts exemplified by animal laboratory science provide a compelling model for re-thinking the relationship between discovery, reason, and emotion in scientific knowledge-making.

The advent of sound studies dramatically destabilized ethnomusicology’s first assumption, “music.” What about ethnomusicology’s other assumption, however, “the human”? This talk highlights the urgency of addressing this question by glossing the many different theoretical currents employed by recent scholars. Rather than taking separately issues of animal communication or musicking; sound and the environment; Black and Indigenous ontologies of sound; and creative methodologies, this talk argues that the collective force of such interventions challenges the very foundations of the field. More than simply summary, however, this talk also addresses the institutional forms of knowledge production have historically precluded such disciplinary shifts, including discussion of how nation-wide protests on college campuses, which occurred concurrently with the symposium that inspired this panel, highlight some of the concerns discussed throughout. Without proposing definitive answers, this talk suggests a pressing need to think across disciplinary boundaries to address the future directions of the field of ethnomusicology.