Conference Agenda

What are the moral conditions that enable a life to matter as a life and how do music and gender play into those conditions? By drawing parallels between the symphony’s elevation as the pinnacle of human culture and the reception of humpback whale song since the 1970s, in this talk I argue that humpback whale song became culturally relevant within a Western context because of the specific musical aspect they contain—large-scale form, thematic repetition, and extended duration, —as well as what they ask from the listener—protracted concentration, emotional engagement, and intellectual discernment. Centering personhood as interconnected with meaningful musical output, I show how culturally and societally the composing humpback whales had to necessarily be males, a gendered framework that derives both from evolutionary theories and Western classical music ideologies embedded with nineteenth-century values. I highlight the coherence of discriminatory gendered ideologies throughout species, including humans, and how their musical significance entered meaningfully into the sciences and musicology only after second wave feminism. For example, just as female bird song has long been excluded from large birdsong surveys, female and collective whale vocal expressions have been marginal and relegated to the non-song realm. Ultimately, I address how humpback songs function semantically and culturally similarly to symphonies and how their framing, discovery, and study, repositioned whales not as bodies to be extracted as lifeless profit, but rather as mysterious and endlessly fascinating non-human pinnacles of intelligence.

Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) sing and navigate in close relationship with sea ice, using leads and areas of thinner ice to surface, breathe, and orient across the deep Arctic winter. This paper asks what happens to bowhead vocal culture when the acoustic environment it depends on is itself disappearing. As Arctic sea ice diminishes in extent and seasonal duration, the underwater soundscape bowheads sing into is changing materially: ice cover that once structured sound propagation is replaced by open water increasingly filled with shipping traffic and industrial noise. Drawing on phenomenological approaches to listening and sound, alongside recent Arctic bioacoustic research documenting the scope and seasonal variability of bowhead song, I argue that climate change should be understood not only as a threat to bowhead populations but as an ongoing transformation of the acoustic conditions under which their song exists at all, and a loss of acoustic habitat that runs alongside, and is entangled with, the loss of physical habitat. This reframing resists a purely biological account of vocal behavior and instead treats bowhead song as an aesthetic and relational practice unfolding within a specific, rapidly vanishing sonic environment. I position this argument within the blue humanities and within ecomusicological work on soundscape and environmental change, asking what ethnomusicology's tools for listening to musical environments can offer climate research as a model for thinking climate loss through sound rather than only through visual or statistical registers of disappearance.

This paper explores how sonic and musical practices engage nuclear landscapes as sites of ecological vulnerability, ethical responsibility, and more-than-human relationality. Drawing on theories of nuclearity, it examines how music and sound participate in forms of environmental attunement and response in a nuclear age, particularly in contexts shaped by the ongoing ecological afterlives of Soviet nuclear modernity. The paper juxtaposes works by composers shaped directly by late Soviet cultural contexts such as Alfred Schnittke’s Nagasaki with transnational and contemporary reinterpretations of nuclear catastrophe, including Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for the Chernobyl miniseries and recent experimental projects such as Galya Bisengalieva’s Polygon and Marina Herlop’s Pripyat. This grouping allows me to trace how nuclear imaginaries move from late Soviet artistic responses to catastrophe toward twenty-first-century ecological and media-saturated reinterpretations across Eurasian and contexts. Rather than treating these works as representations of nuclear sites, I ask: How do they make nuclear environments sensible? How might listening itself function as a mode of engagement with irradiated landscapes and damaged ecologies? Methodologically, the paper turns to sound ethnography not only as an analytical framework but as a listening practice attentive to environments, bodies, infrastructures, and more-than-human agencies. Instead of positioning sound as a reflection of place, I approach it as a medium through which nuclear landscapes are mediated and imagined.

This paper explores how sounding and listening provide ways of imagining and knowing and modes of enacting human relationships to plant life. Through ethnographic and archival research, I examine practices and discourses related to plant-data sonification from the 1970s and the 21st century, showing how human-plant relations reveal, reflect, and inscribe imaginaries about consciousness, communication, sound, and the more-than-human world. I situate my research in relation to 19th and 20th-century alternative religious practices, cybernetics, and what Theresa Castro refers to as the “1970s Plant Craze” (2020), a milieu in which plants were considered intelligent and sensitive to human thoughts and feelings. I ask how contemporary plant-data sonifiers construct meaning through listening to plants, and why they consider sonic plants a unique challenge to normative boundaries between species and conceptions of nature, culture, and consciousness. This research contributes to scholarship on the entwinement of nonhumans with human musicking (Seeger 2017; Levin 2006; Steingo 2024), the “plant turn” in humanities scholarship and popular literature (Hall 2011; Kimmerer 2013), and recent interest in the vegetal within music studies (McGhee 2024). I assert that while sounding and listening to plants provokes imaginaries of a consciousness unbound by species and positions plants as authors, collaborators, and agents within sonic assemblages, such efforts to decenter the human may actually reinforce the anthropocentrism they seek to challenge.