ABSTRACT
Interdisciplinary approaches drawing from sound art, more-than-human geography and urban ecology offer the potential for recording, mapping and creatively remaking water flows through urban environments using sound. Drawing on the experiences of two art-geography projects involving the sonic cartographies of urban water networks, Water of Life (2013) and Surface Tension (2015), this chapter outlines some possibilities for engaging sonically with freshwater aquatic systems. It focuses on the carrying streams of human and non-human sounds in and around water – described together here as fluid-sound. As yet, there has been little academic work that explores the potential of sound as a creative geographical method to explore and address modern water networks. This is, perhaps, surprising. The fleeting, malleable nature of sound, particularly when abstracted from its source and reworked, makes it a valuable creative medium to address concepts of hybridity, complexity and entanglement, both in the characteristics of the urban water networks, and as a proving ground for the production of new grounded theories in response to novel Anthropocene natures. Informed by non-representational theory, this chapter presents a more-than-human approach for engaging with aquatic systems through sound, presenting three techniques for recording and collaboratively re-imagining fluid-sounds.
