ABSTRACT
How to think with sound in the context of environmental history? And what does this mean in a world so dominated by the visual? This chapter takes up the question of sounding environments as an invitation to listen across time, and across different kinds of scientific and cultural practice: from the empirical work of acoustic ecologists to the experimentalism of contemporary sound art. The sonic imagination, the chapter suggests, is a provocative mode for thinking in some way beyond a human-centred world (and a human-dominated past). A brief history of birdcall recordings; microphones under melting ice caps; drone artists in the tropical rainforest; container shipping and underwater seismic blasting; the natural and cultural history of whale calls; increasing noise and gathering silence – this chapter sounds out these different worlds, tracing their entanglements of human and beyond-human history. If cultural and historical imagination in the Anthropocene “is mostly disengaged from the sonic tumult we create”, then the act of listening more carefully confronts us with the difficult paradox at the heart of this sensory crisis: that our species “is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches” (Haskell 2022: 318).
