Listening to and through petrosonics

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Notes

1. Brandon Labelle, in his book Acoustic Justice: listening, performativity, and the work of reorientation (2021), explores sound as a means of recognition and listening as a bestowing of attention. Listening, according to Labelle, assists in creating a “holding environment” that “allows for remembering: to remember oneself as being human, as being full of emotion both accessible and inaccessible; it is to engage in the capacity to care, which is also affected by remembering what has been lost and what can be lost still” (2021: 9).

2. “Anthropocene” was popularised by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, who used the term during a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, February 2000. Later that year, Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (who had used the term previously in the 1980s), co-authored Crutzen PJ, Stoermer EF. The “Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter. 2000 May; 41:17–18.

3. Recorded by Obony and the Base Boys (Ikot Akpa Nkuk, December 2007). For more information on the project, see Unmasked: Spirit in the City exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, by Port Harcourt-born British-Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa and Oxford anthropologist David Pratten, https://prm.web.ox.ac.uk/spirit-in-the-city.

4. See Bates “Resource Ecologies, Political Economies and the Ethics of Audio Technologies in the Anthropocene”. Popular Music 39(1): 66–87, (2020).

5. See especially Chapter 7: Dewitt and Titon’s “Singing for la Mêche Perdue: Reconciling Economic, Environmental, and Cultural Imperatives in Louisiana” and Chapter 8: Hurley-Glowa and Titon’s “Alaska Native Ways of Knowing and the Sustenance of Musical Communities in an Ailing Petrostate”. In T. J. Cooley (Ed.). 2019. Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy ;(pp. 87–100). University of Illinois Press.

6. For a comprehensive review of the installation, see Harrison Montgomery & Megan Jeanne Gette (2023) ‘Listening to extraction’, Sound Studies, 9:1.

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Notes on contributors

Lara Weaver

Lara Weaver is a doctoral candidate at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) as the recipient of a Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Drawing upon the situational knowledges of practice research, her thesis investigates the capacity of sound to observe and give voice to changing ecosystems: specifically, the sound of ebullition in Northern Irish peatlands and the ‘singing’ sand dunes of the Empty Quarter (UAE). Lara graduated with a First from St John’s College, University of Cambridge, with a BA (Hons) in Music, after which she continued at Cambridge with an MPhil in Musicology and Composition, which was awarded with Distinction.