Bat/Man: echolocation, experimentation, and the question of the human

ABSTRACT

Sound studies research has demonstrated that hearing and listening are culturally constructed and historically contextual. Yet the construction of normative perceptual states has historically relied on interspecies comparison, particularly in the laboratory. In this article Iconsider the ways that scientific imagining constructs more than human subjects, particularly the entanglement of bats and humansin the violent history of echolocation research. Beginning with the notion of “sonic sight”, I examine early echolocation experiments as well as the biomimetic application of echolocation by humans who are blind or visually impaired. I conclude with an analysis of “Bat/Man”, an experimental piece by Austin-area composer Steve Parker, whose work suggests that human-animal relations are a product of anthropomorphic imaginaries. Drawing from recent work in critical animal studies, I argue that biomimetic practices in the laboratory and in music are central to the production of a perceptual normate that constitutes the category of the human. At the same time, I invoke Thom van Dooren’s concept of a “multispecies ethics” to consider the violent asymmetries that are implicit in such forms of knowledge production (Van Dooren 2019, 11).

KEYWORDS:

• Bats
• critical animal studies
• echolocation
• disability studies
• experimental music
• Texas

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though it has been increasingly common to use the phrase “blind people” in academic literature, I use “person-first” language at the request of my interlocutors.

2. Goh’s theory also recalls Feld’s “echo-muse-ecology”, a predecessor to his “acoustemology” (Feld 1994).

3. Shortly after, Swiss scientist Louis Jurine conducted experiments that demonstrated the importance of the ear to echolocation (Galambos 1943, 155).

4. Additionally, Sterbing-D’angelo et al. (2011) have suggested that microscopic hairs on bats’ wings are directionally sensitive, meaning that Cuvier was not entirely wrong in suggesting that touch functioned in navigation during flight.

5. Griffin and Galambos’ experiments are often lauded as the “big bang” of echolocation research, despite the fact that echolocation was simultaneously articulated by Sven Dijkgraff of the Netherlands without the aid of electronic listening devices (Dijkgraaf 1960, 10; Griffin 1980, 4). Dijkgraaf was able to hear the faint audible frequencies in echolocation calls when observed in quiet settings. He termed these sounds “Ticklaut”, while Griffin and Galambos referred to it as an “audible click”. Griffin comments, “After the war we straightened out these matters by cordial correspondence, and at one point I even sent Dijkgraaf a live Myotis lucifugus to compare with the very closely related European species he had studied” (1980, 4).

6. They did not draw directly from Spallanzani’s writings, however, many of which remain unpublished. Rather, they worked from Louis Hahn’s work to recreate Spallanzani’s experiments at Indiana University in 1907. Hahn concluded that Spallanzani must have grossly exaggerated his results, “arguing fervently that Spallanzani must have exaggerated, since ‘not a single individual out of more than sixty belonging to five species that I have experimented with, have shown any approach to this degree of skill in avoiding objects [as small as a silk thread], even with the sense all intact” (Hahn 1908, 166).

7. Griffin’s involvement in the project, which was to attach bombs to live bats and release them over Japan, was minimal compared to some other players, although he did conduct experiments to test the weight carrying capacity of bats in service of the project (Couffer 1992, 35). In later years, when his work turned towards addressing the issue of animal consciousness, he regretted his part in the project.

8. I owe the concept of a performative interruption to many recent decolonial projects, among them Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening (2020), Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science (2021), and some truly outstanding work by my graduate students at Indiana University.

9. Images and video of the performance can be viewed at: https://steve-parker.net/bat-man

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julianne Graper

Julianne Graper (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington whose work focuses on bat-human relationality through sound in Austin, TX. In addition to forthcoming publications, in Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (Oxford University Press) and Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of Covid (Trickster Press), Graper has published with MUSICultures (2019) and in Songs of Social Protest (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). Her translation of Alejandro Vera’s The Sweet Penance of Music (Oxford University Press, 2020) received the Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society. She has presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the Doctoral Workshop for Ethnomusicology in Hildesheim, Germany, and as an invited speaker at Ball State University, Ripon College, and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.