Buzzing like a bee: simulation and cross-species empathy in sound installations

ABSTRACT

Recent sound installations at major international museums and public venues simulate the sounds of the European honeybee. In this article, I discuss how and to what effect “buzz” is used in selected installations in London, New York, and Montréal. In these immersive works, listeners are invited to “be a bee” and mimic behaviours such as flight, pollination, and hive activity. The works suggest that to behave like a bee is to empathise with a bee’s experience – an exercise that cultivates compassion and, possibly, activism. Reflecting on these installations and my experiences thereof, I consider the possibility of cross-species empathy through methods of simulation, immersion, and witnessing.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound installation
• honeybee
• empathy
• simulation
• immersion
• listening

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The Hive premiered at the World Expo in Milan, with the theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”, in 2015. The U.K’.s Royal Botanic Gardens acquired the sound installation for Kew on a temporary basis in 2016 and made it a permanent exhibit in 2017. Kew Gardens promotes “The Hive” installation on their website (Kew 2023), on YouTube (Royal Botanic Gardens 2017b), and in an exhibit catalogue (Royal Botanic Gardens 2017a). The artist Wolfgang Buttress features the installation and its reception on his website (n.d.).

2. Detailed information about the composition of The Hive’s soundscape is not offered to visitors at Kew. The amplified soundtrack is an aleatoric composition that samples from a pre-recorded library of melodic stems performed by Ensemble Be as well as recordings of birds and insects. Buttress uses vibration sensors to monitor the movement of a certain colony of honeybees and then feeds those live signals to an algorithm that translates bee activity to lighting effects and combinations of “harmonious stems” in C major that fluctuate in amplitude. The composition plays constantly inside The Hive, driven by a buzzing drone of the sound of a real honeybee hive. The real, or source, hive is located outside the boundary of Kew Gardens near the Plant Quarantine House. See Szarecki (2023) for a full discussion of Buttress’s sound design and Ensemble Be’s composition “ONE”.

3. The Hive’s structural design and algorithm-driven soundtrack bring to mind similar techniques (e.g., data sonification, photoacoustic conversion, listening to place) in other 21st century ecological sound art (see Ouzonian 2017; Bianchi and Manzo 2016).

4. Ensemble Be released a version of The Hive soundscape as the composition “ONE” on Rivertones label in 2016. “ONE” is available on Buttress’s website (n.d.) and on Bandcamp (Be n.d.).

5. Sonic arts in the twentieth century favour immersive techniques. See Dyson (2009) and Kahn (2001) for studies of immersion in art and media, and Schrimshaw (2015) for a critique of the “immersion orthodoxy”.

6. Schrimshaw takes issue with artists and sound theorists who exacerbate the “audiovisual litany” that professes inherent difference between the aural and the visual. Salomé Voegelin, for example, distinguishes between “sound’s ephemeral invisibility” and vision’s “apparent stability” (2010, xi).

7. Theodor Lipps (1903b) developed the concept einfühlung (literally, “in-feeling”) to conceive how humans understand art through “inner imitation” of mental states, emotions, or experiences perceived in the aesthetic object. Lipps’s Aesthetik (1903a, 1905) is foundational to theories of aesthetic empathy. Theorists of aesthetic empathy over the last century posit that humans appreciate art by projecting themselves into the aesthetic object. Hansen and Roald (2022) gloss aesthetic empathy as a phenomenon in which “a spectator is invited to participate and share feelings expressed in the work of art”. See Coplan and Goldie (2011, Part II) for more on the topic.

8. Empathy theorists describe such mimetic acts as a form of perspective-taking, or when people imagine what it is like to be another being, or to be in another body or environment (see Coplan and Goldie 2011; Zahavi 2008). Some scholars contend that simulating another’s mental or behavioural processes is a necessary condition of empathising with them (see Feagin 2011; Stueber 2006; Ravenscroft 1998).

9. Jean Baudrillard’s well-known treatise on reality and simulation distinguishes between dissimulation/pretend and simulation: “To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have”. Pretending, Baudrillard continues, “leaves the principle of reality intact … whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” ([1981] 1994, 3).

10. In Browning’s (2020), analyses of the 2016 interactive installation Pleasure Garden at Vaucluse House in Sydney, Australia, he observes that many audience members were inattentive and distracted.

11. Ground-nesting bees such as miner bees (genus Andrena) lay their eggs in burrows just beneath the surface of the soil, while cavity-nesting bees such as mason bees (genus Osmia), carpenter bees (genus Xylocopa), and leaf cutting bees (genus Megachile) lay their eggs in above- or in-ground cavities, using plant tissue, mud, or their own secretions as nesting materials.

12. At my home in Ottawa, I practice gardening with straight species (i.e. species found in the wild and not those that have been modified by humans, often called “cultivars”) endemic to this region and am learning how to conserve and harvest wild bee cocoons to increase their survival rate.

13. The European honeybee can perceive both substrate and airborne vibrations (Michelsen et al. 2014). Entomologists Cocroft and Rodríguez (2005, 1) explain that “[v]ibrational signals differ dramatically from airborne insect sounds, often having low frequencies, pure tones, and combinations of contrasting acoustic elements…. Vibrational communication occurs in a complex environment containing noise from wind and rain, the signals of multiple individuals and species, and vibration-sensitive predators and parasitoids”.

14. Meanwhile, loud noises can prompt carpenter bees (Xylocopa spp.) to abandon long-established nests. Entomologists have found that exposure to environmental vibroacoustic disturbance and anthropogenic noise disrupts communication among some arthropods (the phylum that includes bees) and is associated with a decline in the abundance of those arthropods in noisy sites (Bunkley et al. 2017).

15. The European honeybee is something of a celebrity in North America. I am aware of numerous bee-focused public exhibits and art installations across the United States that prioritise, or exclusively feature, Apis mellifera. One example is Chicago area’s Kohl Children’s Museum (n.d.), which features a permanent exhibit “Honeybee Hideout” and temporary “Bee-ology” events that encourage “pollinator health awareness” through hands-on activities. Children can dress up and role-play as honeybees that collect pollen and perform the “waggle dance.”

16. Julianne Graper’s (2018) study of human-bat relations in Austin, Texas identified a similar discursive thrust in the history of the city’s “becoming with bats”. Namely, bats were gradually embraced because it was convincingly argued that they deter pests and benefit crop production.

17. The U.S. Department of Interior’s Geological Survey Bee Lab acknowledges that “[l]oss of plant diversity is the primary cause of native bee decline”, and warns that, “while important in the pollination of some crops, honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees” (USGS n.d.). As of December 2023, only nine bee species are registered on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species list: seven species of the yellow-faced bee (genus Hylaeus), the rusty patch bumblebee (Bombus affinis), and the franklin bumblebee (Bombus fraternus). This assessment affords these species protection under the federal Endangered Species Act of 1973. Yet almost all native bees are threatened, and dozens more face extinction. The International Union for Conservation’s Red List shows that over a quarter of native bumblebees are at risk of extinction (IUCN n.d.).

18. The Insectarium is in Montréal’s natural science museum complex Espace pour la Vie (Space for Life).

19. North America’s approximately four thousand native bees are much more efficient pollinators of native plants than the European honeybee, yet the latter dominates agricultural activity and discourse (Franklin and Raine 2019).

20. An employee of GénieLab told me that the Insectarium provided the audio recordings of each insect’s flight.

21. This installation models what Browning (2020, 194) calls “the installation-in-the-garden”, “a techno-natural assemblage formed through the co-articulation of the installation (its sound design, infrastructure, interactivity, discursive framing and spatial arrangement) and [the garden] (its plant, animal and human inhabitants; its acoustics, pathways, physical contours and so on)”.

22. The buzz about the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) is striking – it is but one of more than 20,000 bee species and is an agricultural and even invasive animal on multiple continents – yet contemporary public installations across the world continue to spotlight the species and its familar sound. Examples are numerous and I encourage the reader to research artists in their area who work with bees. A few recent works by Canadian artists include Aganetha Dyck’s “Between Us” (2020–ongoing), “Cross Pollination” (2017), and “Honeybee Alterations” (2014); Charmaine Lurch’s “Wild Bees” (2012–ongoing) (see Dyck n.d.); Felix Blume’s “Swarm” (2021); Angelica Mesiti’s “The Swarming Song” (2021); and Monique Martin’s “Continuous” (2018).

23. I nod to philosopher Thomas Nagel’s (1974) well known essay that submits that humans cannot know what it is to be a bat. Nagel says that we cannot infer what it like for a bat to experience its world from analogy with our own experience of ours (which is also a critique of a Cartesian conception of the mind), and that there are physiological and phenomenological limits to a human’s ability to imagine and “sympathize” with the experience of a bat. See also Nagel’s later writings on consciousness (e.g. 1999) and his revision to his “what is it like” position (1998) that suggests theorists of mind should attempt to form a new, realist theory that accounts for functional, phenomenological, and physiological features of mental states. There are several contemporary entomological studies that likewise engage the problem of other minds. Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee (2022), for example, attempts to convince that bees experience consciousness by using empirical evidence of bee biology and behaviour, and invoking simulation theory. Chittka claims that “neither the societies of bees nor their individual psychology are remotely like those of humans” (1) and yet, unlike Nagel, thinks it is “tremendously useful” “to take a first-person bee perspective” and imagine “what it’s like to be a bee” (11, 3). Indeed, Chittka dismisses the philosophical question of whether “what it is like” is knowable as “relatively pointless” (11).

24. Harvard’s Wyss Institute describes RoboBees as autonomous flying microrobots “with potential uses in crop pollination, search and rescue missions, surveillance, as well as high-resolution weather, climate, and environmental monitoring” (Wyss Institute n.d.). As of 2019, the RoboBee could fly, land, swim, and dive into water on its own, but not yet perform a honeybee’s task of picking up and depositing pollen. But in January 2023, the RoboBee Project’s principal investigator Robert Wood commercialised the RoboBee technology for surgical robotics and presumably will no longer focus on creating an artificial pollinating honeybee (Boston Globe 2023).

25. Beewise, founded in 2018, created a robotic beehive called Beehome that uses robotics, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to enable apiarists to constantly monitor the conditions of their honeybee hives and bee health (Beewise n.d.). Arugga AI Farming uses similar technologies to create an autonomous robot that recreates buzz pollination and is operable for mass crops at commercial greenhouses (Arugga n.d.). BloomX offers a comparable buzz-pollinating autonomous robot “Robee” that helps plants self-pollinate, as well as a human-operated collector device called “CrossBee” to aid in cross-pollination of crops such as avocado trees; the latter uses electrostatic charge to help growers collect sticky pollen grains from one plant and carry them to another (BloomX n.d.).

26. Self-fertile plants such as tomatoes, blueberries, and green peppers require forces such as wind or buzz-pollinating insects to release and transfer pollen. Buzz-pollinating insects deploy powerful vibrations with their wings that shake loose the pollen in a flower’s anthers and transfer it to stigma on the same plant.

27. Martin Hoffman (2014, 82) conceives empathy in relation to morality, and advances “witnessing and depth of feeling” as a developed empathic response to the distress of others. “In witnessing”, he says, “one is so intensely moved by exposure to another’s trauma” that “one feels compelled to act”. See Cronin (2018), especially chapter 2, for a study of the politics of witnessing in a context of animal cruelty.

28. In contrast to the simulation theory of empathy (for which empathy is a resonance phenomenon that involves a kind of analogy, imitation, or projection), empathy in the phenomenological tradition is conceived as a direct perception of or intentionality towards the experiences of others (see Zahavi 2008, 2010).

29. This could be conceived via new materialist thought in feminist science studies (e.g. Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Haraway 2007), object-oriented ontology (e.g. Morton 2013), ontological emergence theory (e.g. Ingold 2013), or another way of thinking about the nonhuman (see Grusin 2015).

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Lyndsey Copeland

Lyndsey Copeland is an assistant professor of music and culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.