Sound Ecologies vol. II

In this second volume* of Sound Ecologies, we will continue opening not only our ears, but also our minds and bodies to the expansive possibilities that sonic experience offers to contemporary artistic practice and research. This is conceived as an experimental space for knowledge sharing, where we will engage in active listening through curated playlists, explore diverse theoretical approaches to sound ecologies, and practice guided visualizations alongside collective and individual writing. Together, we will experiment with ways of creating new spaces and temporalities for attending to that which demands sustained attention, while practicing and exercising active and conscious decisions of care for what we listen to.

Session I - Phonocene pt. 2 - Extractivist Listening, Aural Temporalities and Sonic Spirituality
04/11/2026

Many urban narratives tell us that we will find silence in nature, but this claim often silences the complexity of the natural environment itself. Silence may be one of those concepts that, like nature or human, requires continual revision and multiple definitions. Certain listening technologies and sonification algorithms have allowed us to engage with what was previously inaudible, but how should we listen when a distinctly human technology mediates these sensory encounters? What are we hearing when we “listen” to plants or fungi, as many emerging sound art practices invite us to do through technologies of vibration? Can field-recording technologies escape their extractive tendencies? And can artificial intelligence truly make us believe that we are listening to an extinct animal?

Session II - Animal Song? Technologies of Relation and Anthropocentric Musical Aesthetics 
11/11/2026

The capacity to sing is often defined through an anthropocentric lens that reinforces regulated qualities rooted in Western academic aesthetics and traditions, such as harmony, rhythm, melody, texture, and form. While composers have long drawn from birdsong, why are birds recognized as singers while other animals are not?Many artistic and scientific engagements with the vocal or embodied expressions of nonhuman animals remain unidirectional, reproducing extractive dynamics that position the human as interpreter and the animal as source. Focusing on avian kinships, this session considers how recording technologies and algorithmic analysis shape interspecies listening and its digital ethics. It asks what practices might enable more reciprocal forms of communication, and what new sonic and relational possibilities might emerge between human and nonhuman listeners and song-makers.

Session III - Queer Listening: Towards a More-than-human Acoustic Entanglement 
18/11/2026

Thinking through the sounds that shape gender norms, often entangled with specieist logics, the idea of “sonic gendering” emerges as a critical tool. In a visual, image-driven culture, attentive listening can become a queer practice of resistance. Together, queer ecologies and sound ecology invite us to perceive the world as an entangled network where boundaries blur between human and nonhuman, natural and cultural, male and female, visible and audible.

Session IV - Sonic Climate Fiction: Other Ways of Sensing with our Imagination
25/11/2026

When we imagine a sound or read about it, do we truly hear it? Expanding the ways we listen begins with asking what sound is. Is it only the friction of matter vibrating at frequencies our ears and bodies can detect, or can it also be the resonance of memory, emotion, fiction, and anticipation within us? In this session, we will explore how imagined sounds come alive through storytelling and shared listening practices. Sonic narratives can attune us to private resonances, cultural soundscapes, and acoustic experience, opening new possibilities for how we listen and tell stories.