Technology and interspecies musical practice

Biosemiotics (2024) 17:565–585 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-024-09584-9 RESEARCH Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice Susanne Kass1 Received: 16 January 2024 / Accepted: 5 July 2024 / Published online: 15 August 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract This case study on the work of interspecies musician David Rothenberg explores how engaging with the songs and rhythms of other species continues to challenge his musical practice and aesthetic. Technology, science and art come together in an artistic and research practice, which is grounded in the belief that technologies can bring us closer to nature. The article outlines how Umwelt theory, enactive music cognition, biosemiotics and the phenomenology of human-technology relations are engaged in the perception and creation of musical experiences. It also looks at how interdisciplinary research practices that traverse zoomusicology, the visual and performing arts, and data visualisation contribute to interspecies music theory and practice. The article concludes by presenting four interspecies auditory dispositives as a guide to how knowledge, tools and practice are entangled in concrete examples from Rothenberg’s musical collaborations with nightingales, humpback whales, periodical cicadas and pond life. Keywords Interspecies Music · Umwelt Theory · Phenomenology of Listening · Semiotic Freedom · Interspecies Auditory Dispositive · Technology Introduction The sounds and songs of other species resound in the environment, in musical culture and even from time to time on the radio, but how does perception become attuned to hear the voices and vibrations of other species as music? This case study looks at how listening may be expanded to a more-than-human register through the exemplary case of interspecies musician, environmental philosopher, and ecopoet David Rothenberg, Susanne Kass [email protected] 1 Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic 13 566 S. Kass whose collaborative, interdisciplinary practice is entangled with the natural sciences and grounded in improvisation, music, visual arts and ecophilosophy. Rothenberg’s more-than-human musical practice is distinctive in the way he combines and draws on the methods, technologies and knowledge of both science and art to “create a music…that neither human, animal or plant could make alone.” (Rothenberg, 2023, p.292). His approach to understanding and interacting with nature is deeply technophilic in that he holds the view that technology can bring us closer to nature and the lifeworlds of other species. Rothenberg uses technology to bring himself and other human listeners into intimate proximity with the songs and sounds of other species as responsive, vulnerable and valuable part of the shared sonic environment. The first part of this exemplary case study (Flyvbjerg, 2011) briefly contextualises Rothenberg’s ecocentric and technological approach to interspecies musical practice, and the role technology, methodology, and language play in the study of animal music in the sciences and arts. It also presents Umwelt theory as the basis for an enactive listening approach to music cognition (Reybrouck, 2001, 2005), followed by the phenomenology of listening and body-technology relations (Ihde, 1990), and several relevant concepts from biosemiotics. The second part is a cartography of four practices that Rothenberg uses to create interspecies music and describes the technology, praxis, and knowledge involved as four interspecies auditory dispositives. The practices include improvising live with nightingales in urban settings; listening to whale song aided by a morphological notation; immersing oneself in a periodic cicada swarm; and recording and visualising pond sounds as abstract images. These guides to listening explain which technologies can be used to focus the listeners’ attention, and select characteristics and parameters that are influential within the sonic Umwelts of each species. Each dispositive is followed by a phenomenological vignette from Rothenberg’s writing, describing an experience from the field. The cartographies draw on material gathered during interviews, lectures, workshops, performances, as well as books, articles and recordings. Throughout the study I try to maintain an active and open dialogue with the dimension of technology, which is a constant, but sometimes latent, presence in theory and practice that mediates human interactions with the natural world. Practices and Creativity Practices are in themselves contingent and historical technologies. Andrew Pickering defines practice as “the work of cultural extension and transformation in time” (1995, p.4). Interspecies musical practice is a performative “dance of agency” (p.21) between the entangled agencies of human musicians, nonhuman animals, and inhuman sounds that resonate within the sonosphere. As composer Pauline Oliveros describes: Humans sense the sonosphere according to the bandwidth and resonant frequencies and mechanics of the ear, skin, bones, meridians, fluids, and other organs and tissues of the body as coupled to the earth and its layers from the 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 567 core to the magnetic fields as transmitted and perceived by the audio cortex and nervous system. (All of this with great variation, of course.) All cells of the earth and body vibrate. (Oliveros, 2010, p.22) Humans engage in this dance with the help of resonant instruments to interact with the sounds of resonant bodies, and also by recording and reproducing sounds, or manipulating recorded sound. However, artists and scientists approach this dance with different sensibilities and intentions, even if they use many of the same instruments and methods. The microphones, software and speakers that artists and scientists use to record, analyse, modify and play back animal sounds may be identical, but the role of instruments in the process diverges. In the context of science, the instruments used should, if possible, not interfere with the sound phenomena studied, while in music the very purpose of working with instruments is to create sound phenomena (Ihde, 1990, p.95). Attending to sound also requires creativity — for scientists who strive to observe new qualities of order in nature, and from artists who want to create new qualities of order in their work (Bohm, 2004, p.3). Engaging in listening practice develops sensitivity and tuning one’s sense of perception, which on occasion can enable artists and scientists to notice orders and patterns they had not noticed before, and develop new ideas based on these observations. An example of this is Payne and McVay’s (1971) insightful observation that humpback whale songs consisted of patterns that repeated. Focused study of these abstractions of sound, enabled by the development of hydrophones that were able to make recordings underwater, which were then printed out as sonograms, revealed the structure of the song, showing repetitions and patterns which were difficult to hear, but easier to see. Developing the skill to hear something new is equally about mastering new powers of the mind as well as mastering manual dexterity with tools (Ingold, 2018) and the skilled practitioner works with their tools using both embodied, tacit knowledge and cognitive precision. The hours spent perfecting skill can be described in language, but since much of the knowledge acquired is tacit and does not leave visible semiotic traces, this makes practice always more complex than even thick descriptions of it. The traces of practice are distributed and located in various sites, including memory, the environment, and in media artifacts. Attempts to speak about practice without engaging in the activity itself are likely to miss much of the nuance that accompanies embodied and situated practices. Throughout the research process I have tried as often as I can to do these activities as well as think about how they are done, either in the field or with the help of recordings. The skills involved in interspecies music and listening involve learning more than training. Certain instruments and equipment, techniques and knowledge can unlock previously unheard qualities of sound, but significant time must be spent to attune the ear to them. Many of the practices described here require Rothenberg not only to be correctly equipped, but also precisely located, temporally and geographically. His interspecies music uses a mobile and spontaneous setup, the technologies he works with are mostly light and mobile enough to fit in a backpack as he travels from one sound ecology to 13 568 S. Kass another. This gives his music a different quality of flexibility and site-specificity than a studio-based artist like Tomás Saraceno, whose installations involve a vast team of engineers, designers, biologists, musicians and others. Although Rothenberg also collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, scientists and designers, his network is dispersed across the globe and new links and locations are constantly being added. As devices and software allowing musicians of any skill level to easily manipulate and experiment with sound have become more common, he has gradually shifted from collaborating with other interspecies musicians, to sharing his practices with musicians, students and others interested in using the techniques he has devised in their own creative ways. The practices described here are thus intended as a guide. I also encourage any curious readers to pick up the technologies available to you and apply these practices and knowledge to tune your ears to these more-than-human sounds and rhythms around you at your leisure. I have framed these practices using only select biosemiotic concepts I found were empirically applicable to Rothenberg’s particular variety of interspecies musical know-how, as arising within a contingent and historical technological condition. Thus, the descriptions that follow are only partial, and offer one possible reading on a limited set of topics. Interdisciplinary Methodologies for the Study of Animal Music David Rothenberg’s interspecies musical practice is characteristic of a wider ecocentric turn in music that directly works with animal sounds and songs as material, and not simply as symbolic representation (Doolittle, 2008). He has developed a personal ethical approach to interspecies music that embraces technologies as tools that are able shape an individual’s interactions, changing both how nature appears and revealing its limits (Rothenberg, 1993, p.xii-vi). In his view, the technologies we employ are directly involved in shaping the human conceptual view of nature and the metaphors that we use to describe it — as sacred, as resource or as a responsive and dynamic cybernetic system. Rothenberg’s ecocentric approach to nature as a subject with an intrinsic value is influenced by the time he spent with Arne Næss and the Norwegian ecophilosophy group in the mid-eighties to early nineties (Anker, 2020, p.211 − 12), translating and disseminating the principles of Deep Ecology to an English-speaking audience. Arne Naess’s particular articulation of the philosophy of deep ecology depends on a human ability to apprehend the qualities of nature directly…We see the world first as relations between us and it… what it would mean to see the world in this other way — how the primacy of all qualities might make things recede and relations come into prominence, how it might be the birth of a less arrogant way of placing human beings into an equally experiencing surrounding, also a subject, not only an object. And the announcement that the emotions we sense there in nature are not mere projections, or whims of different perspectives, but an actuality which can’t be denied. (Rothenberg, 1996) 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 569 The idea that technology can have a positive influence on the human relationship with nature was, however, not commensurate with the critical attitude toward technology within the wider Deep Ecology movement. His personal ecosophy and ethical attitude towards nature does not reject, but embraces the way technology allows the individual to connect with nature on the micro level of experience. Rothenberg’s interspecies musical and listening practice is only one methodology in a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary approaches to researching the songs and sounds of animals. His idiosyncratic artistic methodology draws on knowledge from visual art and music, but also borrows methods and tools from bioacoustics and ethology. Influenced by, but not entirely adhering to the radical openness of avantgarde composer John Cage’s approach, which considers all audible sounds as potentially musical (2004), Rothenberg frames his artistic licence slightly differently, in that if someone asks you to consider something to be music, then in his view, it is. His interspecies music is not limited to any family or species, as he prefers to play with any species which will help him bring something new to his music, and his personal preference is to seek out the more extreme oddities within the evolutionary spectrum of animal music. Across three decades, Rothenberg has conducted extensive research on the idiosyncratic approaches of individual naturalists, poets and musicians who have transcribed, analysed, or interpreted nonhuman songs calls and sounds across centuries and cultures. In the resulting writings and accompanying recordings, he has compiled an eclectic and interdisciplinary historical overview of remarkable connoisseurs of the phenomenology of interspecies musical listening, who have employed a wide range of strategies from established semiotic codes such as musical notation and onomatopoeic texts, or when these proved too reductive, devised originally designed asemic scripts or mapping systems (see Why Birds Sing, 2005; Nightingales in Berlin, 2019; Thousand Mile Song, 2008; Whale Music, 2023; Bug Music, 2014; and the Secret Sounds of Ponds2024).Rothenberg maintains a language that is clear and comprehensible to make it accessible to all in the contexts of art, education, or the media. He avoids jargon, abstruse concepts and specialised vocabularies, and describes his experiences, ideas and beliefs lyrically or metaphorically, preferring a relatable and poetic storytelling tone which is more literary or journalistic than academic. However, he is not shy to express his opinions on topics that involve interspecies interactions, such as the contentious topic of interspecies communication and emotions, and uses “dangerous” terms in association with other species, such as aesthetics or music (see Martinelli, 2001, p.343).As one of the early proponents of using both words in relation to animal music, Rothenberg’s work is notable within the field of zoomusicology, an emerging field which studies the aesthetic communication of animals through sound (Martinelli, 2007, p.83). As further research into animal music is conducted, the vocabulary around aesthetics and emotion that Rothenberg has already been using for some time has become more widely adopted, although which language is appropriate when describing interspecies interactions is still disputed (see Steingo, 2024, p.180).The emerging interdisciplinary field of zoomusicology (see Doolittle & Gingras, 2015) has developed useful concepts and categories for talking about interspecies music. Its interdisciplinary methodology combines methods and conceptual frameworks from musicology, aesthetics, ethology, biology, bioacoustics, philosophy 13 570 S. Kass and biosemiotics, amongst others. Importantly for interspecies music, humans are not excluded from the scope of musical animals. Zoomusicology tries to develop criteria and concepts for the study of animal music which are open to the possiblity that animals also have the capacity for aesthetic and emotional experiences. The external, etic perspective of the researcher is not the only option for studying the experiences of animals, since it is possible to have some idea of the embodied experiences (Tønnessen, 2011, p.329), then at least a partial emic perspective is also possible (Martinelli, 2011, p. 261). Zoomusicology also attempts examine the diversity of musical experience, to develop terminology that can differentiate between species-specific musical traits or identify characteristics of behaviours and responses to music that are transspecific and homologous between humans and some nonhuman music users, such as the performer/spectator relation and set-up, music as an event, or expressing admiration toward the performer (p.276).There has also been a paradigm shift within academia, as artistic practice has become more established as a different, but also valid, form of research and knowledge production. This emerging discipline raises its own unique questions, develops experimental methods and is not afraid to challenge the often too-narrow criteria for defining truth and knowledge. Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary methodology is situated in artistic practice but borrows some methods, equipment, and software that is used by the scientists who study birdsong. During his first foray into the scientific literature of birdsong research for Why Birds Sing (2005), he was most drawn to the aspects of birdsong research which had clear affinities with musicians: the ability of scientists to hear nuance in birdsong, and the skill, creativity, and imagination involved in formulating and testing hypotheses about what was heard. However, Rothenberg also found that detailed methods and substantial data sets could not provide answers to his own musical hypotheses that had originated from the practice of playing live with birds, such as the aesthetic and structural affinities between birdsong and human music. The songs of other birds (Roeske et al., 2021). Four sound morphing strategies that mockingbirds share with composition in human music were identified: timbre change, pitch change, stretching and squeezing. By mapping the complex structural patterns with the help of sonograms the effects could be identified and compared to examples in human music. Etic biases of the researchers were considered, as well as the influence of physiological factors, but the comparisons indicated that the birds have an endemic set of rules for selecting phrases from the songs of other birds which follow the rules of their own song. In this case, the starting point of listening to the mockingbird with a sensitivity for traits found in human music allowed the researchers to identify a uniquely nonhuman method of composition with identifiable parallels with human music. The questions posed in this research project were concerned with the musical qualities of birdsong rather than its functional purposes for reproduction and survival of the species. Rothenberg does not build or design any hardware, but he enjoys experimenting with new tools and software, for example, to modify field recordings and sonograms and create sounds and images with a more-than-human aesthetic. Machine learning is rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for bioacoustics research since it makes light work of processing large amounts of data, and the potential to reveal otherwise imperceivable patterns in the sonic environment are also promising. However, although Rothenberg believes this technology is a great tool to collaborate with, he 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 571 thinks it would be a mistake to develop a faith-based relationship with this technology. Although this technology may help uncover knowledge that neither humans or machines could produce alone, machine learning alone cannot produce meaning, it is not an autonomous agent. Though the technology continues to surprise us, the position he outlined in Hand’s End appears to remain largely unchanged: The program that replicates a real-world system, either one built by us or seen by us, will not possess an active relation to its context outside set boundaries. It cannot act without expectation. Though external changes may be accounted for, it cannot doubt the conceptual framework upon which it is written. A human thinker always can. A natural process is always more than the system we impose on it. (Rothenberg, 1993, p.135) In his view nature is not reducible to information, or manageable according to the logic of information theory. The capacity for creativity may not be uniquely human, but the ability of machine learning to remix information at an inhuman rate and scale without clear intentions is not an expression of artistic creativity, and mostly only a form of entertainment (Manovich, 2022). However, applied to real-world contexts, data driven models in combination with human expertise are incredible tools which can help map and mitigate biodiversity loss, or monitor the health of ponds by interpreting their sonic ecology (Rothenberg, 2024, p.119). Exploring Musical Embodiment with Umwelt Theory and the Phenomenology of Listening Some hear bug music. Some hear people music. All depends on your ears. —Wâfu, 1866, Kyoto (Translation by David Rothenberg in Bug Music, 2014). The primary motivation for Rothenberg to make music with other species is to create a music that no species could make alone, to diversify his own musical sensibility and skill by attending to and responding to the aesthetically challenging musical structures and qualities he finds in nature and animal sounds. The quote above poses an interesting question about Umwelt perception and listening – how does practice attune our human ears to more-than-human music, and what kinds of tacit and explicit knowledge are invoked in the experience of listening to or playing this mode of music? Jakob von Uexküll’s pluralist Umwelt theory (2010) offers a framework to map and compare how sensory stimuli are made meaningful through the embodied perception of different species that each enjoy their own distinctive lifeworlds. Instead of considering the body as a morphological structure, the methodology foregrounds “expressions of certain movements, sensations, and interactions with their environ- 13 572 S. Kass ments” (Parikka, 2010, p.xxv) and the ontological dimension of substance becomes subordinate to that of process, since the qualities that we seek to understand are intensities, relations and affects.The experiential and ecological approach to music cognition developed by Reybrouck (2001) outlines how musical epistemology is developed through a process of individuated interaction with sounds in the environment that have developed as the result of learning to “cope” with sounds in the sonic Umwelt in ways that are experienced as meaningful by the listener. Neuroscientific research has established that it is possible for animals and humans to differentiate between background noise and vocalisations (Theunissen & Elie, 2014), but it is always the listener who selects and focuses on sounds that are considered interesting (Reybrouck, 2005, p.251), and interpreting interactions with the sonic environment is therefore an active process. The ability to find music meaningful is learned through a semiotically structured constructivist process of enactive cognition (Reybrouck, 2001, 2012) that occurs in a functional circle of stimulus and reaction that is adaptive in humans and at least to some degree also in species that are vocal learners, such as nightingales and humpback whales. This experiential approach to listening considers the sound as a sign (property) of a sounding body that is interpreted by the listener (a music user) (Reybrouck, 2012, p.400). In biosemiotic terms, the adaptability of vocal learners to cognitively offload sounds into the environment (Wilson, 2002) is an aspect of semiotic scaffolding, a process that makes “history matter to an organism” (Hoffmeyer, 2015). This is expressed both genetically across generations through speciation, and individually in the Umwelt of the organism. The rendering of previous semiotic interactions with sound as meaningful is fundamental to increasing the flexibility and complexity of connecting signs (Cobley, 2016, p.54–55), which is a factor in expanding semiotic freedom, a measure of the organism’s ability to respond to a diverse set of cues in the environment (Hoffmeyer, 2010, p.196). The ability of organisms to integrate more complex sound structures into their Umwelt though processes of semiotic scaffolding, thus increasing the amount of flexibility in their response to signs. According to Kull (2022), aesthetics is a process of semiotic fitting, or finding compatible relations that are not the result of survival or natural selection (p.7). Fitting is not universal, and species have their own aesthetic preferences (p.6), Aesthetic features result from fitting rather than habit, and organisms can quickly make choices for fitting values met in the environment, which do not need to be functional, only remove incompatibilities (p.11). Beauty is the result of a multirelational fit for an organism, and what is fitting and beautiful to one individual or species may be ugly to another (p.17). However, as Reybrouck points out, music is a dynamic art and more penetrative than merely looking at an object (Reybrouck, 2022, p.387). In summary, the methodology of Umwelt offers a processual, adaptive, and pluralistic approach where organisms enactively develop meaningful relations to sounds in their environment. In particular, vocal learners have the ability to differentiate between vocalisations and more general environmental sounds. Higher animals, have the ability to semiotically scaffold some interactions, leading to further semiotic flexibility, or semiotic freedom to associate sounds diversely. Further, organisms make 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 573 qualitative choices based on values that are compatible and fitting to them, and when fitting is multirelational, relations that tend towards aesthetics and beauty result. Phenomenology of Listening Akin to the theory of enactive cognition outlined above, the phenomenology of listening sees the experience of sound as an embodied, multimodal and multi-sensory experience that is both affective and creative (Dura, 2006). Real, remembered and imagined sounds are actively produced, a product of the mind, the integrated system of brain, body and environment (Grimshaw & Garner, 2015, p.3). The reflection on auditory experience is more complex than the methodology of Umwelt theory that analyses and interprets responses to individual stimuli, as it requires an entanglement of several senses (Ihde, 2007, p.21). A phenomenological approach to listening expands on the theory of Umwelt in several respects, in awareness of the mediating role of technology, the development of explicit and tacit knowledge to make sense of what is heard, and complexity of negotiating between meaningful sounds. Many musical listening practices are embodied through technical devices, and these interventions structurally condition the existential relationship of the body to the world (Ihde, 1990, p.72). Ihde proposes the following two variants according to which technologies relate the body to the world: A. Embodiment relations (I-technology) → world: Embodied technologies withdraw and become part of the self-experience of perception. Body-sense is extended monosensorily or even multisensorily to the parameters offered by technology and adapted to suit the needs of the body to interact with the environment (p.74). The technology imbues the body with a new power and introduces a new way to be in and with the environment. B. Hermeneutic relations I → (technology world): Hermeneutic technologies require interpretation and interpretive action (p.80). When a text becomes transparent, this is not a transparency of perception but a hermeneutic transparency (p.82) and the ability of the user to develop an understanding of a phenomena via an instrument may occur regardless of access to direct perception of it. When the listener creates music via an acoustic or amplified instrument, improvements in embodiment relations can produce a clearer, more transparent experience and extend the body deeper into a sensory realm outside that of the “naked” body. A well-designed embodied technology allows the body to retain the capacity for expressivity (p.80), allowing the user to focus on the output rather than managing the apparatus. Practice further scaffolds the affordances of the instrument into the body. Playing music on a tablet or other device is instead a hermeneutic relation because the interface abstracts the relation between the trigger of the sound and the qualities of the output. However, an adept reader will be able to interpret cues and make estimates based solely on memory or imagination. Thus, while perception is an essential aspect of maintaining control of the technology in the case of embodied relations, in 13 574 S. Kass the case of hermeneutic relations it is enough to understand the logic of the technology to use it successfully. Practice maps the affordances of the instrument and notation into the body. The individual keys of a musical instrument are indexed to corresponding tones, patterns and structures are memorized and become second nature leaving the player to focus their attention on how rather than what to play. As Merleau-Ponty writes of the organ player: the stops, pedals and manuals are given to him as nothing more than the possibilities of achieving certain emotional or musical values and their positions are simply the places through which that value appears in the world…The whole problem of habit here is one of knowing how the musical significance of an action can be concentrated in a certain place to the extent that, in giving himself entirely to the music, the organist reaches for precisely those stops and pedals which are to bring it into being. Now the body is essentially an expressive space. (Merleau-Ponty, 2010, p. 168–169) Interspecies musician Jim Nollman describes how over time interspecies musicians have developed explicit knowledge about how to make interaction more likely – leave gaps, don’t play too loud – a kind of interspecies music etiquette. However, more elusive is the tacit knowledge of hearing the subtle difference between the characteristics of a merely simultaneous musical encounter and a responsive dialogic interaction, which he finds is best done by listening to recordings at length: “The knowledge came to me in a rush, like glimpsing a face hidden within the folds and textures of a surrealistic painting. The moment I heard the difference, I heard it ever after. Unfortunately, the distinction hinges on a close listening of musical inflections, and defies a literal explanation.” (Nollman, 2008). Prolonged listening to animal music in effect expands the semiotic scaffolding and the ability of the listener to differentiate between qualities of sound, a process of semiotic niche construction, where interpreting minds (analogous to the organisms in ecological niche construction) act locally according to sets of opportunities and boundaries for the generation of meaning, their action frequently alters these sets, which in turn feedbacks into the interpretation activity and the mind. In other words, semioses depend on the availability of semiotic forms to generate interpretants through signs, and as semiotic activity transforms signs and semiotic forms, it evolves new interpretants. (Atã and Queiroz, 2017) Analysis of auditory experience has a much more modest vocabulary than analysis of visual experience or language, which have often been used as a substitute (Ingold, 2007). Based on Ingold’s critique of the visual language associated with the sound- 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 575 scape, Stoichita and Mori (2017) have developed a model for describing modes of attending to sound on three levels of increasing complexity that can be useful for the context of interspecies music, since it avoids language that is derived from visual or linguistic analysis. They propose three postures of listening: 1. Indexical listening, to hypothesise about the cause of a sound; 2. Structural listening, to abstract patterns from what is heard; 3. Enchanted listening, to contemplate how sounds interact with each other. When considered from the perspective of the three postures of listening outlined above, interspecies music exposes the listener to three habits of listening that creatively expand the listener’s semiotic niche. In doing so, listeners may employ a range of auditory technics, practices and knowledge about the Umwelts of other species contributing to experiences which shape brain activity and help the listener relate to the environment (Hoffmeyer, 2008, p.180). Cartographies of Interspecies Auditory Dispositives In this last section I will briefly summarize four practices within Rothenberg’s broader more-than-human musical oeuvre as a series of interspecies auditory dispositives (IAD). The concept of the dispositive was initially developed by Jean-Louis Baudry to describe the intertwined technical and habitual aspects of technologically entangled culture that must always be considered together (Schulze, 2018, p.40). Like any complex listening activity, the material and situated practice of interspecies musical listening should not be separated from the technologies and habits which it requires. Choosing technologies and scaffolding strategies that enhance our capacity to attend to sounds and songs of other species is something we can actively encourage and learn. The dispositive mobilises perceptual capacities and mental capacities that are highlighted by artistic works and practices (de Paiva, 2022), challenging our ideas and experience of aesthetics by engaging creativity to experiment with more-thanhuman structural patterns and musical interactions. Since most are not habituated to this mode of listening within mainstream musical culture, it is useful to actively maintain some awareness of the technologies, habits and ethical aspects of interspecies musical listening.This quick guide to Rothenberg’s interspecies musical practice can also be framed using the three postures of listening outlined above. Firstly, he helps the listener index the sounds they are hearing by introducing the species, and differentiating traits and qualities both between species and within the repertoire of a species, allowing us to index the sounds we are hearing. Secondly, by translating recordings into sonograms, or responding to the structural patterns through improvisation, he both draws the listener’s attention to these shapes and abstracts them visually or with his instrument, without calling up an image based on spacial criteria (figure, ground, etc.). Thirdly, by framing the sounds as musical and presenting them in conditions that encourage listening within familiar musical parameters (e.g. jam sessions, concerts, tracks, etc.), the listener is invited to attend to the sounds heard relationally and focus how they interact. 13 576 S. Kass Although different complexities of semiotic scaffolding may be required for each posture, the listener is free to adopt them in any order and switch between them at will. For example, I may first want to listen to a track and focus on the way sounds interact without needing to identify them. Or I may prefer to first identify and differentiate the sound and structures characteristic of nightingale song as it contrasts with the clarinet. I have chosen to present one example from each family of animals, and describe a specific way Rothenberg has devised to make music with a species, whose songs and sounds are unusually complex, unusual, or intense. They are presented chronologically as they have appeared in his practice, as he has gradually shifted from playing with more overtly ‘musical’ animals to sound environments more obscure to the human ear, which also require more technological involvement.Following the description of each practice, I have included some vignettes from Rothenberg’s own writings about making music with nightingales, humpback whales, periodical cicadas and pond life, respectively, as a phenomenological account that also discloses knowledge of animal perception, agility with using acoustic and electronic instruments, and sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of sound developed over many years of studying and playing more-than-human music. IAD #1 - Site-Specific Improvisation with Nightingales Nightingales have many characteristics which make them a suitable partner for late night outdoor interspecies improvisation. These territorial, migratory birds will return to the same location each spring, even the same tree, year after year. They are “vocal learners” and are believed to acquire their song from their elders, being especially sensitive to learning up to three months old (Hultsch, 1991), singing only phrases they have been tutored in. The male nightingale has three ways of interacting when encountering unfamiliar songs within his semiotic niche: perceived threats to territory will provoke an “aggressive” song that attempts to interrupt or “jam” the songs of other birds; when sounds are not perceived as threatening the birds will sing and countersing in turn, leaving space for other birds (or human musicians), which requires mutual listening and precise timing; the most confident birds will follow his own pattern and sing as he chooses (Rothenberg, 2019, p.10). These interactions involve voluntary choices (Hultsch & Todt, 1989). The songs use repetition and variation, the three to eight second phrases are not identical but based recognisably around a motif. Each bird exhibits consistency in its song, and this makes it possible to identify individual birds within the species or population (Rothenberg, 2019, p.55). One of the challenges that the nightingale presents human musicians is its stamina, since it can sing for hours at a time. Rothenberg’s experience of playing music with nightingales has shaped a distinctive attitude to reorient his playing to an interspecies mode: Nightingales and humans share the desire to sing. Take an open approach to listening, and if possible, set aside preconceptions, try not to impose any meaning and enjoy the mystery. Be humble with your song, spend time listening, leave plenty of silence and space. 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 577 “To deeply listen to a nightingale is to feel the power of a musician who is not human, a purveyor of sounds as ancient as they are futuristic. At once primeval and electronic, these whistles, scratches, and turnarounds are inarguably music. You can prove it or you can feel it, whichever approach works best for you…. …Nightingale music takes time. He can go on all night; we should be able to manage one hour. This performance must be one long unearthly, untaught strain. Listening to it all now, I can tell it takes time to get into this nightingale scale of midnight hours - sound weaves slowly around my consciousness, taking forms and shapes only after many repeats start to make sense…. …I’ve brought the biggest Bluetooth speaker I can carry, so these deep frequencies—granted, frequencies the birds can’t hear or care much about—are there. But I like to think they can feel them just the way they can feel that an earthquake or seismic shift might be on the horizon…I pick up my clarinet: Phrygian mode or whole tones? It’s down to me, the bird, and the beat. The corncrakes and crows fall silent, but I feel them begin to dance. There is a clear moment where that nightingale swings…Up high are the nightingale’s phrases. In the middle the clarinet rises and falls. A soundscape of niches, each one of them filled…To be sure, this machine beat is dominating the wild bird, and I know plenty of people who will hate this track because it does exactly what I tell musicians not to do: invade the nightingale’s space, overlay his perfection with that incessant human rhythm. And yet, I cannot deny that to me it sounds cool. I want to blend with the bird and give him this ground before I go.” (Rothenberg, 2019, p.32; p.36; p.126–127) IAD #2 - Audiovisual Morphological Notation for Humpback Whale Song Whale song has several structural characteristics which have parallels to human music, but these are often easier to recognise when visualised as a sonogram than by listening alone. The shapes and patterns in the sonogram provide a faithful abstract form of the sounds they represent. Initially the parameters that define the correlation must be learnt, but once the basic logic of the relation between sound and image is established, it becomes possible to associate the pitch, length, and dimensions of intensity much like in musical notation, which is relatable since both follow the same logic of frequency against time. In the age of digital recordings and computer software, sonograms have since become much more detailed and colourful as well as simpler and faster to create. Today it is easy to stretch or compress timelines, juxtapose or superimpose the output of several recordings to compare them in a matter of seconds. In order to take advantage of these new affordances, Rothenberg teamed up with data visualiser Michael Deal to create a unique visual morphological notation to enhance the ability to connect to the complexity of sound and patterns present in whale songs (Rothenberg & Deal, 2015). Specific sounds that repeat throughout the cycle were isolated from the recording, and a unique glyph was designed and colour coded for each sound expression. The glyphs provide a clear visual language to guide 13 578 S. Kass listening to these complex humpback sounds that blends three elements, the indication of pitch, the logic of the musical staff, and the visual transcription of a sound wave. This allows semiotic interpretation according all three Peircean variants of the icon – the sonogram as an image, the notation as a diagram (de Aguiar, 2019) and the shape as a metaphor. Visualising whale song in this way brings out patterns that indicate themes and phrases that provide structural parallels to human music, and the introduction of colour makes it easy and quick to recognise which sounds repeat. Sonograms and the staff used in musical notation follow the same logic of a timeline along the x-axis and pitch along the y-axis. The glyphs can be directly transposed onto a musical staff (see Fig. 1 below), which situates the sounds within the context of human music and brings out details such as overtones. Potentially, as the listener gains more familiarity with the linking of sounds, shapes and colours maybe be indexed to the expectation of certain sounds, and if hermeneutic relations become sufficiently scaffolded and transparent, sounds may be imagined on the basis of colours and shapes. “Kent’s copper-tipped hydrophones do get a great sound, swirling around from ear to ear. Not true stereo, because they’d have to be a hundred meters apart to get that, but something more dynamic than what I’ve yet heard. I carefully lower my ESunPride underwater speaker down its rope. Blow into the mike, test the sound as I listen back to that resonating, underwater clarinet sound I’m starting to get used to. Not quite muffled, more like extra resonances inside an insulated box; more overtones, making it all somewhat bell-like and far away. The whale, on the other hand, sounds amazingly close. Right under the boat. The hull itself is buzzing…Two minutes in, he really seems to get louder in response to the spaces I leave in between my notes. He’s alternating with me, not interrupting, like nightingales who compare each other’s riffs in the dark. Then I play a high wail, and he seems to add a whoop to his bruup. He’s adding resonance to his tones, making them richer, louder. Suddenly he leaps from a real low growl to a super high squeak…I’ve spent enough time with field scientists who deride my claims to make music with animals as wishful think- Fig. 1 Humpback whale song glyphs superimposed upon a musical scale to show pitch range from WHALE MUSIC by David Rothenberg © 2023, all rights reserved, Terra Nova Press 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 579 ing, so now I need to assure you that I too have no idea what is going on in this duet. All I know is for five minutes, I felt music. Some of it is harsh and shrieky, but that’s what the whales were up to…When I get home from Hawaii I hunker down in the studio, replaying the experience over and over again…I listen to hours of recording from all the different boat trips where not much is happening, then home in on the best several minutes where alien music seems to appear…Far away from science, I know. But it’s a music like none I’ve ever heard before. Most who’ve heard it thus far also hear some kind of connection between man and whale…As the duet continues, I hear that the whale makes use of the spaces between my phrases, filling them in with patterns from his repertoire that at times seem to echo the pitches and timbre that I am playing. He leaps from his low beats and inserts his shrieks just when space allows…After several minutes I’m flowing deeper into the style, ready to shriek wildly into these klezmeresque vibratos, evenly spaced, like the whale aesthetic that I’m hearing...In a way it is no surprise that this whale is able to match my unfamiliar sounds so quickly. If he couldn’t do this, there would be no way humpback males could learn new songs so quickly, changing their group song rapidly over the course of one single season. A new whale could change the song, and so might a clarinet. This is a hypothesis I have just begun to test. Listening back later and printing it out, I look at the page, and the pattern tells me there may be some sense in it after all.” (Rothenberg, 2023, p.257–259) IAD #3 Immersion in the Rhythms of Cicada Swarm There are three morphologically and behaviourally distinct species groups of periodical cicada, Magicicada, each with its own distinct calls for attracting and signalling mates. Periodical cicadas spend most of their lives underground, emerging only at thirteen- or seventeen-year intervals for about six weeks to congregate in chorus centres, reproduce, then die. The choruses are an intense and memorable sound event, and as they occur only once in a generation, often act as a marker of the passing of time for the locals. People who live near chorus centres can be disturbed or frightened by the intense sound, which can reach up to 100dB and last for several days (Williams & Simon, 1995). Cicada enthusiasts like Rothenberg and his peers, travel around the east coast and central US during the spring of the select years when a big emergence is predicted, and actively seek out chorus locations, hoping to be at the right place at the right time to catch one. Communication technology has also caught up with this trend, and today there is an app so that cicada enthusiasts can alert each other to when and where emergences occur. The repetitive nature of the cicada call is difficult to mimic on an acoustic instrument, but it can also be recorded, sampled and manipulated in infinitely strange and interesting ways using software. Part of the allure of the periodical cicada sound is to experience the full intensity of immersing oneself in the sound of the chorus and to be humbled as only one sounding body amongst millions of vibrating bodies. 13 580 S. Kass “We simply found the right tree at the right time that was teeming with so many cicadas that it was impossible to think about anything else. Cicadas were our world, our total sound field. The tree was low, the insects were all so close to us. Time to go in… Living, noisy cicadas drop from branches into our hair, all over our clothes, soon inside our clothes, just hanging there, singing. They start to tickle, I begin to laugh. I run for the open field, giggling. What else can I do, the scene seems so ridiculous. It’s about to get even more absurd. I have no choice in such situations except to pull out an instrument. More used to the delicate earthiness of the clarinet, with this great volume I have no choice. Must pull out the saxophone, to cut to the chase, or cut through the swiiiisssssssssshhhhhhssssssssssshhhhhhsssss.. I pull the straight golden horn out of its case and immediately cicadas are excited, they jump right onto the shine. I’m worried about starting to play because I don’t want to crush any of them who might try to climb from the inside of the horn out one of the tone holes. They’re all over my brown shirt, outside, stuck to the stripes, and inside, holding their ground. They’re all over my scraggly hair, alighted on my ears, tymbaling up a storm. It is essential to wear sunglasses just to keep them from bounding and bouncing into the eyes. As I finally get up the nerve to play I find I must hunch over to keep the swarm from overwhelming me. The noise is deafening, but the soprano is used to cutting through. A tentative, minor melody comes out. I reach out, and try. Up, down, a look around. Upon holding out a long tone I suddenly hear the cicadas swelling along with me. Contact! Contact! They’re certainly crawling up my naked back under my shirt, but I’m more excited about possible contact in sound. They are all rising in volume in a great big swish. I imagine it is certain notes that I play that bring on the sync. Later, though, I read about the three concurrent thirteen- year species and I learn I’m in the midst of a swarm of tredecassinis, and the swell is just what they do, whether or not a sax is pontificating in their midst. But who thinks of causality at a time like that? I am awash in a mist of tymbalic noise, the strangest orchestra I have ever tried to join. How could they possibly care about my sound, so different it is than their own, so fixated they are on the mantra of fly! sing! mate! die! And yet, fly at the sax they do, jump to the shine, swell with sound all over my hair…And yet this world tree of cicadas really is too much. It’s just a total wash of sound, far away from the angularity of my horn, it’s cut-to-the-chase pierciness that has pushed the popularity of the soprano sax, so hard to play in tune, but able to pierce through the white noise…. Why play one, clear, single human sound into such a panoply of noise? First, it’s a humbling experience, being one of the thousand musicians, the rest of them desperately beating their tymbals for their very lives, caught up in the desperate unique propagation of their species through sound. Then, it is a strangely inspiring moment, you are taking your single pure tone and trying to find a way for it to have meaning in the midst of all this atonality.” (Rothenberg, 2014, p.221–225) 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 581 IAD #4 Seeing Pond Sounds Pond sounds cannot be heard by the human ear without technology. Rothenberg must fish for them with a special hydrophone, different from the one used for whales, which works more like a waterproof contact microphone. Listening for pond life requires time patience, as it might take a long time for any audible sounds to appear. Ponds are complex ecologies consisting of plants, insects and aquatic animals, all of which contribute to the rhythmic layers of the sound environment. Many of the most rhythmic and regular pond sounds are the product of underwater plants breathing, and light is the primary trigger for the movements that we can hear, because the sound is the result of photosynthesis. It’s hard to predict if a pond will sound interesting or not, making playing live unpredictable. Since it’s difficult to predict when some interesting sounds will appear, or if they will appear, it’s easy to end up with hours of recordings, leading to some tedious work to listening to hours of nothing in search of an unknown something. This makes looking at recordings as sonograms a much more interesting way to go through them, as well as a great time saver, meaning that the visual abstraction produced by the sonogram is even more important than in the case of whales. Translation to the visual actively assists listening to this complex sound ecology and subtle patterns emerge more easily in the visual register (see Fig. 2). Software lets you filter out certain layers of audio or visual noise, to highlight specific rhythms or sound, revealing different textures and detail. The program Amadeus lets the user choose the colour palette and determine the hue that represents the loudest and quietest sounds. By zooming in and out, you can visually search for the interesting passages scattered amongst long stretches of uniform uneventful sound. Similarly to the system of audiovisual morphological notation outlined above, familiarity with recurring structural patterns and colour associations may help the listener begin to expect certain sounds, develop more sensitivity to subtle detail and imagine sounds associated with the visual pattern. “There is no me and him, me and her, me and it, but my sounds together with others’ sounds, live and leaping into the lap of the world. It’s not that I wouldn’t want such a one-on-one contact with another creature, it’s just that I don’t think that’s the best way to find music there. It is not an I-Thou situation, but instead the music itself is the unity, the identity, the process that is more real than the various species who produce it. It cannot be made by humans or ponds alone, but only when we decide that underwater, there is no such thing as silence, and that the soundworld we hear is on the path toward music. Our sense of what can be called music expands…. …I thought this pond-derived music would sound impossibly abstruse, far beyond the likes and dislikes of most people, just a complete and utter obscurity, but actually these sounds seem to inspire as the audience starts to feel the rhythm. There are beats out there far beyond the simplicity of human time. The clicks of the plants breathing in, breathing out, make it seem like they are striving toward the need for music, without being aware of what they are doing…. …I hear them even if I don’t see them. I listen to the captured hours, over and over again. It becomes the natural context for my clarinet dreams. Bass clari- 13 582 S. Kass Fig. 2 Perfect Day - the simple difference between plant and animal, 1:04 − 1:24, twenty seconds from Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg © 2024, all rights reserved. Roof Books net. Contrabass clarinet. Just low, low as you can go. I try to unplay my instrument, to turn myself into a pond creature. I know nothing, absolutely nothing outside the ringing rhythm of my rippling water…. When you come across a strange sound, ask not its purpose, but strive to inhabit it. This world of ponds we are investigating may be an unfamiliar world, but it is a world of sounds that can tingle us in a most pleasant way…ASMR— Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response—something I had never heard of under that name though I’m sure I have long felt it…. …With my mouth I just go pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. At a certain speed I go back to one of my earliest memories, a nightmare from childhood…I heard this in my head going ah ah ah ah ah ah ah, like the popping bubbles of plants, rhythms today in the pond. Back then it was scaring me. Now I discover sounds just like that, I don’t know if they make me calm down or agitate me. Remember history, remember my past, these pops retain a certain sense of beauty, a tingle that resonated so deep inside.” (Rothenberg, 2024, p.51–55) 13 Technology and Interspecies Musical Practice 583 Conclusion The interspecies dispositives outlined above use technology to equip and attune human perception to a select set of vibrations, some of which only become audible and visible with the help of technologies, focusing and disturbing listening in ways that pushes our cognition to “cope” with new kinds of musical qualities of sound. As technology becomes more deeply embedded in tasks of all kinds, further embodied and transparent, more complex and autonomous, it is good to maintain an awareness of the role it plays in how we listen. Advances in recording techniques have allowed animal music to be brought directly inside the lab or the concert hall have led to a renewed appreciation for the structures, timbres, tonality, and temporality of animal music, allowing these sounds to be appreciated for intrinsic musical qualities. The unique structures and rhythms can now be closely studied, or integrated into musical compositions; field recordings can be used directly, as material, or manipulated to enhance selected qualities, both aural and visual. Stripped of technology, humans are not the loudest, we don’t sing the longest, our songs are not the most complex, neither are they the oldest. However, humans are unusually curious about the music of other species, and interspecies music as a practice, a technology that enchants listening, cultivates further curiosity. Rothenberg’s intentional practices of interspecies listening to and interaction with sound present human listeners with a set of semiotic technologies, or “tools for semiotic activity” (see Hoffmeyer, 2008, p.343–344) that enhance and enrich the experience of music and bring it closer to nature through the affordances of sound. Listening to more-than-human music allows humans as a species of vocal learners to semiotically scaffold our sonic Umwelt with new musical structures, rhythms and expand the scope of what is musically meaningful and beautiful. Emerging technologies may offer tools and methods to answer further questions about why musical animals, ourselves included, are so fascinated and engrossed by the enchanting nature of music. This is a good reason to leave the definition of what music is rather open, since from the processual and pluralistic perspective of Umwelt, we have only a partial experience of what music is, let alone the diversity of sound experiences which may be perceived as musical. Author Contributions S.K. wrote the manuscript. Funding No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript. Open access publishing supported by the National Technical Library in Prague. Data Availability No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study. Declarations Consent for publication The author has received permission to publish and use images and illustrations. Competing Interests The authors declare no competing interests. Consent to Participate The author has received informed consent from the participant. 13 584 S. Kass Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. References Anker, P. (2020). The power of the periphery: How Norway became an Environmental Pioneer for the World. 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