The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S4E8: Sonic Specimen with Rachel Mundy
In this episode Claudia chats to Rachel Mundy about the concept “Sonic Specimen” they talk about the historical categorisation of sound illustrates some of the ways in which humans and animals have been hierarchically thought of. They touch on how this has shaped and is shaped by the institutional production of knowledge also hinting at the usefulness of related concepts like “animanities” and “translation”.
Date Recorded: 10 March 2022
Rachel Mundy is an Associate Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture and Media Program at Rutgers University. She is primarily concerned with the way animal musicality has defined modern notions of life and rights in a post-climate change world. For Rachel, this is an interdisciplinary question that brings musical science into conversation with Western beliefs about race, gender, nation, and other forms of difference. In a series of nationally-recognized books, articles, and public lectures, Rachel has explored these questions through cases that connect human rights to animal voices. Find out more about Rachel on her university website or email her questions directly (rmm290@newark.rutgers.edu).
Claudia (Towne) Hirtenfelder is the founder and host of The Animal Turn. She is a PhD Candidate in Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and is currently undertaking her own research project looking at the geographical and historical relationships between animals (specifically cows) and cities. She was recently awarded the AASA Award for Popular Communication for her work on the podcast. Contact Claudia via email (info@theanimalturnpodcast.com) or follow her on Twitter (@ClaudiaFTowne).
Featured:
Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening by Rachel Mundy;
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.
Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.
iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
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This is another I Roll podcast.
SPEAKER_02:You know, this is really about how we value voices, how we value lives. It just felt to me like it was a profound way of showing that when we talk about animals and we talk about musicality, we really are talking about the valuation of life at a pretty profound level.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome back to the Animal Turn, everyone. This is season four, episode eight, where we're focused in on animals and sound. And in today's episode, I'm going to be speaking to Rachel Lundy about the concept of sonic specimen. It's a really good episode, and we go in some interesting uh directions. And we start to also talk about some related concepts like animanities and towards the end of the episode, translation as well. And uh it ended up being a really generative conversation, I think, with a lot of insights uh in terms of the ways in which animals and humans have historically been entangled in what are often unequal and unjust, I think, processes of procurement. Got a lot of big words there. Sorry about that. Let me tell you a little bit about Rachel Mundi. Rachel Mundy is an associate professor of music in the arts, culture and media program at Rutgers University. She's primarily concerned with the way animal musicality has defined modern notions of life and rights in a post-climate change world. For Rachel, this is an interdisciplinary question that brings musical science into conversation with Western beliefs about race, gender, nation, and other forms of difference. In a series of nationally recognized books, articles, and public lectures, Rachel has explored these questions through cases that connect human rights and animal voices. To find out more about Rachel, definitely go check out her website as well as her book, Animal Musicalities. And then, of course, at the end of the episode, we have Hannah Hunter who's going to round us off with an animal highlight, this time focusing in on butterflies. Who uh, yeah, I'm not gonna tell you anything, which you're gonna have to wait until the end of the episode to listen. But without any further ado, here it is.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, Rachel. Welcome to the Animal Town Podcast. Hi, Claudia. It's amazing to be here.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's been we've already been chatting in the green room, and I think it's gonna be a good conversation. So um, welcome. And for folks, I'm pretty certain everyone who's listening to this season has a sense of who you are and your your amazing work on animals and sound and music. But for those of us who don't or are new to animals and sound, could you give us a little bit of a sense of who you are and how you became interested in animals and sound?
SPEAKER_02:So my name is Rachel Mundy. I am associate professor of music history at Rutgers University, Newark. Um, I started out as a very traditional music historian when I was a graduate student. I had funding to go to France and study the government budgets for 1950s experimental music in Paris.
SPEAKER_03:Government budgets.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, government budgets. And while I did that, I was just really interested in bird song. I was recording um field, I was making field recordings in New York City from my apartment. Um, I was really lucky I had a tree that crowned right outside my window. So in the spring, all I had to do was roll over at four o'clock in the morning to turn the recorder on. Um, so I went to Paris for this work, already interested in birds. And as I was there, I was doing um research that basically involved looking at receipts. And although it was a worthy project and it was important, it was incredibly boring. And I as I was doing that, I was also continuing to listen to birds. I was reading historical material from the 50s on birds in natural history journals in France. And I just felt like it was so much more interesting than French mid-century budgets for music. And I think the reason I felt like it was so powerful and so important was because to me, thinking about bird song and music as part of a shared conversation was also thinking about like the modern conundrum. Why do we live in a world where talking about climate change doesn't also mean talking about social injustice? Why do we live in a world where talking about, you know, animal musicality is a radically separate topic from questions about the music we listen to in our everyday contexts? I felt like there was this schism between the discourse about sound in non-human contexts and sound in human context. And so I just felt like this was important to talk about and think about, particularly because it has so much relevance for questions about who has rights, who has worth, who has value. So I went back to New York and said to my dissertation advisor, I would like to completely change my dissertation. And because she was very gracious and she knew me quite well, she actually said, Rachel, we've been waiting for this. So thank you. So I was very lucky that I had such support from my faculty and teachers.
SPEAKER_03:Amazing. And then was uh is this so your book, Animal Musicalities, did that come out of your PhD work?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it came out of a kind of weird dissertation that was about um evolutionary theory and the parallels that it made between human and animal sounds. But if you ever read it, which you shouldn't, it was very heavy on examples from France in the mid-20th century.
SPEAKER_03:It's great. It's so interesting. I think it's really, really um, it's fascinating.
SPEAKER_02:It was wonderful. I was, like I said, I was so lucky that I had such supportive faculty. I think they they were intrinsically interested in the material, just as I was. So the book was very different from the dissertation. Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_04:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Like in terms of the content. I got much deeper into the research, but the kernels of it were definitely in the first, the first big document that I wrote.
SPEAKER_03:Amazing. Um and and were you always interested in animal studies? So you said you were you were with music first. So you went from music and you found your way to animal studies. Um, did you find that kind of transition or learning about animals in relation to to music and and the schism that you're talking about? Did you find that hard?
SPEAKER_02:That's a great question. And it's a really thought-provoking question for me because it was so hard in some ways and so natural in others. One of the music faculty I worked with, um, Jason Stanjak, who teaches at Oxford now and is just an incredible ethnomusicologist, when he heard that I wanted to record bird song in my neighborhood, he loaned me an Eddie Roll recorder, which you normally use for like interviewing. And he also handed me a copy of Donna Haraway's Primate Visions, which I had never read, I had never heard of, I didn't know that there was such a thing as animal studies. But as I started to read that, um, it was interesting because it it was like it permanently realigned my view of the world. Um, and I felt that that I, in some ways, I don't consider myself primarily an animal studies scholar. And I think most people who do it would say this because my work is so in between different fields. Um, it's really about rethinking disciplinarity rather than um fitting cleanly within a disciplinary tradition. But one of the things that I felt strongly that animal studies brought to the table was a profound recognition that the category of the animal as such is deeply problematic. And that once you accept that, you have to rethink everything.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And and I know in your your book, one of the questions you asked is, what is humanity? And I think you know, animal studies is constantly grappling with that divide or that dichotomy, just like in in gender studies, you're kind of grappling with the divides and the divisions that manifest there. Um but my my experience of animal studies so far has been that it almost seems inherently once and interdisciplinary because because I think to some of what you're talking about in your book, uh we is you might focus on um music or I'm focusing on studies. The second you start to look at animals, you start to uh you have to ask questions about biology, you have to ask questions about history, you have to ask questions um the ones and uh you know the physical sciences and the natural sciences as well as the social sciences and humanities. And uh and for me as a as a person related as my teacher that's one of the hardest things is actually trying to grapple with the literature in a variety of different spaces and feeling like I need to know it all. Um so yeah, it's just it was really, I think, fascinating to read your book and and your ideas around uh just animanities. I think that's a really great uh concept. Perhaps before we get to to Sonic Specimen, which is the focus of the episode today. Um, and I think Sonic Specimen is a really important concept for us to be having in this this season, but maybe we could just spend a little bit of time talking about uh animalities and and uh what you were trying to do there with that that concept.
SPEAKER_02:Oh wow. That's actually it's tougher than you think it is to summarize that quickly. When I was writing the book, um, the process of writing it gave me a moment to think about like what are what are productive nodes of inquiry that would help us do this work of rethinking in different ways that are grounded in historical context. Because I'm a historian by training in relation to music, and I felt that thinking about the intersection of musicality and historical context was really, really empowering in the context of animal studies, partly because music as a historical creation has been viewed for about 200 years as like a window to the soul, as a window to interiority, as a symptom of sentience, of internal, of internal being. And so part of what that means is that when you ask whether or not an animal is musical, you're asking about like its invisible personhood in ways that don't fully translate to the to the visual and don't fully translate to the textual, right? That you know, can an animal have language? That's about rationality. Can an animal make music? That's about the secret, invisible person, um, the soul, really. And so I was really thinking like, this is this is to me, this is about rethinking how ethics and life are intertwined as part of a historical package that we need to unpack a little bit before we can really apply it successfully to the next one or two hundred years. Um, and thinking about ethics, when I created this idea of the animanities, I was like thinking what nodes of ethics need to be re-examined through historical context, through understanding the human and the animal as a problematic binary. Um I listed in my book uh personhood, identity, difference, knowledge, um, the idea of humanity as it emerged after World War II, which I called post-human humanity, subjectivity, and then the last note I wanted to interrogate was this idea of paradise, the idea of a utopia that we could hypothetically live in in a moment in which most of our ecological utopias that we have fantasized are profoundly problematic because almost all of the um fantasies of ecological conservation and safety are premised on the total absence of human beings, which is not realistic, right? Um so just thinking about these different nodes. So the animanities which is actually this sort of very structured thing I came up with, these seven different points of interrogation. And the word itself, in some ways, I feel like we make up new words in scholarship. And these new words are ways to, they're ways to do a lot of things, but they also have a lot of cultural capital for the person who invents them. And in some ways, I wanted to push back against that too. So I chose a word that's almost so silly sounding that it's really hard to use, partly because I wanted people to benefit from I wanted people to benefit from the knowledge without without overly valorizing the the textual element of this word animalities.
SPEAKER_03:It's so funny that you say that because I I was literally as I was reading yesterday, I was like, oh, I think I could use this in my PhD because something that's wrong. I make no promises, but I do think as a as a as a justification, because um, so I'm in geography and I'm actually squarely put in the realm of human geography, and I'm constantly like my my my PhD degree, even though I'm in animal studies, is gonna be a PhD in human geography. I'm like, that's not quite that's not quite right because um there's no understanding, you know, my realm of animals understanding humans, but there's also um and I was like humanities really captures what the humanities and social sciences are and I don't appreciate that humans are also animals. Uh and and I I feel like it's a it's a leveler playing field for for us in the animal studies uh realm than than humanities is necessarily, or then um yeah, and and I actually I thought it was really great. And maybe I wasn't necessarily thinking through the kind of related concepts. I think, like you said, difference and how you know things and the epistemology of how we've come to know uh you know anything, whether it's whether it's cities or or music or whatever is based on knowledge systems, right? Like how we and and and what you were saying there about music, like we've separated human music from from animal music, and this is a disciplinary move as well. Um so I actually think it's a really useful concept in in in many ways, and I I think it's uh quite attractive. But now that we're we're speaking a bit about difference, um I really wanted to talk to you today about sonic specimen because I think so far in the season we've we've we've touched on a variety of different uh sounds related to I mean concepts related to sound, so like soundscape, sound ecology, sonic methods, um sound history. We've we've even spoken about music already. Uh but kind of throughout all of these you realize that we're also speaking about types of animals. And sometimes we're explicit about types of animals and sometimes we're not. Um and when I saw the concept of sonic specimen, I I never thought of sound as a specimen. Um so yeah, maybe I I can hand it over to you for now and you can kind of just give us the broad brushstrokes of what this concept means and and why why you found it useful in your work.
SPEAKER_02:This is such a such a great um concept for me, at least. When I was when I was starting to work on animal sounds, um, I knew from my training that there was a period in Western uh music scholarship where people were really, really interested in collecting not one or two, but hundreds of thousands of samples of human song. Ideally, songs that exemplified what was considered to be a kind of hierarchy of difference. So folk songs were very popular, collections of folk songs, um, songs of Native Americans were very popular, um, collections of songs that were associated with specific nations. So that, you know, folk songs of Russia, folk songs of southern Wales, um, things like that, um, songs from Africa, things, things that really were meant to be kind of ethnic, national, racial typologies through music. And I found as I was interested in learning more about natural history from the same period, that although it wasn't as widely spread, there were comparable collections of animal sounds, especially insect sounds and bird songs. And both of these kinds of collections, so I'm talking about something that ranges from an article with 15 to 20 short segments of always written in sheet music that are maybe worth, I don't know, five or 10 seconds, to books that would contain pages of like a hermit thrush singing for pages. Uh, they loved collecting these sounds. And the idea was that you were going to build a kind of typology. Um, if you had 500 songs from the Hobie Indians, you would analyze them and find out like what is the fundamental element that makes something sound Hobi. If you have, for example, um several hundred songs of uh wood peewee, which um at least two different um uh biologists did, you would find out some sort of fundamental sound of wood peeweeness. And it was just amazing to me to think, wow, these are specimen collections, both of them, right? Um you go to the museum, you see the natural history museum, you see um arrays of specimens, um, you know, often insects or birds. They always have larger ones, but the the really substantive collections are often from smaller creatures. And they're this kind of um panoply of difference that is meant to be aware of in front of your eyes, you look at it, you see what is different, and it's all organized for you so that the whole world is structured in this kind of hierarchy. And that's basically what these collections were. Um, they were visual as well because they were in sheet music. And I even found that um one of the things I was curious about was like, were any of these actually put in natural history museums? And some of them were. Um I was really interested that uh an American named Jesse Walker Fuchs, who a lot of ethnomusicologists know, um, he had collected a lot of songs from the American Southwest. And they were stored, interestingly, they were stored at the um the National History of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, until after World War II, where they were then transferred to the Library of Congress, which is across the street. Wow. And to me, it was amazing because this was also a a decision about what these were for, right? Like when they moved them from the Natural History Museum, they had been signs, they had been um specimens in the most literal sense. And then when they moved them to the Library of Congress across the street, they were cultural artifacts. So so fascinating to me.
SPEAKER_03:And did people speak of cultural artifacts when they moved?
SPEAKER_02:There were debates in ethnography about what to do, really. I think there were debates about whether or not a lot of this was more about human artifacts than about animal sounds. Um and and that's also interesting. The way that these kinds of specimens were treated ended up representing a kind of disciplinary split after World War II, where before World War II, most both bird and um most of these were birds or insects in terms of songs, um, both sort of sound recordings and transcriptions that were of animals and um sound recordings and transcriptions that were of um human beings, uh, human communities, they were generally treated as comparable.
SPEAKER_03:Interesting.
SPEAKER_02:And treated, yeah, both were treated as sort of natural history specimens. And then after World War II, there was this big debate in both fields about what to do. I think because after the Holocaust, there was a very public discourse about how race had affected science and how racism had affected science. And different fields responded differently. In fields like ornithology, where they were thinking about trying to systematically study animal sounds as a science. One of the ways they responded was basically just to throw everything that had been and sort of say that was not science. That was like fake science.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And the only real study of animal sound now is animals that are studied. They they had a new technology called the sound spectrograph, which created a graphic image of sound.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And they basically said, if it's music notation, it's not science. If it's a spectrogram, it's okay. And in um, yeah. And then in cultural studies, they did the opposite, actually. So, like in cultural studies, they it wasn't quite the opposite. In cultural studies, they started to do that. They were like, Yeah, we think we should have graphs instead of uh music notation. And then in the 70s, there was this big fight about it. And a group of scholars, I think at UCLA, did a study where they asked which was more accurate, and they were like, none of this is accurate. Um, the work that we do is subjective, and we have to embrace that and accept it. And these this is a radically different conclusion from the conclusion that bioacoustics people came to.
SPEAKER_03:Whoa. This, I mean, there's there's so much going on here, and and it makes me think of, you know, so I spoke to um Cheryl Tip, right, about the significance of archives and kind of collecting things and keeping things and and the power and who gets to decide what is important or valuable in being stored in an archive in the first place, right? But I think museums here are as significant a space, and obviously a related space here, where you know things and people and animals and a variety of relationships are kind of displayed in a very particular way. So, like you spoke there about kind of insects and birds being put on display in a hierarchy and in like a determined order already. Uh, but of course, natural history museums have been fraught with like histories of colonialism and also putting up people in very particular relationships to animals on these displays. And I think this is a big tension in in animal studies today. Anyone who's doing animal studies and kind of grappling with some of these questions is needing to also speak about uh race and colonialism because um the idea of the animal has also so often been kind of weaponized and used against very particular people. And I think the museum was a key site of those those kinds of establishing ideas of who is primitive and who is civilized.
SPEAKER_02:Um this is who is the human as well, right? They're they're interlocked.
SPEAKER_03:Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's it's and then it's really uh it becomes a really like a difficult terrain, I think, in animal studies today because you you want to take seriously and must take seriously those kinds of fraught racial and colonial histories and how they impacted different people in a variety of ways. Um without without necessarily disavowing what those relationships meant for animals, um, but also at the same time not necessarily collapsing how they were experienced differently. Um so so then because I I enjoy natural history museums, I've got to say, I go there, I find them, I've always found them really fascinating. And I'm like, whoa, all the shells and all these things. But now you start to think about the work that they're doing and the specimens that they're doing and and what they mean in terms of how we come to know the world. And then it it becomes a very different space. It becomes a space that the types of questions you're asking, I think, are quite fascinating. And I don't think I've ever heard things in natural history museums. And maybe this is changing now as technology and kind of displays are changing. But I I don't have any I've got massive like memories of taxidermy and skeletons and um jars filled with goopy things that were fascinating. But I don't recall hearing anything, which is interesting. Um and I just love that idea of you saying that that they have sheet music. I never that seems I don't know anything about music, but the idea of I like I don't even understand how that would work. Is it is it you hear a particular sound and you say, Oh, this is how how how would that even work?
SPEAKER_02:So people who are musical have training in what's called transcription, which means knowing enough about the notational system in Western tradition to write down what you hear approximately. And obviously, people who are writing down sounds that did not come from the Western musical tradition had trouble writing it down properly in this system because the system isn't designed to represent certain sounds. So whether they were talking about um non-Western folk music or something like that, or whether they were, I hate to even use this term folk music because it's a it's a word that comes from this tradition of classification. Um but whether they were talking about sounds that came from a community outside of Western Europe, or whether they were talking about sounds that came from a species outside of the human, they often made um very creative and intriguing adaptations. So, like when I wasn't gonna play this actually, but one of the one of the um people who transcribed a lot of a lot of uh American bird songs was named Ferdinand Scarler Matthews. And for example, he really loved the the harmonic sounds of an American Robin's song. He really loved the the rhythm, and he sort of loosely associated it with traditional four-part harmony. So I can I can maybe play you an example of how he transcribed that, and then maybe later after the podcast, I can send you an image from his book of what it looked like on the page of music. But I'll play it and you'll hear that if you if you know what a robin sounds like, it's kind of right, but robins don't sing in four-part harmonies, so it's a very different thing. Let's see, can I I don't know if I can but that's really fascinating.
SPEAKER_03:So they so they would listen to, if I get this correct, a field, someone who worked in the field would go into the field, they would hear a song from a bird, and they would try to write down what that sounded like, and then they would use human instruments to try and play that sound again.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, and they made very, very immediate comparisons with human music. Like one of these birds that was really popular was the wood pee-wee. And um I'll try. I think that because my headphones are plugged in, you can't hear audio that's that's internal to my computer. So um I can't. Oh, yeah, you've got the wood pee-wee. So we can we can play the wood pee-wee. So um give me a second. So the wood pee-wee, um, this was an American biologist named Aretta Saunders who did a lot of really serious research on bird song and really beautiful research on bird song. He collected hundreds of songs from different species, and one of the species he was interested in was the wood pee-wee. One of the comparisons he made, and actually several other people made as well, was between this bird's song structure and the structure of American popular sort of tin pen alley songs with a with a history from minstrelsy. So, on the one hand, they're comparing the bird to human music, but on the other hand, they're comparing it to a kind of human music that was considered very lowbrow, um, had associations with black American culture. So it was like this bird is really great, but only sort of maybe, yeah, maybe you can play the whippy, but I'll tell you first what to listen for. They they were thinking about the idea that it structures its song deliberately. So the idea was that it had a form, and the form would be a phrase A, followed by a contrasting phrase B, a repeat of the first phrase A prime, a little variation, and then a repeat of the second phrase with variation B prime. Um and they compared it. Uh you play that, and then I'll sing the song they were comparing it to. Okay. A. B. A prime, B prime. So they were comparing this to Swanny River. So they compared it to this American pop song called Swannee River, and the melody was like um da. That's A. Da. That's the B. Da repeat. Da, and that's the B. And they're like, these two are just the same. And part of what fascinates me is that on the one hand, they are hearing structure in the song, and there's no reason to assume there is no structure in the song. On the other hand, they're so invested in making a comparison that is not just to the human, but it's actually to a deeply layered sense of human hierarchy in music.
SPEAKER_03:Mm-hmm. And and was it common to to kind of hear a particular bird song and then equate it with a particular type of music or song and then and so like did you see kind of um different valuations of different species of birds with different valuations of different types of music? Um so would you have yeah, I just I I just don't know enough about birds or music to kind of think of a connection here, but uh would you would you have a species of bird that's really like revered being associated with a really revered piece of music?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. So for example, the the okay sort of mediocre bird, the wood peewee, which was associated with American blackface, um you can compare that to uh there was a comparison made by a really um a really Erudite music scholar uh from the turn of the century between a nightingale, which was a very revered songbird, and um European opera. The claim was that opera singers, when they ornament their song, are literally like nightingales because they both use the same ornament, was the claim. And then the kacini trill was the ornament that they compared it to.
SPEAKER_03:It's beautiful. You know what is interesting in thinking about this though is is even in how we talk about it, we kind of talk about, I guess, the we're talking about labeling, right? We're talking about how the the songs can be labelled, and the humans who are doing the labelling are using their own social worlds and their own social understandings of how people relate to one another to define bird song. But it's also not outside of the realm of reason that songs were also shaped by bird songs and animal sounds as well, not necessarily these exact species kinds of um uh collapses that are happening in the deaf defining process. But I'm sure that, and maybe this is where some of your knowledge on evolution would come in, but I'm sure that our relationship to sound is also an evolutionary relationship to the sounds of other animals.
SPEAKER_02:Um it's a tough one that. Yeah, there's an old story. I don't know if it's um I don't know if people still believe it actually, but there's an old story that's almost a kind of parable for anthropologists of music. And the story is this anthropologist, um, I think it was Colin Turnbull, went to the pygmies of Papua New Guinea and said, Sing me your oldest song. And they go, they go find an elder, and the elder comes up and starts to sing and says, Oh, you know, he gets everyone together. We're gonna sing this, we're gonna sing this. Um so they sing. And he records it. And it's oh my darling, Clementine. And the kind of moral of the parable that I was taught when I was in graduate school, anyway, is that um oral history basically means that you can only date something to the oldest living person who speaks with you. Um, and I and so these questions about evolutionary relationships are very I I don't feel that they're stupid questions, actually, but I do feel like they're it's almost impossible for me to imagine a legitimate way to answer some of them. Not not all of them, but some of the ones about things like transmission and influence, particularly when it's just as reasonable to say that composers are influenced right now when they hear birds, as to say that, right? And um and would they know it? I don't know.
SPEAKER_03:Um but I don't know if we have to know that they know. Um, you know, I I think the the reason we're able to kind of say, I think with some sense of probability, like or some sense of surety that people would have been influenced by the animals around them is because we are influenced by the animals around us today, even in ways we don't necessarily know or comprehend. Just like the animals around us are influenced by the things we do. I think um I think to to kind of disavow and doesn't mean we necessarily understand the contours of that influence, um, but I think to to to not appreciate that there could have been influence, that somehow music was sparked by its own just manifestation of humans in isolation from the rest of the world. I I I don't know. I I just that to me, I have no evidence or no background in in anthropology or in evolutionary sciences, but it just seems to me um to kind of again place humans in an isolated box where where they weren't seeing things. I mean, part of what it what I think is really useful in thinking about sonic specimen is there's there's kind of like a so in prep preparing for this, I was looking up, I like to look up the etymology of words, and I was really surprised to find that the etymology of species and of a specimen are connected. I was just like, wow. Because the more I've come to study animals or try to understand animals, the more I'm just like, species makes no sense to me. The more I try to look at the boundary or the barrier of species, the more I'm like, but but it it really is hard to sustain that. Um so maybe we could speak about like when you think of sonic specimens, um I know you mentioned so we've spoken about these like these sheep music, and that now there are these spectographs which have become their own kind of uh sonic specimens of like they're like stand-ins for living beings. Um but there are other elements to this sonic uh specimen that I that I'd like to unpack a little bit. So you you spoke about um vivisection and kind of the inspection of the dead. And I think that in some interesting ways, yeah, this is kind of a dissection of sound or a or a I don't know, like could you could you maybe speak through a bit about like the body and and how it's connected to the sonic specimen?
SPEAKER_02:Wow, this is like I feel like it's hard to speak um briefly on this question. Um for me, when I was researching the book, one of the things that I looked at, or one of the places I looked was a um a article from an ethnomusicologist working in Berlin in the 1920s, um, a guy named Ernst Moritz von uh Eric Moritz von Hornbostel. And I was very struck by this. It was a quote I had seen somewhere else. Um, an article by Eric Ames mentioned it, and I went and reread the article, and it's just a music analysis. He's just looking at a piece of music and saying, what makes this tick? But it's a piece of music that is um not from Germany, it's from Indonesia, if I'm right. Uh and in the very beginning, he says there's this debate about when you study music, are you supposed to um cut it open and watch the blood flow out while it dies in front of you? I mean, it was incredibly graphic and brutal the way that this question was formulated, especially because the thing he's doing is just like asking things like what pitch is in this recording, what does this sound like? And because I was so curious, I thought, why would he ever make this comparison between animal vivisection, which is not not just dissection, dissection is where you like cut into a dead body, right? But vivisection is where you open up the body of a living creature in order to study it, usually while it dies in front of you at this time. And it turned out that he worked in a uh scientific context in Germany, where a lot of the knowledge about sound at the time, which was it was a field called psychoacoustics, the devices they used and the training they had came from a previous generation of physiological research, in which their teachers, their laboratories, the spaces, the devices, all of those had originally been used for animal vivisection. Um and I even I even found as I was doing this that um some of the yeah, it was it was really intense. And one of the one of the uh devices that was used in this process, a thing called a chymograph, which is a kind of armature with a stylus at the end and a rotating cylinder that would record in little graphic lines the motion from inside of the animal's body as it died during the experiment. This device was translated into sound, where the armature that had reached into the body of the animal and recorded the quivering of the animal's body as the experiment proceeded was the stylus that reached into the groove of the phonograph and created sound as you listened to playback. And to me, it was um stunning actually to realize that there was a linear one-to-one relationship between the way that an animal's life was valued and the way that we learned to listen to sound.
SPEAKER_03:You know, when I was asking the question about like vivisection, I was actually thinking about how sound is dissected and how sound maybe like a song is dissected, and it loses every time we try to categorize something or put it in a box, you're never fully able to capture it. So it loses some of its beauty and its amazingness. But I think that story really drives home the kind of material realities of how animals and music are connected to one another. Um, it's a really profound story.
SPEAKER_02:I think for me, part of what really I thought about it was that when you, you know, there were lots of descriptions of like, why would you vivisect? And it was always described as a kind of exchange that you you have you value the life of an animal, but you exchange that valuable life for knowledge, because knowledge is more valuable when it's about human benefit and especially human medical benefit. And it seemed to me like it's really important actually to understand that there's a sense in which, you know, this idea that we trade the life of an animal for knowledge, and then we're going to add music into that equation and trade the life of a piece of music for knowledge. And then the music that was being traded was usually the music of a um marginalized community. Uh, you know, to me, it it felt like there was actually a very linear connection between the idea that an animal, though valuable, was not as valuable as a human, you know, life was not as valuable as human knowledge, which is a kind of radical concept. And then to sort of make that transition to music required a um a transitional example, in which the music in question was also the voice of a marginalized community. And like that, also I thought, you know, this is really about how we value voices, how we value lives. It just felt to me like it was a profound way of showing that when we talk about animals and we talk about musicality, we really are talking about um the valuation of life at a pretty profound level.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think I think you're completely right. And um and and just the the creating of these taxonomies, we were literally trying to put people in in order of one another, the um, you know, to say and and and this again, some of what we were talking about earlier, kind of the difficulty with thinking about animals and humans, is because throughout history it wasn't, even though now we kind of speak as humans being, you know, categorically spoken of or considered as above animals, they were the boundaries where some humans were considered below some animals, and some animals were considered above some humans, and and kind of the the access to life and the access to um chances and opportunities wasn't always determined by by species boundary, by human versus animal. Um and and I think that that's really interesting. And I think your your kind of study of sonic specimen helps us to trouble those relationships that that divide, that dichotomy. Um but it also makes me just think, you know, coming back to animals and the usefulness of this for animal studies is in that concept of specimen and of ideal type and how we do tend to not only lose sight of animal cultures, I think, but also animals as individuals. How how one song ends up becoming a stand-in for all song just seems counter to what culture is. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's amazing, actually. You're making me think about the fact that there's this one, this one recording of a single humpback whale from, I think it was from 1966, maybe was the original recording. And it was published on this album in 1970. It became associated with the Save the Whale movements, and I swear it feels like every single recorded version of what is supposed to be a humpback whale is all this single voice, this single source recording. Um, it's like this one moment in time, this one individual has come to stand in for this species. But but actually now for what, 50 years? That's an incredibly long time.
SPEAKER_03:Um and and it seems particularly problematic the more we come to know of whales and their cultural diversity and the fact that they've got different dialects. And and I mean, as much as I try to trouble kind of the human and animal uh dichotomy, sometimes thinking about how this would play out when thinking about humans helps to show how kind of bizarre it is and how it plays out with animals. Is to what extent would we take one person, and I suppose we do do it, um, but one person's song as being emblematic and an example and a characteristic type of all human songs or even one culture songs. And and I think this is some of what you've been speaking about with with the natural history, is we we kind of know now that to do that with people seems to miss out on the dynamism of people. Um and uh to kind of think that animals have one voice and one way of saying something, I think what what are we not hearing if if that's our starting point.
SPEAKER_02:Right, but that's I feel like that's the thing about the human-animal dichotomy, right? Is that the animal is this category that is sort of by definition, if you're using it that way, it's like all non-human life of a certain type. And so, of course, we have one thing stand in for it. And then the human, it's um, I'm thinking of there's this wonderful essay by Sylvia Winter that basically argues that the human as we know it was defined in the 1600s as a white European masculine ideal.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And um, I feel like that in many ways that is the counterbalance of this idea of a um a type specimen, right? Right, that like you have this one thing that stands in for everyone.
SPEAKER_03:That's a really, really interesting point. Um, and I mean, obviously that that kind of stand-in is being more and more troubled and more and more pushed against. And we're seeing how how how uh that's not necessarily readily accepted, right? Um, from the the powers that be. Don't necessarily want these categorizations to be disrupted, because it's uncomfortable to have categories challenged. Um and and the same kinds of logics work with how we categorize animals and how sound has been used to do that is really, I think, um, interesting. And this is really a difficult conversation to have, I think. Um I'm I'm I always find having these kinds of uh conversations about the intersection of human and race and animals really, really hard actually to to to do.
SPEAKER_02:I feel like it's it's made more difficult than it needs to be by the there's like a surface level where if you say the words human animal race together because of prior traditions in which that's a comparative venture, in which what you're doing is like comparing lesser human beings to um, you know, to animal subjects, then it sort of sets up that conversation to be a defense against that practice or some kind of explanation of how that's not what you're doing, when I feel like that's um it's almost a distraction because I think the more, you know, the more the more productive way to think about it for me, and this is not just me. I mean, a lot of I I mentioned Sylvia Winter, I read a wonderful book during COVID by Zakia Iamon Jackson that looks at things this way, basically thinking about the fact that um if you want to trouble the animal, you want to trouble the human. If you want to trouble the human, you're thinking about um divergent definitions of who counts as fully human. And you can't think that without unpacking where the animal plays a role in that. And and likewise, you can't think about non-human species without unpacking the way in which notions of the human define almost everything that we say and think about non-humans, sort of non-human others. To me, it feels like there's a bigger nexus here of like needing to rethink the pairing of difference and identity as intertwined. Um I feel like especially we we live a life. I know your first season was on animals and law. And we live in a present moment in which the protection of the marginalized, the protection of the other, has been created through categories of difference that are also the tools of inequity. And so part of the challenge in this moment is simply that in order to see out of that problem, we also have to live in the present where the tools of the solution are part of the problem. And yet we can acknowledge that those tools, you know, that that categories of um racial identity, of gender identity, of national difference, of speciation all come from a problematic point in the past that um won't necessarily serve us as well as we want to be served in the future.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's really important. And I think because we don't exist outside of the world we're born into and the context we're in. Um so it is really um powerful. And and I think some of the work that you're doing here with Sonic Spacemen and some of the conversation we're having here is kind of it's it's an anti-essentialist move. It's a at least at least for me, I think in having this conversation, it's a it's a and and obviously my my loyalties lie in kind of understanding animals and trying to think about how I can know and understand animals. And I think the Sonic specimen kind of shows in and and specimens in general, even you know, the the bodies that are put up in museums, but also the the multitude of the many ways in which they're put up and made specimens, uh kind of show a constant drive to make animals simple, to tell a simple story about uh specific species, about specific animals. And obviously those stories are entwined with our own um and very specific human cultures and ideas which are shaped by historical events like colonialism. Um so yeah, I just like I find I'm constantly trying to just resist simple ideas of of what animals are or who animals are. And I think that the the concept sonic specimen is a really useful tool for for grappling with that, for kind of showing that kind of essentialist move.
SPEAKER_02:I think it helps to me too. I mean, one of the things that I feel like we we tend to not connect to that, but is obviously very real is like we love stereotyping voices. You know, we really do. Um, I know in the United States, no no one who is a native English speaker in the United States um would have a second of wavering between identifying someone whose English-speaking accent comes from a native fluency of speaking Spanish in Mexico versus a native fluency of speaking Spanish in Spain. Um people who are um American English speakers in the United States, those are two very different sounds. And the typology is is so immediate, it's so rapid. Um, I don't think, you know, I don't even know enough to know is that like an acculturated tendency, uh, but it certainly is a tendency, and I feel like it plays out in the way that we hear not just other people, but other others, right? Um it's it's just that the blunt instrument, when you think about something like birds or whales or insects, it's like such a blunt instrument that I think people don't even realize it's happening.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and it's I think it's it's hard because I do think we are uh, and maybe I don't know, maybe this is because of the kind of the ways in which we do science, but I do think that we seek our patterns as humans. Like I look for patterns in clouds, I look for faces and rocks. Um, I think we we have a tendency of trying to clump things together. So um I think that we do make kind of generalizations and stuff, and that many of them are problematic, but it's kind of how to hold intention, the desire to generalize and to understand by using patterns without collapsing and essentializing and making something seem simple.
SPEAKER_02:Right. It's so funny, you know, one of the things that I has motivated me to think so much about the sonic specimen is that when you teach music, which is what I do most of the time, one of the most effective ways to teach it is to basically make each period into a stereotype of sound and say, like, this is how it basically teach people how to stereotype periods. Like, this is what Baroque music sounds like, this is what Mozart sounds like, this is this is the difference between you know 90s hip hop and early 2000s hip hop that you teach all these little techniques for kind of um generalizing. And it's a very powerful tool. And it, you know, I would not say that I think it's a tool that should be completely dispensed with. But then at the same time, it feels like it is kind of a dangerous tool, too.
SPEAKER_03:I mean Yeah, like dangerous. I think it can be dangerous. So maybe generalization is a technology, like you said, it's a tool. And and I think all technologies kind of offer us potentials and problems. Um, and maybe generalization is a tool that provides us both potentials and problems, right? I think that maybe we have come to know animals and we've come to understand animals in a variety of different ways through these kinds of tools of generalization. But I I like what you're doing here in terms of just troubling some of what that knowledge is. And and I think, I mean, I think that's what you're doing, right?
SPEAKER_02:I hope so. I'm really trying to. I feel like I it I feel like one thing that is is very tempting, and I'm not the only person who looks at music and animals that has had this happen. It's like if you do this work, you're often asked to make a sweeping statement about like, are animals musical or aren't they? And um, and it's completely anathetical to what I'm actually trying to do. Um it's like that's the the the thing I want is to say, like, why do we care about that question at all? And I feel like my my answer is that we care about that question because it's a way of asking a much bigger question about who counts as a person. And so for me, I think this idea of sonic typologies that was also a way of sort of trying to narrow that question down, you know, be like, oh, well, this is this is a real personhood type sound, but this sound maybe not. And I feel like that just having knowledge about that can help you rethink how you might generalize because it is useful to do it. Um, but I think it's also powerful to understand that if you're doing it in a certain way or with a certain end, um maybe what you're really doing is trying to articulate who has certain a certain type of interiority. And if you if you are aware that that is what a certain type of sonic generalization does or what you think it is doing, then you can kind of step back and be like, well, am I, you know, does this really do that? You know, do I really think that understanding um, you know, understanding the relationship between a hermit thrush and Beethoven is going to tell me what I really want to know about a hermit thrush? And and if the answer is yes, great. But I think I think what happens if you look at that carefully is the answer is no. Um comparing a hermit thrush to Beethoven tells you how much you like Beethoven.
SPEAKER_03:And it also compels you to ask whether the ends justify the means. Is knowing that knowledge worth the killing of that bird? Uh, is is establishing that boundary or that typology worth that death? And I mean this this goes again back to your comments about Vivi's section, is uh is cutting animals open while they're alive worth the knowledge? And this speaks to the whole kind of lab experiments done on animals where we already know. I think it's something crazy, like 80 or 90% of research that's done on animals cannot be used to scale up to human medicine. Somehow that's still just uh it's just common standard scientific practice to cut open animals or test or to test stuff on them in the most cruel and violent ways. Um so I think yeah, like questioning a specimen and what work that's actually doing and the ethics of it is really important. So thank you so much for for bringing that up. Um we're nearing the end now. Uh so perhaps you uh uh could tell us a bit about your quote. So you said I know you said you're not really a quote person. So it's hard to put you through this.
SPEAKER_02:I'm not really, and now because of what you just said, I'm like, oh, I I my quote doesn't relate to what you just brought up, but I kind of wish it did because you're you know, what you just said about the this is a parallel I never explicitly drew in my book between um this sort of historical vivisection practice and contemporary animal laboratory research. But I'm very glad that you raised it because it's a complicated and thorny question. But the but what is not complicated and thorny is the thing that you said about this, they call it translation, like um the idea of establishing standard criteria for understanding how a a claim about a non-human body can transfer, can translate to a human body. There is no standard for that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And that's crazy, right? I mean, it's absolutely crazy.
SPEAKER_03:Yep.
SPEAKER_02:And it's absolutely right as well. I don't think it's as common as it used to be by a long shot for people to do vocalization research that um, you know, uses uh that that sort of traumatizes or kills animals. It still happens, but I think it's less frequent than it used to be. Um, but it's shocking to me that it ever happened because of this question of translation. Like what does it really do?
SPEAKER_03:And and the logics are similar, right? So the the kind of logics that frame or justify getting that knowledge operates on the same um tenor to stick with our sound. Um because and and and maybe that's a hopeful thing. Maybe if people are no longer killing birds in order to understand what they sound like, maybe there's hope that in future we will actually finally realize that we don't need to kill them to advance our medicine and that there are ways in which uh And I think translation, what an interesting concept. Um I mean this could go to a variety of ways in which we try to understand animal cognition and we subject them to human tests of cognition. Um really fascinating.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Like it's also um, you know, the question of translation and the the evaluation of like the the relation between the human benefit and the body of the animal. There's a lot that could be said there. There's a lot that could be said there. Um it's I'm just glad that you brought it up. Um it's something that I've thought about. I don't have a I don't have a clear sense in myself of like where do you draw the line, right? Like I think I would hesitate to submit myself to certain medical treatments that had not been previously tested. Um, but that's that's cowardice, right? Um I and a certain selfishness.
SPEAKER_03:But it's also tied, it is tied to some of these, I think, violent histories that you were talking about previously. Like there is also historical precedent that science has been done on historically disenfranchised people, and that lab work today is often reliant on getting um generally people with uh low income or who are financially precarious to do this kind of lab work. But again, it's the same kinds of unequal logics that are working. And and and for me, w when we have these kinds of lab experiment conversations, we often try to think of like life-saving drugs. Like if we don't do this, then you know we won't have. But genuinely, half of these things are, in my view, to be blunt, like relatively pointless experiments to just further something that's already been known. Like how long can we get mice to swim around in a beaker for before they die to try and prove the extent to which humans give up on tasks. Like there is there's a scale and a range of types of questions that animals are used to answer in these kind of scientific experiments. Um and yeah, I mean, I again I don't know enough about this, but I do think there is something interesting in that idea of translation and who we're willing to put and who, whether animal or human, who were willing to subject to these kinds of vivisection logics to get knowledge that's oftentimes really not helpful.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, and one of the reasons I loved thinking about music in relation to animal studies was because also, you know, I mentioned that music was the language of the soul, right? And that like this was a space where people thought about interiority. But the other thing was that it was a language of emotion. And so it was also a place where it really revealed a lot about the internal conflicts within the sciences, about like how do you grapple with emotion? Are you allowed to feel it? Is it allowed to count? Are you allowed to, I mean, I mean, um, are you allowed to feel are you allowed to feel um emotion about vivisection? Right? Or and and you know, if you do, it interferes with with one version of what you should be doing and propels you towards a different version. Um and so I think for me also this question is tied to um thinking about like, are there ways that people who do animal studies can can be productive and thoughtful allies for people in the sciences who are trying to make space for emotionality as something that can have a um uh positive meaning in things like experimental design.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, completely. And and and I think, I mean, some of the work in in cognitive ethology is doing is doing some of this. And and some of what you spoke about in talking about sonic specimens as well was kind of the institutionalization of it. It's it's not necessarily I think individuals have a role to play, and as people, we need to contend with how our decisions uh relate to our own ethics and the ways in which we relate to the world. But institutions also have a lot of power. So if you're a first-year student and you're expected in order to get your degree that your parents have paid however much to do, or you're paying however much to do, you need to do this experiment on a frog, and you don't want to because it feels it feels shit, and you don't want to do it and you think it's wrong. But there are all these other pressures, and everyone's telling you that you're dumb for feeling something and blah, blah, blah. Um, institutions have a lot of power. So I think kind of combating these it's an individual thing, uh 100%. I don't want to take, I think there is responsibility at the individual level, but it's also institutional and cultural and and and um yeah really important. You see where we got to? We're talking about sonic specimens.
SPEAKER_02:Like I know, all right. The quote. I've been like avoiding the quote. All right.
SPEAKER_03:No, no, I think it's great. I love these conversations that take winding roads, it's best.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, but I did have a quote. Okay, okay. Um so this is this is from uh George Santayana. And the quote that's usually read is those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is a very, a very uh sort of famous epigraph, right? Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Um the full quote is fascinating to me because it's actually about the interconnection between remembering the past, being condemned to repeat it, and the kind of evolutionary hierarchies from human to non-human voices that that are driving the need to remember the past. Um, the full quote, because he because he was part of his own institution of knowledge, right? So the full quote is progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it so that old age is as forgetful as youth, more incorrigible, and its memory becomes the self-repeating degenerate degeneration into an instinctive reaction of a bird's chirp.
SPEAKER_03:Whoa.
SPEAKER_02:Whoa.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, there's a lot going on in there. Well, okay, so I'm trying to actually grapple with what's what with what's happening there. So I mean, obviously he's he's bringing up many problematic uh comparisons, but what what is he trying to say there about the kind of connection between memory and um and age? Or am I missing it?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I mean, as I read it, he's basically saying that this version that we're used to hearing, those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it. He's effectively saying those who can't remember the past are those who degenerate. This was a um racial slur, actually, those who degenerate into their primitive animal selves.
SPEAKER_03:So they de they de-civilize.
SPEAKER_02:If if you don't remember where we come from, you They decivilize, and rather than using rational human language, they use the the sonic emblem of degeneration, a bird's chirp.
SPEAKER_03:I see, I see, I see, I see. And so there's a conflation there of some of what we were talking about, how how animals and and specific types of humans get conflated, and and how sound here is used as a mechanism to articulate that conflation. Fascinating.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I think part of why I sort of am fond of that quote in a certain way is because for me it's it's in addition to demonstrating that conflation of like you know, the degeneration meaning going into your animal self from the past, it also says something like I really do believe that that we need to remember the past. You know, I I actually agree with him on the core message that I think maybe was part of that was that um if we don't remember the past, we're missing something vital. And then at the same time, I feel like the the mechanism he had for even thinking that was this institutional mechanism, right? This sort of structural um, the the mechanisms of structural colonialism, colonialism, and racism that defined the very way he even conceived of this.
SPEAKER_03:But also I think his premise of remembering, I mean, with that kind of idea in mind, is it's also based on the idea of progress and a linear idea of progress. Whereas I think I think for for for me certainly, remembering to a past is not to progress to some sort of better future on a linear, it's to it's to and maybe I mean maybe it is. I talk about improving things, but uh actually I think understanding the past is about understanding how we came to be where we are now, if if that makes sense. Not so much about projecting some sort of single pathway.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_02:It does. I mean, I think one of the reasons that I thought, you know, with this idea I had of the animalities, one of the one of the spurs of that concept that I wanted to think about more and still want to think about more was the concept of of paradise, of utopia. And one reason is because of this troubled tradition of progressive thinking that um, like you, right? I'm like you, I want to think of a better future. I I want to think about how we can um be cautiously optimistic and cautiously hopeful in the face of so many, especially in this moment, right? So many forms of crisis, ecological crisis, um, humanitarian crises, um, you know, certainly um social crisis, so so many reasons not to be optimistic. And you sort of think, well, it's still the best option. Um but but what would that look like? Like what does it mean if you're not going to um if you're going to sort of follow Santayana's advice by not following it, right? Like if you're going, if you're gonna remember the the past in productive ways, but ways that don't replicate that linear, that um linear and hierarchical narrative.
SPEAKER_03:I like that a lot. And we're we're not gonna unfortunately have time to go into some of your, I think your speculative work, which I think is really important. And I'm grappling with some of those ideas myself, is the the role of imagination and of speculation and kind of imagining imagining different universes that don't rely on this kind of simple idea of progress. Um But alas, we're running out of time.
unknown:I think.
SPEAKER_03:Um But before we close though, I do want to find out some of what you're you're working on now and uh if if people want to get in touch with you, how they might be able to do that.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I would love to um if people want to get in touch with me, they should just email me. Uh I'm going to type it in the chat thread so you can reproduce it. Well, you know my email because you can't. I can pop an insurance. But it's R Yeah, you can throw it in there. Um it's rnm290 at newark.ruckers.edu. Um I would always love to talk to someone who's interested in these topics. And in terms of directions that I'm going, uh, I'm working on another book that I'm hoping can kind of take some of the foundational questions I came to at the end of the first one and go somewhere with them. Um, especially for me at the end of that book, I was thinking like we really need to rethink how we grapple with ethics, because the ethics, the sort of ethical norms, ethical standards that we have are grounded on these past traditions that are deeply problematic and deeply um premised on the idea of the inferiority of animal life, right? Like, or like even the fact that I can say that sentence, the inferiority of animal life. Um, even words like humane treatment, right? What does that mean? That that is the primary standard for the treatment of non-human animals. What does that mean? Right. So um it's also sort of strange that you would say, I'm going to agree that it's okay to do certain things with other species, but the criteria I'm going to use to evaluate the ethics of that choice are specific to my species. Um I'm starting to think about questions like that. I am looking at some case studies. The book, most of the case studies, ended around 1950. So I'm looking at a couple of later case studies. I interviewed Katie Payne, who was involved in the discovery of humpback whale song in the early 1970s. Um I'm looking at a couple of other cases like that and a little bit later. And I'm also just exploring new questions, um, like this one of humane treatment. This is relatively new for me, but it's one that I really care about and I'm really excited to see where it goes. And I'm learning from other people.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's been it's been really fascinating speaking to everyone for this season. Like I am see, you see, my brain was gonna go to a really bad metaphor. As I was gonna say, I'm like a fish out of water, and I was like, that's a horrible thing to be. Um, but uh I don't know much about sound at all or about uh the relationship of animals to sound, and I've actually really found this whole season and the kinds of concepts that have come up really useful for challenging not only like my visual way of orientating things, but uh like brings up experience and phenomenology and just different questions in a way that I hadn't anticipated. So uh yeah, thank you for being part of that and just helping me think through this stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been wonderful to talk to you. Um I'm sorry we had technical problems, but um, it's been a really great experience, and I'm excited to see what comes next in the podcast myself. I'm now a follower.
SPEAKER_03:Hi Hannah, welcome back to the Animal Tone Podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Hello.
SPEAKER_03:So, what are we talking about in today's highlight?
SPEAKER_01:So, thinking about the idea of specimens led me to think about butterflies. Um, because I was thinking about, you know, when you have those specimens of butterflies that are pinned down on boards and things like that, and I thought, I don't know anything about butterflies and sound, so I'm gonna go on an uh adventure with that. So um I went on a bit of a wild ride with this one. So butterfly communication, as you can imagine, is quite there's a lot we don't know about it because their life worlds are just so radically different from ours. Um, and it's a difficult science to figure out how they're communicating and what means. But what we do know is that a lot of butterflies they're thought to be very kind of visually and chemically keen uh species, so they mostly communicate through pheromones um as well as through kind of visual cues, but some butterflies do communicate through sound. So, for instance, the hammer-dryas butterfly, um, who are commonly found throughout South America and all the way up to Arizona, so they have the common name of cracker butterflies, and they get this common name because they make the sounds that males make with their rings, wings sounds like cracking. A study by Jane Yack from Carleton University, all the way back in 2000, is like the most comprehensive study that exists about this sonic behaviour. And she found that butterflies, that the Hamadraeus butterfly had been observed to make this sounds in response to their own species as well as in response to other members of um, like other birds and other humans, but the exact purpose of these sounds is unclear. Um, it's thought to be territorial or for courtship practices. Actually, Charles Darwin proposed that it might be for courtship practices back in the day. In the observations of um Jane Yack, it seemed that the Hamadreeus butterflies partly used their sounds to figure out the sex of the other butterflies. So they would kind of go around making these clacking sounds, and if they found another species, another butterfly that also made those cracking sounds, they said, okay, that's a male. So they sort of quickly abandoned each other. But if while they were going around making these sounds, they found a butterfly who didn't make the sounds back to them, they figured that that was a female, and so that they could go ahead with their courtship ritual. One of the most interesting questions around this, though, is if butterflies are making these sounds for communication, does that mean that they are able to hear? Um, before this study, the question had not really been explored in detail of whether or not butterflies have kind of ears or how they hear. Um, but the proposal is that they have this membrane on their wings um called a vogel's organ, which kind of functions as their quote-unquote ears. And these organs are consistent with how lots of other insects hear, and um bear with me here, it's called a tympanyl organ, and it consists of a membrane stretched across a frame backed by an air sac and associated sensory organs, um, neurons, and sounds vibrate this membrane, and vibrations are sensed by other organs in the insect's body. So that's pretty cool how insects hear. Um, but that was one kind of butterfly. Um, another kind of butterfly that has a cool acoustic behavior is in the peacock butterfly, and these are said to produce intense ultrasonic clicks that startle and thwart bats that might prey on them. So that's uh a foreshadowing for the uh bat communication episode. Um peacock butterflies are called this because they have these um so-called eye spots on their wings and they resemble the oval eye-like patterns on a peacock. Um, so usually peacock butterflies are thought to ward off larger predators like birds through eye spot displays, so they'll sort of flash their wings in such a way that these eyes are really visible. And I'm not a butterfly expert, but I think the idea of this is if you look at pictures of these peacock butterflies, these eye spots look a lot like the eyes of an owl or who are predators. Um, and so sort of birds who might prey on butterflies who themselves are preyed on by owls might mistake the butterfly to be an owl through these eye spots, um, which is wild, um, and then be scared away. But with bats, it seems that bats are more scared by the sounds that these eyespot displays make rather than um, and these ultrasonic sounds, I should say, rather than through um the visual side of things. So that's really interesting. My final fun fact about butterfly sounds um is less about what they use for communication and more what we can hear. So, monarch butterflies who are well known and well loved, um, during wind migration, we know that tens of millions of them can be found in um hibernating in forests in central Mexico. I found this video on YouTube that hopefully um we can share in the show notes of this episode. But Explorer, an explorer called Phil Torres, um, goes and records the sounds of these tens of millions of butterflies. Um and he refers to the sounds that they uh that can be heard to be some of the rarest sounds on earth. And so the butterflies will hang in clusters um off trees in in formations that look like huge beehives or make it look almost like they're fuzz on the side of the trees. And when the sun comes out, the butterflies sort of wake up and come off of the trees. And because there's millions of them, it's sort of this amazing cascading sound um that sounds like a waterfall. Um, and it's really cool to listen to. So hopefully um you can click on the link and listen to the sounds of monarch butterflies um and appreciate them in a new sonic way.
SPEAKER_03:So that sounds like those are my fun thoughts about butterflies. In reading a bit about bats, I was learning like there's this whole like bat moth sonic, like because before you spoke about sonic warfare, and there seems to be like an interesting kind of responsiveness to bats as praying. I don't know anything about it, hopefully we'll learn. But I'd never thought about um butterfly communication and and sound. So that's really fascinating.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, when you see them, you don't really, you can't really hear them, right? We think about we kind of admire butterflies for the way that they look. And I think sometimes in the species like that, you think about that so much that then you don't think about sound. Um, and because we often can't hear the sounds ourselves, right? They're outside of our range of of hearing.
SPEAKER_03:So incredible. Uh so completely unrelated. But as you were kind of speaking a bit about butterflies, you know, being outside of uh the range, range of things. A friend of mine the other day, she mid-conversation, uh Patricia Peterser, if she's listening, um, mid-conversation, she turns to me and she says, Did you know that humans have stripes? It's like, what? Did you know that humans have stripes? So turns out cats see human stripes. Okay. And I thought she was just talking. Yes. Humans have stripes in our in our um skin. Uh and uh if you see it under, I think it's ultraviolet light, if you see it under ultraviolet light, you can see, which is weird because I don't like I've definitely been to parties where there's ultraviolet lights and I haven't seen my stripes. So there must be a way in which you can't see that make these stripes visible to them. But uh anyway, I'm not doing it justice. Go and Google, it actually looks really gross. But humans have stripes along our bodies. So I don't know if you've got like beauty, if you've got beauty spots, if your beauty spots go in a particular pattern along your body, chances are that's one of your your stripes. No way, they're much more pronounced in a different light, and your cats can see those stripes.
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_03:Blows my mind.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my god. So from See, that's so interesting. I just one of the things I find most interesting about studying animals is that we just all experience the world in such different ways, and it's just like we think we have this grip on reality, but we just we just don't.
SPEAKER_03:Completely and and and those are just such fascinating experiences, like coming back to butterflies, the idea that a monarch, the the the migration they do, the distance they go, it's just um, you know, the lives they lead are just so much more complicated than we than we than we necessarily give thought to. So thank you again, Hannah, so much for joining me on the Animal Highlights. I look forward to the next one. Thank you once again to Rachel for being a wonderful guest, to Hannah Hunter for the highlight, to Jeremy John for the logo, and Gordon Clark for the bed music. And a huge thank you to our sponsors, Animals and Philosophy Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple, for sponsoring this podcast, as well as to the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory SAP Lab for sponsoring this season. We're eight episodes in, not much further to go. I hope you've enjoyed learning about sound so far. If you've enjoyed this episode and any of the others, I'd really appreciate a review. But that's it, everyone. I hope you have a wonderful day. This is the Animal Turn.
SPEAKER_00:With me, Claudia Hoffenfelder.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.
