S4E10: Grad Review with Bailey Hilgren and Hannah Hunter

In this final episode of Season 4 two graduate students, Hannah Hunter and Bailey Hilgren, chat with Claudia about some of the core themes and tensions to emerge from the season. This includes a focus on sound methodologies, such as issues with how we collect animal sounds to how (or even indeed whether) there is something special about sound in trying to understand the lives of animals.   

Date Recorded: 2 May 2022

Bailey Hilgren is a musicologist and sound studies scholar about to begin a PhD in ethnomusicology at New York University. Her most recent research project traced environmentalists’ construction of a wilderness area in northern Minnesota as a primarily silent place, an idea and legal practice that has undermined non-human animal agency and limited Ojibwe sovereignty in related but distinct ways. She holds master’s degrees in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon and Historical Musicology from Florida State University, and she completed undergraduate studies in biology and music performance from Gustavus Adolphus College. 

Hannah Hunter is a PhD Candidate at the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory at Queen's University. Her research explores the intersections of animals, sounds, and extinction through the case study of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Hannah is particularly interested in how we can build relationships with distant and lost beings through sound, and how sound may be a potent force for representing and challenging the sixth mass extinction. Connect with Hannah via email (hannah.hunter@queensu.ca) or on Twitter (@HannahfHunter)

Featured: 

Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening by Rachel Mundy; Hungr

A.P.P.L.E
Animals 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 Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

This is another I Roll podcast. And we have been, uh, you know, in kind of Western society, been such a visual, kind of focused culture that sound has been ignored for so long. And so there's this immense kind of repository of information or of information about relationships or politics or whatever is important to you that we just have completely ignored for a long time. Not completely ignored, that's not fair. There have been lots of people doing work on sound. But I think sort of this recent attention to sound, part of the kind of sensory turn, is this idea that, like, there's all this information there that we've kind of been missing out on Welcome back to the Animal Turn, everyone.

SPEAKER_04: 0:51

This is episode 10 of season four, where we've been focusing in on animals and sound. And as always, we finish off the season with a grad review. And in today's grad review, I'm going to be speaking to two exceptional graduate students. So the first is someone who I know really well, and that's Hannah Hunter. You've gotten to know her a little bit too throughout the course of the season. She's done a wonderful job with the animal highlights and will join us at the end of this episode for the final highlight. But a little bit about Hannah. She is a critical and creative geographer interested in human-animal relationships, bird sounds, and the history of science. She's a PhD candidate in the geography and planning department here at Queen's University, but also tends to align herself quite strongly with SSTA Science and Technology Studies. Her doctoral research explores the more than human histories of bird sound recording and asks how these recordings can be reimagined and repurposed towards abundant and multi-species futures. In particular, she is interested in ivory-billed woodpeckers, Atlantic puffins, and bird owls. Bird owls. So Hannah is a wonderful scholar and friend of mine, and she, throughout this episode, kind of gives lots of interesting tidbits and thoughts about how we think about sound and the ways in which sound is used. The other graduate student who's going to be joining us today is also fantastic, and that's Bailey Hilgren. She is a musicologist and sound study scholar about to begin her PhD in ethnomusicology at New York University. Her most recent research project traced environmentalists' construction of a wilderness area in northern Minnesota as a primarily silent place, an idea and legal practice that has undermined non-human animal agency and limited Ojibwa sovereignty in related but distinct ways. Bailey has explored soundscapes of recently burned areas in Oregon. She's also looked at data sonification as an art science collaboration, anthropocene technology, as well as historical conceptions of nature in both romantic and classical music. So she has a wide ray of interests in sound, animals, and music. And she holds a master's degree in environmental studies from the University of Oregon and historical musicology from Florida State University. And you'll hear throughout this episode that Bailey and Hannah really complement one another well. Hannah actually points this out right in the beginning of the episode, stating that, you know, Bailey's got a really strong focus and interest in music, whereas Hannah has a really strong interest in kind of thinking about how data and sound is recorded and perceived, especially historically. So it's a great conversation. As always, grad reviews are a wonderful opportunity to kind of reflect on some of the tensions and core themes that emerge throughout the season. And I think we do a good job in this kind of hour-long discussion of unpacking those. So this is a great place to either start or end the season. But while we're here at the end, I just wanted to say thank you, as always, listeners, for listening, for being here with us. I'm happy to report that we have now plugged 14,000 downloads, which is always really, really exciting. As this is the final episode of the season, I just want to carve out a spot of extra time to say thank you so much for the season's sponsors. Thank you to Animals and Philosophy Politics, Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring the podcast generally. As well as say thank you to the Sonic Arts of Place studio and the Sonic Arts Studio, both of which are here at Queen's University. But I'll tell you more about what the next season is going to entail at the end of the episode. For now, let's get to it. Enjoy the conversation. Welcome to the Animal Turn Baby and Hannah. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Hannah's an old hand. For those of you who have listened to the season so far, you would have heard Hannah giving us the animal highlights throughout the season. It's been really uh great uh so far. So thank you, Hannah, for joining us for the grad review. Uh and thank you, you are joining us for the first time. So welcome, welcome, welcome. It's been a really great season. And I'm always delighted with the grad reviews because it gives me an opportunity to go back and listen to everything. And uh the season's been quite spread out. Uh so being able to go back to kind of the earliest, the earlier episodes and and get a sense of how how many ideas kind of emerged from when Brian first introduced us to Soundscapes to talking about sonic methods with Jonathan, uh, to ending up here with um back communication with Gloriana. It's been a really like cool season with a lot of stuff coming up. So I'm excited to talk to you both today uh to just kind of pull apart some of the um overlaps in terms of the concepts that we discussed in the season, but also potentially some of the tensions and challenges that you think come up when thinking about how we can do uh research with animals and thinking about the significance of sound in terms of understanding animals and their lives. But as always, before we get into the actual thick of the episode itself, first let's learn a little bit about you. Uh so, Bailey, maybe we can start with uh you. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and uh what kind of research you're doing?

SPEAKER_03: 6:01

Yeah, absolutely. So I kind of loosely consider myself a musicologist and sound studies scholar. I say loosely because I'm um always probing at the boundaries around the word music, which I think will an idea we'll be able to come back to lots in this episode. So I recently completed a master's degree in environmental studies at the University of Oregon. I have a master's in historical musicology, and I'm about to move to New York City, the big city, to start a PhD program in ethnomusicology at New York University. So a lot of my work explores the ways hierarchies in how that structure how we think about human and nature relationships, how those hierarchies manifest in sound. So oftentimes that involves questions about what sounds mean, what counts as music, what doesn't count as music, um, you know, conversations about noise versus sound and all of that. So I was incredibly excited to be invited to be part of the season because it is so right up my alley. Yeah. I have yeah, I have a I have a background in biology. Um, my undergraduate studies were in biology and music performance. Um, and so I also really love thinking about boundaries between disciplines and how we're approaching kind of sometimes the same question from a different discipline and how that changes the answers that we might get or the questions we might ask in the first place.

SPEAKER_04: 7:26

My goodness, I feel like I couldn't have asked for a better grad student. You've got all of the uh you've got all of the connections there, which is really, really, really cool. I I mean, even with the with the episode with Martin when I'd said I hadn't thought about music really and the significance of music to animals. So uh kind of having you having you here and um someone who actually understands music and kind of some of those connections, I'm excited to unpack that a bit more with you. And New York.

SPEAKER_03: 7:55

Yay! A big change. I'm from rural Minnesota, so it's about as different as you can get. So is this for a for a PhD program? It is, yep. Yep. And who who are you gonna be working with there? Um, I'll be working with an ethn an ethnomusicologist named Martin Daughtery. He does really incredible work on music and sound and violence, and he's starting to get into some more questions about um, well, he always has, but in a more explicit way, questions about environmental damage, um, and the anthropocene with lots of asterisks next to it, you know, to um yeah. So I'm I'm incredibly excited about that. It's a great program in part because they ask you to do uh sort of traditional research, but also to make sounds and to incorporate sound making as part of your own kind of academic practice. So again, so many themes that we talked about or that were talked about in the podcast season that are just popping up in my life too.

SPEAKER_04: 8:51

So awesome. Uh awesome. Well, well, it's great to have you here. Um, and and I look forward to seeing what you kind of start to produce. And and at the end of the episode, maybe we can talk a little bit more about kind of where you see your your research going and what what you think you might do in that project because it sounds fascinating. So Hannah and I actually know each other uh quite well. We're in the same grad program. We're fellows in arms. I don't know how to say metaphors. I'm just the worst at metaphors. Um, but but Hannah and I are sort of the only people that I know that are actually working on animal studies related stuff in our department. Uh so it's really uh really special for me to have her uh involved in this this season. But Hannah, could you tell us a little bit about uh for the listeners who don't know you as well as I do, uh a little bit about who you are and how you and what your research is about.

SPEAKER_00: 9:40

Sure. So first of all I want to say Bailey your work sounds so interesting. And I think it's cool because we're we both are coming from quite different perspectives. I feel like music is the the parts of the season that I felt like I have the least kind of knowledge and to speak on. So I think it's it's gonna work well. But um, yeah, anyway, I kind of come from this human-animal studies interest and how what role sound has in human-animal relationships. So I'm in a geography department, but um I'm kind of sort of a bit of a geographer, but a lot of a science and technology studies person. Um so actually, right now I'm at Cornell as a visiting fellow at their STS um department. And so yeah, I'm interested in human-animal relationships through sound, and I'm particularly interested in extinct and endangered animals and how um how sound what role sound plays as um like a way we can know extinct and endangered animals, especially from the past, um, as well as ways that sound is used to resist extinction and communicate extinction and and things like that. So um earlier in this season, I introduced in one of the animal highlights um one of my main case studies, which is about the Ivory Billed Woodpecker and how sound is used in these attempts to find this species that's thought to be extinct. Um I also spent a lot of time in the archives looking at these historical sound recording expeditions and and things like that. So, yeah, sound and extinction and the things in between.

SPEAKER_04: 11:06

And I love the the that animal highlight when you spoke about that. It still sticks to my mind now the idea of intergenerational communication. I'd never that that for me was such a profound idea that you know, like speaking to the I still don't know how to articulate it properly, but um just that that idea I think is really transgressive uh because we do kind of use animal sounds as as stand-ins, right? Um as kind of uh sonic specimens um to use Rachel's concept, right? As as it just stands in for the whole species. So yeah, it's it's really great. I think you guys do come from quite different branches. And then, of course, I'm also a geographer, but I have more historical interests, and my knowledge on sound is really quite rudimentary. So uh hopefully the three of us can generate some cool ideas here. So uh let's let's get into it then. This is just a general kind of open conversation where we can try and pull together some of these episodes and think through some of the um the overlaps and the tensions. So, what for you guys were maybe some of the I guess standout overlaps or themes for for you? What really came through in the season as an important theme to unpack and consider if you are interested in the relationship between animals and sound or using sound to understand animals?

SPEAKER_03: 12:23

Yeah, so I can I can jump in. So I um this may be in part because of how the season was sort of front-loaded with methods and then got progressively a little bit more theoretical as it went along. Um, but I think questions about methods, both of I guess, of uh listening, recording, and collecting sound, and how all of the methods um, you know, in the sciences, I think we sometimes think of methods as neutral. Of course, that's never going to be true. Um, and a couple of the guests made that very clear, um, including especially like Rachel, uh Rachel Mundy's work, but those those methods are always going to be imbued with with values. Yeah, I think that was an important theme throughout the whole season.

SPEAKER_04: 13:05

Yeah, totally. Um, I also kind of underlined method and and listening, and and I really enjoyed listening to Jonathan again. I think he he kind of outlined so many of these methods in in quite clear and distinct ways. And and it was it was neat because we did start off with methods kind of strong, go into theory, and then we ended with two episodes, I think, speaking to um ecologists who are who who were, you know, both Gloriana and Denise, I think were just going out into the field collecting this data. And and both with them and Mickey, I I found myself constantly being like, well, what are the ethics of these methods? What are the ethics of these methods? And and I think it raised interesting, um, yeah, definitely interesting questions about how we do this research, that it isn't value neutral completely.

SPEAKER_00: 13:52

Yeah, I I I couldn't sort of stop thinking about the ant recording that that Jonathan played. And yeah, like you asked a question, Claudia, about kind of the potential invasiveness of this kind of putting this contact microphone sort of into their into their homes and like what impact that had on them. But then at the same time, this is this really kind of intimate way that we can listen to to ants, you know, and like that might change kind of our politics and the way that we think about these species. So how do we balance kind of those two those two things? And I think like in the humanities, perhaps, especially animal study scholars, we're much more likely to kind of, well, I don't know. I feel like we would think about those things kind of by default, whereas sound might generally seem like a less invasive method than than other methods, right? Where it's better than cutting animals open, it's better than you know, all these other things. Um, but there's still you know ethical ways to think about it.

SPEAKER_04: 14:48

And I think what what for me was really pertinent to this was uh it came up with a couple of people, I think, with with with Cheryl, with Jonathan, um, and and with with Rachel is the idea of valuation. What is valued, right? What is the intention of doing this research? Is it just for is it just because it's cool and it's fun? And some and there is something, like Loriana also said, there is something to be said for for curiosity, for curiosity's sake, um, you know, but but but at what cost, right? And and for what value? So is it just to get a good sound? Um and and to not ask these questions, I think, is a even even sometimes in my posing it, I sometimes like am I being am I being too um am I being too sensitive? Am I like, am I poking, am I poking in areas where maybe I should just leave it? Because understanding ants, like you say, it's gonna really change, uh, could be really important for them. But are we just using conservation as a shorthand then to do whatever we want, kind of thing? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:48

And how do you quantify that? You know, how can you quantify what impact something like that will have? Um, it's a tricky question for sure.

SPEAKER_03: 15:55

Yeah, I think also um the issue of whether or not we are able to ask for consent when we're creating sound recording, you know, this is something that we think about a fair amount in ethnomusicology. When we're going out and doing field work and talking with humans, we always have to go through a pretty intense, you know, ethics review, um, including especially um if you're going to be working with vulnerable populations. And so um, you know, my past research project I did pre-pandemic plans were to conduct quite a few interviews, both with Ojibwe people, but then also to do sort of a multi-species ethnographic project. And in writing up my um, you know, IRB um request, um, I uh kept having to write that I, you know, understood that I needed to ask for consent to record the humans. But I wanted, I regularly wrote in, and my advisor had me take out sometimes um comments about, well, I need to ask for consent, you know, for some of these non-human creatures as well. Um, and he kept saying, well, that, you know, one, you're maybe poking into something again, like you're saying, Claudia, that I don't need to be poking in. Maybe that's creating more problems for myself than is worth it. Yeah, but it just opens up a whole kind of sticky, whole sticky situation where you're asking for consent for one group and not for another.

SPEAKER_04: 17:17

Is I'm guessing an IRB is the the ethics, ethics clearance. So to get like an extra do research. Yeah, that's um I think anthro, anthro, I'm gonna say it wrong, anthrozoology. Um, there's an anthrozoology podcast. I'll put it in the the show notes that actually speaks a lot about this kind of um this kind of tension. And Lauren Van Pat also recently published a paper on on unpacking and thinking through how we're not expected to ask for or do ethics reviews when we're involving animals and animal subjects. And I and I get it, like as as part of the reason why I stuck to doing archives and historical research was because I didn't want to go through the whole ethics process because it can delay an entire project. Um and again, that maybe speaks to why do we have to do ethics today versus you know, and why didn't we have to do ethics for for archives? That's interesting. Yeah. Um, but then it does like it it becomes burdensome for you as an individual trying to like carry these things, but still there is again a point to who we care for, right? Like we think about our human subjects and we realise that our presence can greatly impact them and their worlds and their economies and what they do, but we don't think about that for animals, right?

SPEAKER_00: 18:33

Yeah, well, I I was thinking um in the interview with the Cheryl Tip, which was one of my favorite episodes this season. It was so cool. Um, but she was talking about when you had a conversation about copyright and about um kind of the recordist copyright and how how that needs to be protected and everything. But you know, you could think of well, well, why does the the human get to get to own that animal sound, you know? Like I that I guess comes kind of kind of naturally, but you kind of extract these sounds without permission, like presumably, and then you can kind of own that and and create capital from that, right? And yeah, it would obviously be be tricky to to figure out another way of doing it.

SPEAKER_04: 19:14

But again, are we just creating, are we just being are we just creating problems? Like is there is there inherent is there in is there an inherent problem in a human owning a recording? And and I think there might be, but but is there, do you know what I mean? Are we just are we just creating as as critical scientists and scholars, are we just saying, ugh, there's a problem in us being the ones who own it? Um, what do you guys think? I've got ideas, but I'm curious to think what hear what you guys think.

SPEAKER_00: 19:41

I feel like I need to qualify my point in that I know that like obviously that the sound recorders is doing a lot of work there, right? They're not just like taking something and saying it's theirs. Like, obviously, there's a creative, creative practice and like a lot of work that goes into that, right? So I do think that they should have some ownership over the sound, but um yeah, sorry, Bailey, I like you're about to say something. So No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_03: 20:02

I have I have lots of thoughts that I have, I'm still kind of working through how to put words to them about the this kind of practice in acoustic ecology, especially of amassing massive collections of recordings, you know, sometimes just tons and tons of sound files. And I think some of my reservations about that practice, because I do totally understand how that's useful, um, you know, as uh Brian Pichowski was making very clear in his episode. And I think Mickey Valley did a good job of explaining why that's important too, Cheryl also. But I think the practice often also, or excuse me, often feels quite a bit like an attempt to sort of conquer exotic animal sounds all across the world. It's like a practice of like going to a new place, you know, not your backyard, not necessarily your dog or your cat or the squirrels, you know, on your porch, but you're going to like an exotic so-called exotic locale and trying to collect as many sounds as you can and like this sort of Pokemon-esque, like gotta collect them all. And I think that's I I my feelings about um ownership of recordings, it's all tied up with the practice of how those recordings are um you know gotten in the first place.

SPEAKER_00: 21:16

Yeah, absolutely. Um part of what I'm looking at in the archives right now is these really early recording expeditions where they um the corner lab of Ornithology had um people kind of stationed or people they knew all over the world, like generally white people often on colonial expeditions and things like that, who would send recordings back like from places like East Africa and Puerto Rico and Brazil. And it's like, what is yeah, what what like how do we think about that? Um you know, there's been a lot of research on like collection ecologies and um how like the collection of dead animal skins and things like that was tied up in the colonial project. Um, and sound recordings certainly were too, and perhaps still are.

SPEAKER_04: 21:57

Yeah, and I mean I think Rachel brought this through really well in her in her in her discussion of sonic specimen and how kind of these valuations are historical and they inscribe both people and animals in very particular ways in terms of how we understand them. Um and and I think you know the ownership model is kind of part of this, the idea that everything is property is is kind of part of these these histories. Um, and I think I think what you were saying there, Bailey, about kind of getting the exotic sound, like the the idea, and again, what is exotic to who, right? So who is doing these collections? Because not everything is exotic everywhere, because somewhere it's a normal sound, right? But um in asking Cheryl, for example, with the the archive about what sounds people submit, people don't submit the everyday normal, ordinary sounds. They're submitting, I like your Pokemon kind of thing. They they submit the sounds that they think others will find interesting or that they think are somehow exotic. And as you were talking, that kind of got me thinking about where you might find these different sonic specimens. So in the British Library um archive, you'll find maybe a lot of these kinds of sounds of wild animals, etc. But if you were to go to, let's say, uh a welfare institute or um like an agricultural sciences lab, you'd probably have loads of recordings of animals. So then I'm sorry, I'm kind of like thinking as we're going here, but what what what work are these collections doing, right? When you start to have collections of cow sounds and pig sounds as a means of controlling them, how do these operate different things? Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm making any sense. Yeah, I think that makes sense.

SPEAKER_03: 23:34

I yeah, I I don't know. I also part of me also wonders, you know, it's so resource intensive to amass these collections in the first place. You know, it's the archiving of the recordings once they're already made, I almost think of as a separate practice. But the like oftentimes like jet setting, like going as far as you can to like, you know, travel to these places. And um, it's so resource intensive. I I oftentimes find myself wondering, well, you know, is there's possibly some sort of better use for some of those resources that might be able to provide more direct care for animals or to intervene in some of these, you know, actually violent, like overtly violent acts rather than epistemologically violent acts.

SPEAKER_00: 24:16

Yeah. I um recently went to a talk by um Mark Peter Wright, who's a sound studies researcher, um, and he was speaking about the eco-sonic footprint, I think, of sound recording and all the things that we don't hear when we hear a sound recording, and like all of the resource extraction that's used to create microphones and like the plastic casing and like all of these things. And you know, you don't hear the coughs of people whose lungs have been damaged through resource extraction that was created for these things. You don't hear the sounds of the aeroplanes that people take to travel across the world to um to take recordings, and and all of this isn't to say that we shouldn't take recordings, right? But in environmental um sound recordings, there's a lot of kind of aesthetics to it, right? You want to create listen to all the nice parts of nature, but there are all of these kind of horrible sounds and environmental effects that are created kind of as a part of this industry, too.

SPEAKER_04: 25:11

So, what then, if we if we bring this back to kind of thinking about animals, because I think that is really an important point, is tying together kind of the material effects of doing research and not just sonic research or any research. What does it mean to go to a specific place? Um, what resources are you using to go to that place and do that research and which animals and people are is it impacting? That's a very material and important question. Uh, as well as what work does the research do, right? Like how do we value this research? Who is it helping? Is it just a good career move? And I think this could be asked for any uh any research project, right? I think all of us have done uh travel. There's that like we should all be asking questions. Um people going up to the Arctic to understand climate change, taking a beef burger with them. There are contradictions. We we have contradictions, and and these contradictions should be spoken about. But um, I think then the question becomes is what is this work doing for animals? And I think one thing for me that really stood out in this season was that as much as there are these questions and important ethical questions that need to be grappled with, sound seems to present a really interesting and unique and potentially transformative way of understanding animals and their worlds that could change their worlds, right? That could maybe bring people to attention. So maybe we could talk a bit more uh about that, kind of bring animals in and what you think the usefulness is up for sound and sound research and kind of understanding animals and their worlds.

SPEAKER_03: 26:37

Yeah, so I, you know, this is a question that I grapple with all the time is what what does sound actually tell us about the world? You know, I come from a tradition of studying music. And when we study music, there's you know a great deal that can be learned about the people who are creating the music or the animals, you know, if you want to extend music to that um to that length. But I think the the place that I've arrived with this, and this is maybe not a particularly satisfying answer, but the spot that I'm resting for now is that sound is sort of just to me, I understand it as just another artifact of the world, or just another um kind of piece of evidence of our interactions, you know, between humans, between humans and animals, animals to other animals, animals with their environments. And we have been, you know, in kind of Western society, been such a visual, kind of focused culture that sound has been ignored for so long. And so there's this immense kind of repository of information or of information about relationships or politics or whatever is important to you that we just have completely ignored for a long time. Not completely ignored, that's not fair. There have been lots of people doing work on sound, but I think um sort of this recent attention to sound, part of the kind of sensory turn, is this idea that like there's all this information there that we've kind of been missing out on. So there's um a scholar named Jonathan Stern, who's a sound studies scholar, and he very famously um wrote about what he calls the audiovisual litany. Um, so it's this you know body of myths about sound versus the visual that are pervasive in um in society. And some of the ideas are that, you know, hearing is immersive, whereas like the visual provides some sort of perspective. Sound is immediate, whereas the visual is at arm's length, you know, all of these kind of tropes about sound. And he goes through and he kind of dismantles them and and pokes, pokes at them until you get to this point where you're like, well, I'm not actually sure sound is all that special. I don't know that I entirely agree with that because it feels like my my soul and my heart tell me that there's something really special about sound as someone who spends most of my time listening and creating sounds as a musician, but I'm just not sure. I'm just not sure.

SPEAKER_00: 28:58

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up um Jonathan Stern because I think a lot of those of us when sound studies do really struggle with that because you kind of start, and I spent well, I started with this kind of feeling that that that the sound was this like amazing way that we can connect with non-human beings, and I do think it still is. Like, I think that it's it is different. Um, and that's not to say that the other senses don't matter, but um, I think it can be this kind of like empathetic and like quite kind of deeply relational um way of relating to animals and and and kind of sharing space with them. I mean, kind of thinking about this idea of republic of noise that was brought up through the season and things like that. But yeah, in terms of how it kind of how doing this research changes animals' lives, there's kind of I guess a more easy answer to that, which is thinking about the ways in which it has been used in um in science and conservation to directly improve animals' lives, like instances where in the Great Barrier Reef they've played. Fish sounds from the reefs in order to repopulate them. Oh wow. Yeah, it's just really cool. Um, and all of these uh it's happened a lot in bird conservation too, kind of repopulating certain places for puffins, um, and is a lot in the seabird research. But then it's also been used for for ill. There are all of these um kind of sonic hunting devices where you can kind of play sound recordings of animals to harm them. And I think Cheryl might have mentioned this in her, I know that she's talked about this in in other ways. Like when you have these big open access sound archives, you don't really have any say over what people use them for. So people might use them for um hunting or pest control or kind of any any number of things that people do, right? So um, yeah, it's uh I think it's important not to be like sound and animals is always like a this lovely story because it it sometimes isn't, like it can be quite um aggressive as well. I guess it's like any any technology.

SPEAKER_04: 31:01

So like Bailey said, you know, it is it is an artifact, but how we do it, um how we do it is where where the the kind of I always want to say where the meat is, but I'm really trying to find better better metaphors where the it's where the the juice is. There we go with that. It's where the it's where the crux is. There we go. Um what what you do with the sound, and and we have no like we could talk about social media as being transformative and incredible for a lot of people as well as extremely destructive, right? So it does have potential in both ways. But I think there is an emotive component to sound uh the sound of the wolf. I don't know if you guys remember the sound of the wolf, but that just stuck with me completely. And again, I could listen to that sound again and again without it, it makes me want to relate to them or the sounds of the bats, and this was a really cool thing in the season was we were actually able to bring in some of the sounds. And these are animals who I've never heard in my own kind of life or world. And and hearing them kind of it gave me goosebumps. I sat and I felt as though I was in relation and that they were significant and that they are in the world. And that was very different to me to reading about wolves and and and imagining wolves. Kind of hearing a wolf and imagining then where they are and what they're doing was for me quite transformative. And I think that there is something to be said and done here as animal study scholars in terms of how we could make animals more present in our research and more present in the imaginations of others, that sound affords us, whereas text doesn't. Another thing with this was a lot of people were talking about sound, but I sometimes felt like the animals weren't really being spoken of. So there's this the talking about sound, and then there's the talking about animals. And sometimes you can lose sight of the animals in talking about the sound. So I guess I'm interested in how we start to marry those two.

SPEAKER_00: 32:53

Well, if it's okay, I was wanting to speak a little bit to the comment about um about making them, making animals present through sound. You made me think of um in Cheryl, sorry, I keep coming back to Cheryl's because I listened to it the most recently, but it was also really great. Um, but when she was talking about having these um kind of listening events where you would kind of dim the lights down and have people just listen, and how like, you know, that's kind of an uncomfortable thing for us because like, you know, society is like most mostly visual, like it's just you know, then it's how we get a lot of our information and how that can be this kind of quite like deep way of like imagining the animals and kind of having them affect us. But yeah, I think it's it's something that um in terms of how it makes how sound can make animals present in our research, like any animal studies scholar's research, we are kind of constrained in a lot of ways by um main modes of academic academic communication, which is mostly vis like textual and graphical, and as lots of people have worked against that. There are kind of lots of examples of people kind of releasing podcasts alongside their academic paper or or things like that, but still, you know, it's difficult to kind of put that on a resume and it doesn't might not count in in kind of the same ways and stuff. And yeah, I guess that could be kind of a bit of an, you know, as much as Jonathan Stern wants to say that said that you know sound isn't special, like it is it is true that you know, main modes of of of academic communication, you know, the way that we think about knowledge is is often very visual.

SPEAKER_03: 34:31

Yeah, I think and I think because the ways we think about things is so often visual, sound has this sort of disruptive quality. And I don't know that it's something inherent to sound. It might be that you know, if we only commute communicated in sound, if we, you know, um, you know, and this is a lot of this too, is assuming hearing, you know, human animal scholars, you know, there's a lot to be said too for the blind and deaf, you know, folks who um might be relating to these senses in different ways. Um, but because we, you know, you go to an academic conference most of the time, and you sit and you watch a PowerPoint and you watch the person speak and you're listening to the the talk that they're giving, but it's sort of you're expecting what that talk is going to be like. You expect that it's going to be their voice. Um, at a music conference, there might be music kind of clips, but when I've presented at conferences outside of music in sound contexts or like forums in general, um, whenever I play a sound of any sort, people go bonkers, like the eyes get wide and people like shift in their chairs. You know, I usually have to check to make sure there's the correct audiovisual equipment, and I always make sure to bring like a little Bluetooth speaker. So people like, it's totally outside the norm of what we expect in academic work most of the time to incorporate these sounds. So I I do think there's a lot to be said for um, Claudia. I think the way you said it was, you know, making animals more present in our work. Like, actually, how can we how can we incorporate animal voices into the work that we're doing? How about literally incorporating animal voices into the work that we're doing?

SPEAKER_00: 36:03

No, absolutely. Kind of, you know, it's nothing to be said for letting them speak for themselves. Although, of course, like no, as we were just talking about, like no recording is neutral, right? It's like a mediated, mediated representation through all the ways that you know who's recorded, when they're recorded, what what technology is used to record them, and and things like that too. So yeah, I guess I would say that any inclusion should probably also recognize that, right? Um, you know, this isn't just the animal voice speaking for themselves.

SPEAKER_04: 36:33

This brings up some of what uh Eve Eva Mayor was kind of talking about as well, I think, which is Eva Meyer and uh Jeremy Gordon, uh, which I think is quite important. This this idea of speaking and um and the politics of speaking, that that who you listen to and who has an opportunity to voice is uh political. It's not just uh it's not neutral, but that we also have to kind of develop tools for listening. And I think when people kind of poke up what that says that they're like you said, it is transgressive, it is kind of subversive. And I'd wonder if like you dropped a smell bomb, you know, people might not be as keen, you know, like this is what they smell like. So it's kind of it's kind of transgressive in the right quantities of transgressive, uh, if if that if that makes sense, which might be really transformative to some extent. Um so so far we've we've spoken a fair bit, and we've we've been at it for now, and we we started with just talking about the themes, but I think we've brought up a couple of attentions as well. So just to just to kind of bring things together. So we we've spoken about kind of uh methods, that methods are really significant and important, that there are a variety of different methods that came up, but that there's a whole host of ethical questions that need to be asked. And we we we don't have conclusions or answers for that, but that uh definitely the questions about the ethics of how these methods happen should be asked. Uh we've spoken a little bit about the significance of sound. Um, so is sound significant and who is it significant for? For our careers, for animals, for conservation, and how are the ways in which sound is valued, and in what ways do those valuations make animals uh present or not present? So I think we've we've touched on these two uh things, and we've also kind of spoken a little bit, I guess, about kind of uh the politics of uh voice and speaking as well as the politics of listening. So I I think those are the three, and and the fact that these are all kind of bound up also in institutional restrictions and institutional expectations, both at the individual level and the university level. As far as I I think these are the three that we've touched on so far. Before we kind of start getting into quotes and things, are there other are there other kind of really important themes that you think we should be fleshing out here in this grad review?

SPEAKER_00: 38:47

I think we managed to let you quick quickly cover all the things that I had written down. Um like, hmm, yes, I did write that down. Um did. Yeah, hang on. I will I was actually interested. Um, as I said, like music was the kind of the stuff that I think was most outside of my own comfort zone. And I guess because Bailey, that's kind of your your area. I'd just be interested as to what you thought about, you know, the way that that music was talked about in this this season. And um, yeah, Claudia kind of challenged me when we did the the animal highlight on injury lemurs, and I was talking about how you know these are the only only mammals that have rhythm or whatever. And she was like, Well, what is rhythm? I was like, I don't know. I just thought it was cool, you know. And like the question as well is like, what is music? Like the the animals I usually look at aren't like songbirds, but usually more like squawky pecky birds, you know. Um, so and and that's a question too, like why are some birds songbirds and some birds aren't considered songbirds? Anyway, sorry, uh I buried the question there, but I just just wanted you to talk a bit about how you felt about yeah, the music side of things.

SPEAKER_03: 39:58

Yeah, oh yeah. I I love talking about this. And a lot of, I will say before I even dive in, a lot of my thoughts on this are pretty much directly developed out of Rachel Mundy's work. I'm like a super fan of hers. Um, she like is one of the people who like um personally brought me into um animal sounds and thinking about some of these questions. So um, but I think this idea of how we define what music is is often so tied, it's so bound up with questions about who matters, but what you know what what we're valuing. So that's true like all the way through a hierarchy that we might think of as like structuring society. So that's true of humans and animals. You know, you ask someone, is you know, do animals create music and they might scoff? Some people might not. Animal scholars probably would not, but a lot of people would scoff. A lot of people have scoffed when I actually talk about it, um, you know, because animals are in some way below humans, and music is this kind of special thing that humans create. And that's these are not my beliefs, these are kind of broad kind of myths within culture. But I mean, that question about what music is also structures so much about human-human relationships, too. So you really can trace this all the way through a hierarchy. You know, you might hear someone say, well, you know, this person who lives in the apartment next to me always plays hip-hop. Like, that's not music, that's just noise, which obviously has like deeply racialized kind of uh kind of a belief embedded in there. And so this question about what music is or what music is not, and likewise questions about what sound is versus noise, you know, um, some of the amazing kind of conversations throughout the season, those are all bound up with some of these hierarchical kind of structures within our thinking about what's good and what's bad, what's nature and what's human, um, you know, assuming that there are these separations between all of us. So um, and I I think to the question about whether or not something is music, Rachel, I think, said this in her episode, um, is usually the wrong question. And and this this calls out to something that Ava Meyer was saying too. Instead of um thinking of a political system, a human political system, and then bringing animals into it, like the system is inherently not built to incorporate animal communication. Like music systems, the ways we think about music, like the concept itself, is not built to incorporate animals necessarily. And so instead of trying to bring animals into music, why not kind of create some something new together, like in a more collaborative way? So those are just some of my thoughts about music and animals.

SPEAKER_04: 42:44

Both Martin and Jeremy kind of would would join you here. So I think and and I loved both of those those episodes because Martin was like, what is music? If anything, musicologists today, if they're worth anything, will say that they don't know what it is, um, which is which is kind of great. And then also when he he kind of put to the foreground that animals are making sound and music for themselves, regardless of what we're doing. So to kind of descend to the fact that we are the ones that are sounding everything. And then, I mean, Jeremy just had this really beautiful way of talking of saying, like, we are sounding together and apart and together, and we're making the world and let's do noise together. And I mean, I think I I was sometimes a bit more like critical or hesitant of the directions he was going. I was like, wait, but hang on, we have to draw lines somewhere. You know, it's one thing to say that we're sounding together. Um, but what what does what are the implications of of this? Um so yeah, I think I mean Martin's episode of uh I just had so much fun talking to him. He he his knowledge was so at least for me, and I know Hannah, you weren't asking me this question, but for me, like the idea of how diverse it could be once you start looking at those connections between music and animals, the the materiality of the instrument. So he just touched on that, but it was something I had never thought of that the strings on an instrument, that what an instrument is made of actually involves animal death. And whose bodies are being used to make human music is, you know, the the kind of yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 44:15

Um that was really there's a um really excellent edited collection that came out, I think, last year or the year before called Audible Infrastructures. Um, and hopefully you can put it in the show notes. Um, but it touched on a lot of those themes about what uh I mean it wasn't just about animals, but there were some some bits in it which talked about, you know, these kind of environmental entanglements that that and everything that's kind of behind these like like instruments and gramphones and and on all these things like like this. And I guess that yeah, comes back again to that question of like what do we not hear when we listen to an animal through these through these means, or what do we not hear when we listen to someone strumming on a Gibson guitar, which was made from mahogany from Fiji, right? There's a chapter in that book um about that.

SPEAKER_04: 45:02

But and I guess anyone who does a commodity chain analysis, and I think this kind of comes back to consumerism, whether you're consuming a sound, whether you're consuming an instrument, whether you're consuming music, is kind of what does it compel you or who does it compel you to attend to? Um and whose needs and wants are you being, you know, like um a common practice now for me whenever I buy anything is to pick up and see what the ingredients are and where it was made and how it was made. And I think that there is a labor that I think it's really important uh to do. Coming back to kind of some of the themes. So outside of kind of listening and method and significance, for me, some themes that really also still emerged that I just wanted to kind of highlight here quickly was um kind of the idea, and you were touching it, touching on it a bit here Bailey as well, is the taxonomy of sound, that there is a kind of ordering to sound and that the sounds we spoke about value, but that there is kind of a hierarchy and a value and an ordering to the sounds that we value, both in terms of humans and animals, but also in terms of how humans and animals come together. Um another really important thing for me that came up in the season was how significant it is to think about bodies and how bodies sound. So you mentioned there, for example, um, people who engage or interact with sound differently, but so do uh animals, right? Some animals don't have ears, some animals are using vibrations to interact. So there are numerous, and this for me was quite startling because I always think about sound as something I hear, but actually that sound is also something you feel, and it involves kind of movements in air and and vibrations of sound are also important. So that for me was kind of uh important as well. Um and then something else that stood out for me was uh place and kind of the geography of sounds, and and this came up a bit when we were talking about exotic. So cities again and the significance of cities and the sounds they make, but also uh the kind of mapping of sounds and the showing of where sounds come from. So these were also just kind of some themes for me that that emerged. Um and I don't know if maybe I'll give you guys a chop opportunity now to quickly rattle off some additional themes that you you'd like us to see, and then we'll we'll go to quotes.

SPEAKER_03: 47:17

You go ahead, Anna.

SPEAKER_00: 47:18

I just had one, I mean, I think we just we covered so much in such a short time, which is great. Um, one thing that I was kind of noting down was and and it particularly came up towards the end of the season was about um the charismatic species and about funding, which I thought was really interesting. Actually, you know, it I mean it did come up earlier. I know Jonathan talked about it and things, but not only who we record, but what do we what animals do we think about when you think about sound and what gets funding and and what is kind of the exciting ones and what are the the less exciting uh ones and like well, how do we make those valuations, I guess.

SPEAKER_04: 47:53

Yeah, like maybe I would have been more transformative if if I had dedicated a whole show to pigs instead of to bats and dolphins, right? Because those are the two species that you do think of when you think of sound.

SPEAKER_00: 48:05

Well, I was kind of trying to push against that in the animal highlights just to a certain extent, and um like the the research on spiders that was like so interesting. You think about sound, we don't think about spiders, but when we do think about sound and spiders, then this whole amazing world opens up, right? So yeah Ninja spiders. Yep. Ninja supersonic, listening through the FB. Yeah, it's just so cool.

SPEAKER_03: 48:28

But yeah, I think that some of your examples, Hannah, and I loved every single animal highlight. They were you know some of my very favorite, favorite things, you know, when listening to each episode. I got to like look forward to it as like a little dessert at the end. Um but I think I think some of your examples did such a good job at like totally doing this project or like contributing to this project of decentering what sound might be. So I talked a lot about like decentering what music is, and like maybe we have to come up with some sort of new conception of what music is. Um, but I think that's true of sound too. And Claudia, when you were talking about how different animals, you know, listen differently, different humans listen differently. You know, we're all such kind of individuals with our each each of our own kind of different sets of physiologies and things like that. Um, and I think that's I think that's a really powerful lesson in sound is that it forces us when we think about animals and sound, it forces us to go outside of what we think sound might be, to go outside of what listening might be. Maybe it's not just with an ear that's structured like a human ear, but maybe it's with a web, you know, or or some sort of other structure like that, which I thought was really beautiful. And a possible additional answer to the question of, you know, well, what what does sound, what might sound tell us that we might not be able to get from from other kind of areas.

SPEAKER_04: 49:46

And I love the the scale. Like scale was a thing that came up in here, kind of even in terms of thinking of specimen. So an individual who listens and how their world is shaped by listening, or losing hearing, or losing the ability to engage with someone because they can't hear because the environment's too loud, or whatever it is. There's the individual level, there's the kind of species level at which conservation is using sound, but then there's you know these institutional levels of funding of that value sound. So there are these kinds of and then of course the specimen that kind of stands in as a example for a whole species. Oh, and in the case of the the ivory bull, you know, for all time, you know, like this is who they this is what they sound like for all time. And then you start to think about species that have different dialects and different accents and different cultures, and you think of there's something not quite right there for using a single animal as a stand-in for a whole for a whole. Um so yeah, I think scale is really important there. And again, this brings up the kind of politics of sound. It's not just uh neutral to bring us back to the beginning. So we're we're gonna start wrapping up now. Uh so I'm gonna invite each of you to read your quote. Feel free to kind of respond to the other uh and maybe just give us a sense of where, you know, what inspired you to use this quote and uh and then we'll take it from there. So uh Bailey, why don't we start with you?

SPEAKER_03: 51:09

Yeah, so um the I had a really hard time narrowing this down, of course, as I'm sure all of the participants in the podcast did. Um, but I um especially love the writing of Rebecca Solan, not necessarily directly about animals, but about some of the things that motivate, you know, kind of if I'm just talking about myself, that motivate me to um remain hopeful, and not in a like kind of naive way, but in a in a real way. So um, this is um a bit from her book, Hope in the Dark. It's important to say what hope is not. It is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. Patrice Cullers, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement's mission as to quote, provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage, but pointed towards vision and dreams.

SPEAKER_04: 52:18

Beautiful. And what for you, why why was this quote important for you in terms of thinking about the season and tying things together?

SPEAKER_03: 52:27

Yeah, so I think um sounds for me has been kind of my entry point into understanding some of these really the ways that we're all always stuck together. We're all bound up in all of this muck together. You know, I have done a lot of work on soundscapes and thinking about, well, when we listen in a place, how are all of the sounds that we're hearing stuck together or entangled with one another? Um, and you come away from it, you know, this is sort of a a classic ecology sort of maxim almost, but that everything is all stuck together. There's the famous John Muir quote, of course, about you know, you pick one thing and everything else comes with it. Um, and so I think this idea, not to quote John, I don't, I'm not a John Muir fan or anything like that. He's actually a pretty bad guy, but um, this idea of like, this idea of like shot spots. So sorry, I I, you know, I gotta say it, but um, this idea that, you know, collective action, we're all working together, humans, animals alike, to build collective power and solidarity alongside one another to achieve collective transformation because it's bad for animals, it's bad for humans, it's bad for animals and humans together, you know, all sorts of different animals, all sorts of different humans. So I I really like the way Rebecca Solnit um calls out to this idea that we're all kind of working in solidarity with one another.

SPEAKER_04: 53:48

And I think it's, I mean, things there are, depending on where you're looking, and I think certainly there are many, many around the world that would say things are looking pretty bleak, but there is also still beauty somehow in in how we we do do things together. And I think uh I think there is kind of hope in that. And for me, now that you've kind of pried it apart, even you know, as a as a social scientist and as someone who sometimes I think thinks about things with open endings, and I don't necessarily have these kind of closed answers. I'm I'm more interested in kind of the questions that open things up. And that can sometimes be challenging when trying to communicate, I think, to people who maybe come from a more natural scientist perspective or more biological perspective, where they're looking for clean-cut answers. And as I progress through the season, more and more I was kind of struck by the differences in communicating, but also in how we are all in our own ways trying to improve the world. And that actually we really need to find ways of communicating across these kinds of social sciences and physical sciences. Um, because we we do not only sound together, but we we can working together really transform transform things in meaningful ways. So yeah, that's really beautiful. Hannah, uh, any thoughts or you want to share yours?

SPEAKER_00: 55:04

Um I was just thinking about how different my quote is, but but that's great. We can talk about John Muir another time. It's one of those things that you know when you're in the humanities, we all kind of a lot of us have these like shared critical ideas, and then you talk to people kind of outside, and they're like, whoa, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_04: 55:20

But that's what I that's what I feel like right now. I'm like, okay, we need to go look at the start out. We'll talk later.

SPEAKER_00: 55:30

Um, I wanted to so I wasn't sure what I wanted to um say as my quote, and throughout the season, people there was a lot of you know great quotes about animals and um and nature and these kind of like hopeful and like sometimes kind of devastating quotes. But I wanted to use this opportunity um to talk about um Dylan Robinson's work, who is um he was at Queen's University, but he's just moved on to um University of British Columbia. He's on my PhD committee, Stolo Indigenous Um Sound Studies Researcher. But so he is a sort of preamble because this quote kind of I need to quantify it a bit, but um his there we go, we've both got our hungry listening. It's funny, I feel like sound a lot of uh musicologists know a lot about this book, but I feel like it hasn't kind of come into the animals and sound world, which is why I wanted to talk about it now. But Dylan talks about um how we all have listening positionalities um and how kind of listening isn't this kind of neutral act in the same way that recording isn't. And he talks about how kind of there's a settler colonial positionality, um, which is very much kind of about extraction and pinning down sound. And here's a quote from his book The listening continuum has historically been consigned to a framework wherein one is listening well if one is able to capture the content of what is spoken or the fact of musical form and structure. Hungry listening prioritises the says the capture and certainty of information over the effective feel, timber, touch, and texture of sound. So hungry listening is this term for this kind of extractive and feverant, like a lot of this. So Rachel Mundy kind of noted on this about kind of this vivisection and this kind of trying to kind of take sounds apart. Um and yeah, I guess I just wanted to mention Dylan and thinking that this is an important thing to think about with animals and sound too, right? Like sound isn't just something that we should um that that we should try, you know, to to make to find the fact and what what does it mean and what you know, but we can sort of accept it as this affective timberous qualities too.

SPEAKER_04: 57:44

I think that's beautiful because I think it does tie together a lot of the the themes we were talking about, kind of this idea and this needing and wanting to taxonomyze everything. So uh who was it that spoke about kind of bird sounds? And now you've got, I think it was Rachel as well, like bird sounds. There's this particular like one, two, one, two, and then that's the that's how the song is defined, or like there is this way of kind of making sound sterile, I guess, to some extent.

SPEAKER_00: 58:12

Um yeah, so hungry listening is kind of this terminology that that Del and Robertson created for kind of this kind of rooted in like the original kind of colonial project in in the US, which was um yeah, it comes from like formal music education, like it's still kind of present in a lot of the ways that we're kind of taught to listen. You know, you sit quietly in class and you you don't talk and you you you listen, and that's how you kind of gather gather facts and um yeah, it's sort of this like hierarchical thing. And and Dylan sort of talks about how in in indigenous ways of listening are very different, different to that. And I would really encourage anyone who's interested in sound at all um to read that book because I'm not doing it even at the slightest bit of justice. Um, yeah, and I think there's a lot of relevance to it and and things like bioacoustics and these kind of feverant kind of collection of bird sound, and and you know, a lot of it now, the way that bioacoustics um is is it's not as much listening as it is kind of visualizing and machine learning and all these things like that. And how do we kind of think about those things together? Anyway, I'm rambling, but read the book.

SPEAKER_03: 59:19

Yeah, it's it's a pretty spectacular book. It like forms one of the kind of main theoretical pillars of um some of the work that I just wrapped up here at the University of Oregon. But I think it's so important to Hannah that you brought that in here right at the end because that is actually a theme that I forgot that I didn't bring up, but um, is about how you know potentially really enriching um in the season might have been more connections between, you know, scholars outside of white kind of settler positionalities. That's not to say all the all of the participants were, but thinking about relationships with animals outside of kind of some of these dominant positions. And Dylan Robinson does such an exceptional job at exploring the ways that that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:00

really does the the positions that we're operating from really do structure how we listen and and how not only how we listen but how we act on um our listening so yeah it's incredibly incredibly important work great thank you um no i kind of wish i had known about it earlier because then i could have broken to dylan and be like hey um i should have thought about that but but yeah i think this this speaks to this came up in other seasons as well you know where you start from does shape how you think about law or legal systems how you think about experience how you think about the city these um yeah these are really good tools um and I think we've learned a great deal in the season just about a variety of concepts uh as someone who isn't from sound studies it's opened up my my kind of perspectives into terms of thinking about how I can think about experience of animals and the the avenues that are open to me to to do so um so thank you both of you for kind of helping me think through this a bit and think through kind of these these connections it's been really great uh before we wrap up um maybe you want to just give us a little bit about because you've shared a bit of about your work now maybe what you're working on or in the future or heading towards and or if people want to connect with you how they can do so.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:22

Yeah I can so um I just wrapped up I'm writing a thesis about um a wilderness area in northern Minnesota um the state that I'm from um and I'm still kind of riffing on that work trying to shape it into something that might be able to go out into the world but the project was about how this wilderness area has been constructed like via popular discourse but also through conservationist work um as a distinctly silent wilderness place. And this is also a theme that came up throughout the season is this kind of dichotomy of like nature as tranquil cities as loud, you know that kind of thing. But my project was tracing how this place which is actually quite cacovinous in a beautiful way was constructed as a silent place and how that notion of silence was codified into legislation that now doesn't allow any motorboats to be used in the place which is kind of good for animals. It majorly infringes on Ojibwe food sovereignty ability to use their boats to go fishing. And I trace the ways that those issues you know the limiting of Ojibwe sovereignty and the trivializing of animal sounds are connected. So the ways animals and indigenous people um yeah their their faiths are kind of tied together in that place. So and then the other big project is moving to you know across the country to a big city starting a starting a PhD nothing nothing much. Fascinating and you'll you'll start that in September yes great and if people want to get in touch with you what would be the the best way to do so yeah so I'm kind of bouncing between institutional emails right now so the best way to get a hold of me is um through my email Gmail address which is bhilgren at gmail.com. Great I'll pop it in the show notes too.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:09

And uh Hannah how about you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:11

Yeah oh my gosh I just I want to read you at these days I really hope that you I during my masters I did a really small project about Gordon Hampton's One Square Inch of Silence project. And I'm really interested in these politics of like trying to make places quiet and what that actually means. But yeah so with me I'm sort of in the midpoint of my PhD right now so still sort of in the weeds of things. I'm trying to write up my work about um sound and the search for the Ivor Goldwoodpecker so that's going to be kind of hopefully submitted this summer um and coming out to the world at some point soon. And yeah I'm just finishing up my data collection in the archives and and and and seeing um seeing what's next. And if people want to contact me I'm on Twitter it's at Hannahfhunter um or my email address is hanna.hunter at queensu.ca but yeah I just wanted to thank you Claudia for such a great season I think animals and sound like I've always thought of it as being this quite niche area and it's not huge in in animal studies. So I think it's really cool that um there was so much focus on it and I'm sure that it's it's kind of inspired a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:24

So um it's been I would include myself in that too I'm very much inspired every episode I was like trying to juggle all the notes that I was taking with like you know going for walks to like come down from all my excitement.

SPEAKER_04: 1:04:37

So well that's so good to hear because that's the I mean that's the goal of the podcast is it's supposed to be kind of um a pedagogical tool. I think it was born somewhat of me feeling isolated and feeling a bit because animal studies is so diverse and it's so connected and and starting my PhD I wasn't in animal studies um I wasn't even in geography so I was just like oh let me do a PhD or something I know nothing about. And and and I figured well who better to learn from than than the actual folks and it's been really every episode is just really exciting and and great for me. And I'm hoping that it'll become a tool in classrooms and as people kind of go through their own journeys. So I'm really thank you so much. I'm really happy that it's useful because obviously you guys know sound better than I do um so I'm I'm happy to hear that it's it's useful and uh thank you so much for sharing and being with us today and I've definitely got to get some of those references from you for the the show notes. But yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you so much Claudia well welcome back I've just been speaking to you for the whole episode I'm here again everyone if you haven't had enough of me well it's the final animal highlight so uh it's gonna be a good one it's been such a it's been such a pleasure having you on for the whole season so fun I've learned a lot and and a lot of your highlights have like they shaped some of who I was going to speak to next you know you raised so like the dolphin episode was a direct you know directly related to some of the things you said in in the highlights there have been so many like interesting things that you've mentioned in the highlights that have come up in the interviews so thank you for for helping me think through animals and sound a bit more it's been super fun to like get to research fun facts about animals and sound.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:34

So grateful for the opportunity to get to do that.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:37

So yeah we've got one more to go so before we say our final farewells uh who do you have for us today? We're gonna talk about elephants. I love elephants. I mean I'm from South Africa so I've been fortunate enough to have seen elephants in real life and they are just just gorgeous.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:55

You might think elephants huge is that's mostly how they listen but there is another way that they listen to things which I would like to share with everyone today. So for first you need to know that elephants have vocal cords that are eight times the size of our vocal cords. Huge and I guess because of this size they're capable of sending out two forms of sound waves at once. So there's the usual kind of higher frequency ones that we're able to pick up and listen to so we might be able to listen to some elephants right now. And these travel through the air like our voices do. But they also have low frequency waves that they send out at the same time and these travel through the earth. So when low frequency sounds are low enough we think of those we call those infrasonic um so that's we talked before about ultrasonic waves which are the really high ones that we can't hear. These are really low ones that we can't hear um so they're below the range of human hearing and the lowest threshold for human hearing is 20 hertz so it's sound below that. Because of the ways that sound waves travel high frequency sounds dissipate much quicker and so travel a lot less far than low frequency sounds and so this is where the elephants come in. So bioacoustics a bioacoustics researcher at Cornell called Katie Payne was among the first to realize that elephants communicated in this infrasonic ground based way and because as I said they um these low frequency sounds travel so far this means that elephants can communicate with each other over four kilometers away but how do they hear these sounds well Caitlin O'Connor Rodwell found that elephants listen to these infrasonic sounds partially with their feet. Wow so she um this researcher noticed these different listening poses that you could observe elephants going in so um they would stand still they would pick up their foot and point their toe at the ground and this was kind of an indication that um new information was coming in. So an indication to other elephants in the herd so for us so if we're looking if you see an elephant doing this they might be listening to impression okay I see I see so this is like seismic communication and it works really well for elephants because of the incredible sensitivity of their feet. So like all mammals including humans um I'm gonna botch this elephants have receptors called Pascinian corpuscles or PCs let's call them PCs in their skin and these are hardwired to a part of their brain where touch signals are processed. And in elephants these PCs are clustered around the edge of their foot. So when picking up a far-off signal elephants will sometimes press their feet to the ground and elephants have these really kind of like fatty feet so when they press their foot to the ground it spreads out their foot enlarging the surface area by as much as 20%. So imagine if you had like a partially inflated balloon or football and you like pressed it to the ground and it kind of flattens out. That's what elephants do with their feet and that allows them to hear these infrasonic sounds that it travels through the ground. So they might be listening to other herds of elephants or they might be trying to listen for thunderstorms um and there was this maybe we can we can link to it in the show notes there's a really interesting like PBS like short documentary about this and like one group of elephants hearing a matriarch from really far away for another group of elephants and like through that knowing that this other group were leaving a watering hole so that the new group could come in for the watering hole. And yeah and for the thunderstorms it's a really obviously they make these low rumbles so elephants can hear those with their feet or also with their ears they can hear with their ears too. But we wouldn't be able to pick this up right but the elephants can and so if it's a really dry or like drought period they can move towards the thunderstorm and be able to find water.

SPEAKER_04: 1:11:41

This is amazing I mean it brings it brings forward so many of the the aspects we've spoken about like how how many how many ways there are to experience sound uh how many ways there are to listen to sound um that a lot of the ways in which you both listen to and create sound go beyond human ranges um and give meaning to animals in so many different ways that's wow okay so uh I just want to reiterate so you've got high frequency and low frequency sounds and high frequency sounds don't travel far distances but low frequency sounds do. So elephants are able to generate these low frequency sounds and read low frequency sounds which means that they're able to hear even greater distances than what their ears are capable of.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:27

Yeah yeah yeah exactly that that's amazing if people want to know more about there's a um I I know I'm quite orientated towards Cornell because that's where I am right now. So I talk to people and they tell me cool stuff about what's happening but at Cornell there's um something called the Elephant Listening project. So if you want to know more about elephant listening you can you can find out more there. And I just think it's it's just a cool way of you know we know elephants are cool animals and and everyone loves elephants I think but it's like a cool yeah it's a cool entry into their worlds and as you say it's really interesting to think about these like sonic worlds that are happening far beyond our comprehension and and it's also just amazing.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:10

So uh thank you again Hannah for for sharing all of these great details. I I'll make sure to put all the links to these amazing studies in on the website. But thank you it's been such a pleasure having you on the animal highlight and in the ground review. And uh you're the first person who I've had on the show who's not me. So I mean other than guests you're the first like animal you're the first podcast you know what I mean yeah so it's been it's been a real big learning curve for me as well and uh I've I've very much enjoyed uh it's been awesome I'm gonna miss being on but I'm looking forward to uh listen just listening to the future future episodes so yeah thank you so much thank you so much to both Bailey and Hannah for a thrilling and interesting conversation you can hear that I was maybe a bit tired and all over the place but it was really just so much fun to chat to two fellow grad students. I hope you enjoyed listening. A big big big big thank you to Hannah for doing this animal highlight on elephants which was super interesting but just for being a great uh co-host highlight person throughout the season I think she's opened my eyes to the potential of what the animal highlight could be and I'm excited to kind of see when and how things develop. I'm very happy to report that the next season is going to be on animals and biosecurity. There's going to be a little bit of a break in between the end of the season and the beginning of the season on biosecurity and that's just because I'm gonna try a new recording strategy so that the episodes are not so spread out. So let's see how things work. I'll keep you updated but for now thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to Apple for sponsoring this podcast to the Sonic Arts Studio and SAP Lab for sponsoring this season to Jeremy John for the logo Gordon Clark for the bad music and to the numerous other people that always help me and cheer me on and share and just say good things about the podcast. Really thank you so much you guys make everything worthwhile.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:14

I'm wishing you a wonderful summer or winter wherever you this is the Animal Turn with me Claudia Hirtenfelder For more great iRull podcasts visit irallpod.com that's I R O A R P O D dot com ho