Arboreal Intimacies

Arboreal Intimacies: vibrating bodies, sharing wounds, navigating across messy boundaries (2023-2024)

A field recording, listening and writing practice made around one tree spanning three seasons. This work considered more-than-human temporal patterns of migration and phenological readings of space such as first leafing, full leafing, mating, living and dying. I was interested in how sound field practices could provide embodied experiences of temporal diversity by focusing my recording equipment around one tree, revisiting across a calendar year.

My work for this project formed a piece of writing which was published in the sound art journal Row of Trees with an edited extract below:

'Listening is both embodied and metaphorical, an active attentiveness across many senses. My practice explores how listening can bring attentiveness to more-than-human lifeworlds, agency and temporalities through field practices. I’m interested in how the embodied nature of listening establishes intimacy and empathy across= species lines, and of the field as a place of unsettled boundaries between disciplines, bodies and experiences of time.

The field in this paper is a mixed wooded meadow near the River Tweed, neither far from industry, exemplified by the local quarry and busy road to Glasgow, nor low in biodiversity. The area is home to ravens, orchids, linnets, violet ground beetles and migratory visitors such as ospreys, spotted flycatchers, enacting their varying interactions with the wide river, banked by mixed deciduous and Scots pine woodland. With a well-worn footpath cutting through the meadow, this field is a shared space. A site of encounter between diverse species bodies and timelines that criss-cross and intersect throughout the year.

At the end of the previous summer, the solitary Japanese larch in the meadow had been struck by lightning and split in two. The subsequent fire hollowed the inside of the trunk.

I first visit this space on a dry day in early Spring, with the intention of using contact mics, hydrophone and field microphones. Recording with this equipment is contingent on a number of factors, not least the weather, but also more embodied factors such as a window of good health within an irregularly presenting auto-immune condition. I play close attention to my experience of listening within this space and the contingencies and multiplicities of encounter. These are particularly evident, not just in the seasonal arrival of migratory bird species like the chiffchaffs and sand martens and the related sounds and vibrations they bring to this space, but also through the rarity of the lightning strike: how it altered a tall, dense tree into a hollow wooden chamber with a deep resonance. These contingencies combine with my own embodied responses to the space and the listening process in a feedback loop: I am responsive, often moving, the act of listening shaping where I next focus the microphones.

Sound allows for an embodied participation into spaces, aiding attunement to more-than-human interactions and timings. Listening in this space, across several months and two seasons, I experienced a sensory response to the timely patterns of migration, first leafing, full leafing, full flowering, mating, living and dying. I became more attentive to the temporal rhythms around me and in which I was participating through my own practice. The ambiguity of sound, when occurring through vibrations from and across diverse bodies in the field, allows for a joining and participation of my listener’s body with other bodies: the sounds I hear cause affective and physical responses within me; the tread of my feet as I reach the site and place the equipment, affect the more-than-human inhabitants around me, the alarm calls they make, which radiate to other bodies in call-and-response.

Later, I showed a friend a picture of my hydrophone with a contact adapter on the larch’s root, supporting several species of moss. The moss was warming in the sun and still damp from the morning’s rain. The recording was surprising. The moss, tiny insects, water evaporating, air, perhaps bryophyte respiratory processes, combined ambiguously with the particular voice of the hydrophone to relay crackling, popping and fizzing. Like the sound inside my body when I rotate my neck.

The vibrations increased my sense of spatial-volume in relation to the meadow, different to my sense of the space experienced without the microphones: cars, people talking, a dog running. Attuning myself more to listening/witnessing within the space, I heard both more specificity in the variety of bird calls, the changed call of the mistle thrush now winter was over, and more ambiguity, as these sounds came together as an assemblage, the chorus of a mixed woodland rustling in the spring wind.

During the limbo of changing microphones, using the x/y mics on the top of the recorder in the interim, I also experienced a temporal abstraction of the sounding of the space. Listening with my ears only, I became more aware of the small

delay transmuted between the immediacy of encounter and translation through data when listening through the recorder with headphones, as well the equipment’s amplification of the wind and the busy flight path of the planes heading to Edinburgh. Time felt more layered, thicker, whilst any singular experience of time became less certain. There was an infinite amount of living, dying, breathing, moving, eating, respiring in the space. Alternating between only my body and body+listening device, allowed me to slowly attune to this thickness, this multiplicity of connections and temporalities and lack of certainty of how to orient myself in time.