Listening to Ambiguity Up on Peaton Hill

Recording Disturbance and Listening to Ambiguity
Unsettling encounters with time and sound on Peaton Hill.

Observations made during a 2023 residency at Cove Park, Argyll with the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network PhD researcher cohort

This work was made whilst traversing changing ecologies between the residency complex on Peaton Hill and the shore of Loch Long. Through listening and writing reflective field notes, I found means of practicing Anna Tsing’s ‘arts of noticing’, reaching for a ‘passionate immersion’ (2011) in my surroundings, whilst simultaneously troubling the ethics of my practice as I became a force of disturbance through this immersion.

My work during the residency and these listening practices formed a piece of writing called Recording Disturbance and Listening to Ambiguity: Unsettling encounters with time and sound on Peaton Hill, part of a compendium article with contributions from the cohort. Extract below:

I used a variety of microphones — contact mics that record vibrations across surfaces; hydrophones that can be submerged to listen below fluid surfaces. Acting as sensory prostheses, the mics increased the depth and breadth of my listening field. They affected my means of engagement with the more-than-human world by opening altered spaces of encounter. However, such prostheses also created a space of retreat from my usual manner of hearing, creating a sense of disturbance of positionality and certainty — my position in place, position in time — distorting a sense of the dimension of my bodily boundaries.

Positioning my body further into the woodland increased my ability to hear some sounds whilst precluding others, but there was no sense of leaving anything human behind. The human touch was thick on the landscape, on my recordings and the ambiguity of human/more-than-human signals intermingling could not be solved by retreating further from human-made sounds. As indigenous and postcolonial scholars have described, there is no separation of nature and culture (see de la Cadena, 2016; Tallbear, 2011; Todd, 2016; Trisos et al, 2021). So, too, there is also no ‘friction-free wilderness’, neutral position of the recordist, nor of conceptualisations of the field. Fieldwork as a term holds within it colonial histories of ‘masterful discovery’ (Crone et al, 2022, 12), whilst the recordist might be embedded within Western-centric conceptions of nature and time (Wright, 2023, p.3). In field recording, the equipment and access that makes such listening possible also implicates the recordist in a web of resource extraction and privilege that Mark Peter Wright argues implies ‘neither sound capture nor its consequent representations can ever be separate from the geopolitcal resources and networks that allow signals to be captured’ (p.4). My practice implicated me in a radiating web of disturbance from which I cannot retreat, but with which I must engage.

References

Crone, P., Nightingale, S., Stanton, P., (eds) (2023) Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-Based Research. Eindhoven, NL: Onomatopee

de la Cadena, Marisol (2019) ‘Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen’ in Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., Nustad, K. G. (eds) Anthropos and the Material. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tallbear, K (2011) ‘Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigeous Standpoints: Theorizing the Contemporary’’. Available from: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs- indigenous-standpoints [accessed 07.10.22]

Todd, Z. (2016) ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29 (1)

Trisos, C, Auberbach, J, Madusudan, K (2021) 'Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology', in Nature Ecology & Evolution, v. 5 , pp. 1205–1212
Tsing, A., L. (2011) “Arts of I

nclusion, or, How to Love a Mushroom”, Australian Humanities Review, 50, pp. 5-22.
Wright, M., P. (2023) Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. London: Bloomsbury