Sounding Together

Abstract

This article reflects on the participation of humans and other species as listening and sounding entities in creating sonic environments. The article offers a preliminary reflexive consideration of the author’s current composition-improvisation project, discussing how the project’s pieces transform and transport particular sonic environments of the author’s experience to new settings. The author meditates through birdsong on what it sounds like to compose, improvise, and perform with the sonic affordances of our surroundings. The article suggests that extensions of interspecies and interhuman acoustic assemblages and sonic affordances in composition and improvisation can bring overlapping elements of world-making projects into focus and open up potentialities for new ones. In the article, the author blends reflection with musical description and analysis of one of the project’s pieces, refusing to situate nature as other and rejecting a posture that uses nonhuman sound for personal (human) benefit. By focusing on the edge effects of the overlapping world-making projects at the site of the Zealandia Te Mārā a Tāne Wildlife Sanctuary in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, and on challenging settler colonial listening practices, the article reflects on the implications of sharing spaces with other humans and with countless species beyond our own.