‘And I Listened to the Whistlings and Patterings Outside’

Abstract

Abstract The notion of the wild is one that has developed a richer currency in recent years, simultaneously enrolled as a branding device for leisure activities and employed to account for the potential planetary consequences of a shift towards the Anthropocene. Noting parallel amplifications of wild sound in both the philosophical concept of the sublime and in the literary genre known as nature writing, this chapter critically accounts for the ways in which creative sound practices have deployed listening and recording to manifest the spatial parameters of the wild. These sound art practices are shown to reveal tensions in terms of any strictly demarcated border between the wild and the cultivated, in terms of the technical assemblages that are taken to the wild and that render what is heard there audible, and in terms of the wild as a space that is to be accessed through solitary, silent and arduous effort.