Animal Musicalities: Birds, beasts, and evolutionary listening by Rachel Mundy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Animal Musicalities: Birds, beasts, and evolutionary listening by Rachel Mundy Bruce Johnson Animal Musicalities: Birds, beasts, and evolutionary listening By Rachel Mundy. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2018. This book adds to the growing literature questioning binary models that have for centuries underpinned scientific enterprise, including human/non-human, objective/subjective, self/other, and also body/mind as in theories of embodied cognition, extended mind and cognitive ecology. And, as this study reflects, one of the most promising vehicles for this reaction is auditory as opposed to visual modalities. New attentiveness to the acoustic universe has encouraged a reconceptualization of the forms and levels of intelligence that animate all sounding creatures, questioning hierarchies which have centralised "man" (that gendering is intended) as the imperial centre of a creation identified as a vast resource to be colonised and exploited for our gratification. Acoustic avian studies have enjoyed particular prominence in this ecological reassessment, as comprehended and advanced in the ambitious and wide-ranging research project "Seeking Birdscapes: Contemporary Listening and Recording Practices in Ornithology and Environmental Sound Art" launched this year at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, led by Helena Simonett with Senior Research Associate Patricia Jäggi. Mundy's book is not so much about birdsong and avian intelligence themselves as about how they have been situated in scientific and aesthetic discourse. Covering the period between 1871 (Darwin's The Descent of Man) to the present, Mundy explores the complicity between studies of music and our understanding of the relationship between humans and animals, between culture and nature, "how the status of animals has been a formational element in music's ethics, its categories, and its place in the humanities" (3). One theme throughout the study is epistemological rather than ontological: how do we know the world, what are we prepared to pay for that particular form of knowledge, and what does that say about our valuation of creaturely life? And, I would suggest, this raises also the question: What do we see as the objective of knowledge? Is it to gain "wisdom" (what in a pre-scientific West could be called "virtu") that changes the knower, or power, that changes the known? The vehicle for this enquiry is "stories in which animals have constructed modern sonic culture" (7). The book consists of a succession of muscular case studies of particular moments in the history of that process. I exemplify with two that were particularly rivetting to me. First, the work of Erich von Hornbostel with the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in the interwar period, developing an analytical approach to sound that becomes implicated in the trope of vivisection; second, the experiments of William Thorpe and Charles Seeger in the 1950s in attempting to develop technologies that would produce visual impressions of sound, to achieve greater "objectivity" in their analyses than they felt could be achieved simply by ear. One refrain is thus the encounter between sonic and visual epistemologies. Don't believe everything you hear. Why not? Seeing is believing. Why? What the world is like is not the same as what it looks like according the dominant representational model of perspective, itself an invention coinciding with the Renaissance and the dawn of the scientific revolution. A road running into the distance looks as though it converges to a point, but we know that it does not. The question that vibrates throughout these chapters for me is an epistemological one: why can we not simply say "I know because I hear"? The experiments that take for granted that to understand sound it must be rendered as visible inscriptions, are bullying confirmations of the tyrannical scopism of the scientific project. The image of "vivisection," that to know something we must kill it, evokes the parallel between the rise of science and the authority of "inspection," that the only valid form of knowledge is gained by opening something up and looking inside it, as in the rise of "anatomies," both literal and metaphorical. In ways that are now depressingly obvious, scientific "progress" and its handmaiden, technology, are based on killing. This study is a further reinforcement of the proposition that the connection between knowing and seeing is so...