Soundings of Ecological Time in Contemporary Music and Sound Art

Abstract

In The Natural Contract, Michel Serres asks how humanity can ever address the 'anguishing question' of climate change as long as we don't know how to conceive of the relations between time and weather; temps et temps. This essay aims to find ways in which, through music and sound art, we may be able to attune to temporalities that are less anthropocentric and more ecologically minded. In this investigative essay I will take a closer listen to four works that touch upon this theme of more-than-human time: Jennifer Walshe's Time Time Time (2019), Jem Finer's Longplayer (1999), Felix Hess' Air Pressure Fluctuations (2001) and John Luther Adams's The Place Where You Go to Listen (2004-2006). I aim to enquire how these works offer representations and sonifications of ecological notions of time through sound. Drawing on Elaine Gan's essay The Time Travelers, as well as the vast time-scales of Timothy Morton's hyperobject and Michel Serres's ideas on nonlinear, percolating time, I will further frame the notion of ecological time. To explore the correlated question of how the sonic experience manages to render these more-than-human temporalities tangible, I will turn to sound studies by both the American philosopher Christoph Cox and the Swiss sonic theorist Salomé Voegelin.