Speculative ecoacoustic composition systems: listening to insects through music

Abstract

August2025School of Humanities, Arts, and Social SciencesOngoing insect decline is of critical concern for all species, since insect diversity and resilience are critical to ecosystem function. If we are to rely on anthropocentric rationale alone, this should be ample evidence to pay more attention to insects. However, humans in many western societies have become disconnected from insects, exacerbated by a socialized narrative of fear, avoidance, and exclusion. Parallel to our deteriorating relations with insects there has been a decline in our practices of listening to our environments. This research considers how listening to insects might change the way we perceive and value them – which in turn informs how we interact with and affect them. Composer David Dunn has posited that the production and reception of music can facilitate a connection with beyond-humans through the ‘fabric of mind’ that connects living beings through sound. In this dissertation, I present methods for listening to insects through percussion, electronic, and spatialized music. My focus is on ants and their associates, whose complex societies have tremendous ecological impacts globally. Ants sonically communicate through the architectures in and on which they live, yet there has been very little scientific research on the topic. I posit that we can listen to ants’ mindedness through their aural architectures: the material infrastructure through which they communicate, and by which their sonic agency and social cohesion is realized. Building on Dunn’s artistic works, I present methods for the realization of speculative ecoacoustic composition systems that interact with the sound of insects and our shared environments through recording, playback, and processing. I experiment with composition methods for electronic music, percussion and spatial sound to challenge conceptions of what we can hear, how we listen, and our relations to insects. Percussion and the sounds of our environments are both pushed aside and often labeled “noise” or “experimental” in traditional Western music institutions, yet they are at the same time familiar and embodied, and prompt expansion of what we listen to. My research experiments in bringing these sounds to a broader public through the development and implementation of formats such as performance, public sound installation, in-situ experiences in the field, and web-based media. Through these formats, the work intends to prompt auralization in listeners – composer Pauline Oliveros’ concept of ‘hearing or sounding in the mind,’ through an awareness of cryptic insect sounds in our environments. Building on historical precedents of active listening that empowered social change, and Donna Haraway’s concept of committed sympoietic relationships with beyond-human, I posit that listening through music to insects can foster sonic sympoiesis where we live, sustained by auralization of insect sound in the mind. It is through this affective listening and auralization that we can shift our relations with and challenge our assumptions about insects.Ph