Listening in the Field:Recording and the Science of Birdsong

Scientific observation and representation tend to be seen as exclusively visual affairs. But scientists have often drawn on sensory experiences other than the visual. Since the end of the nineteenth century, biologists have used a variety of techniques to register wildlife sounds. In this book, Joeri Bruyninckx describes the evolution of sound recording into a scientific technique for studying the songs and calls of wild birds and asks, what it means to listen to animal voices as a scientist. The practice of recording birdsong took shape at the intersection of popular entertainment and field ornithology, turning recordings into objects of investigation and popular fascination. Shaped by the technologies and interests of amateur naturalism and music teaching, radio broadcasting and gramophone production, hobby electronics and communication engineering, birdsong recordings traveled back and forth between scientific and popular domains, to appear on gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and movie soundtracks. Bruyninckx follows four technologies—the musical score, the electric microphone, the portable magnetic tape recorder, and the sound spectrograph—through a cultural history of field recording and scientific listening. He chronicles a period when verbal descriptions, musical notations, and onomatopoeic syllables represented birdsong and shaped a community of listeners; later electric recordings struggled with notions of fidelity, realism, objectivity, and authenticity; scientists, early citizen scientists, and the recording industry negotiated recording exchange; and trained listeners complemented the visual authority of spectrographic laboratory analyses. This book reveals a scientific process fraught with conversions, between field and laboratory, sound and image, science and its various audiences

Somatic vigilance and sonic skills in experimental plasma physics

In contemporary laboratory workstations, automation promises a technological fix for producing more robust workflows. By insulating the experiment from tacit or embodied knowledge, it is expected to produce more reliable output. This apparent tension between trustworthy disembodied protocols and the unreliable human factor should not, however, be taken at face value. Instrument operators routinely face uncertainties and instrument opacity, and their concerns may be further aggravated when processes are automated. In some contexts, therefore, researchers cultivate such embodied practices precisely to assure themselves of the reliability of automated instruments and protocols. This qualitative study of research practice in a multi-disciplinary research group in physics and materials science shows that researchers complement instrument readings with 'somatic vigilance', a set of laboratory practices that emphasize hands-on instrument knowledge, material witnessing and rely on sensory experience to monitor experimental processes. Equating physical and epistemic proximity to an instrument, operators use these techniques to monitor their instruments and to manage their own expectations. Operators' reliance on auditory information and sonic skills to monitor their instruments and their environment illustrates the value of somatic vigilance on the laboratory's work-floor. Connecting scholarship in science and technology studies on trust management and embodied practice, somatic vigilance calls attention to the continuous maintenance of both instruments and user expectations as well as the situated and often embodied techniques that are required to manage trust in instruments. More than an unreliable human factor, it suggests that researchers instead, conversely, consider embodied knowledge a way to fix automation