'And I listened to the whistlings and patterlings outside': Hearing the Wild Spaces as sound

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, in keeping with other titles in the series, is designed to “offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area;” the chapters are commissioned from “leading figures in the discipline”. My contribution is distinguished by a number of elements which have not previously been explored within sound arts discourses or in sound studies and one element which constitutes a development within a wider definition of aesthetics.

The concept of the wild animates the creative enterprise of field recording as much as it is the focus of many examples of bio-acoustics and soundscape ecology. However, the concept tends to be mobilized in contrast to corollary terms such as cultivation, culture or forms of settlement. This chapter deploys a notion of a hybridized wild that is beginning to become more familiar from contemporary anthropologists such as Anna L. Tsing, recent posthuman approaches like those of Rosi Braidotti, and critical sociology of the kind practiced by Laura Ogden.

The chapter deploys a range of creative sound practices that would not normally be located within the same constellation, critically connecting work from different generations, at different levels of prominence within the field, and motivated by different purposes, according to an organizing thematic. Furthermore, it seeks to extend the consideration of viable sound practices outside of their expected cultural locations, identifying the literary genre of nature writing as a modality which can express an attunement to the sonorous that exemplifies Tsing’s “listening practice.”

The intervention into aesthetics derives from what I believe to be the first occasion where the notion of the sublime, in its eighteenth century formulation that still exerts considerable influence, is analysed in terms of the both concepts of the wild and of the sonorous.