Listening Towards A Multispecies Heterophony

Human musicians have long imitated or evoked other-than-human sounds in their music, but the development of technologies for their recording, visualization, transcription and digital manipulation means that such practices are becoming more prevalent. In particular, other-than-human sounds are often used in the composition of music aiming to raise awareness of the current biodiversity crisis or simply of our human interdependence with other species in a more-than-human world. In this article I critically evaluate the use of spectrograms, musical transcriptions and audio clips by human composers working with the sounds of other animals to create new music. I view these representations as necessary to the work of (re)composition, but suggest that their use risks an instrumentalism or instrumental rationality that fails to respect the intrinsic value and original functions of other-than-human sounds, and which may undermine the intentions of a composer. Drawing on insights from critical theory and postcolonial environmental ethics into the logics of domination and extractivism, and using as case studies four of my own works informed and inspired by the songs of humpback whales, I challenge the presumption that no ethical questions arise from the musical use of other-than-human sounds.