Bioacoustics, Sound Archives, Extinction: Critical geographies of bird sound recording and the sonic production of environmental knowledge.

Abstract

How do (certain) humans come to know birds through sound, to what ends, and at what cost? This thesis explores the geographies of historical and contemporary bird sound recording(s) in order to investigate the entanglements of power, place, and sound in the production of environmental knowledge. Drawing from literature in sound studies, science and technology studies, historical geography, and beyond, I critically investigate and extend the sonic geographies of these recordings and their associated practices. To do so, I address three interrelated objectives. First, I articulate and analyze bird sound recordings as cultural-historical objects as opposed to neutral representations or data points. Second, I critically investigate how environmental knowledge has and might be made through bird sound recording(s), including in dominant science and ecological artworks. Third, I critically trace the sonic geographies of particular bird sound recordings and explore what we can learn from these. I advance a theoretical and methodological framework of critical sonic geography to investigate these elements through four independent but related manuscripts. The first considers the historical geographies of collection, power, and coloniality at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds in the mid-20th century, exposing the complex cultural-historical geographies of recordings now held at the Macaulay Library. The second centers the historical recordings and contemporary sonic searches for the critically endangered Ivory-billed Woodpecker, arguing for the importance of considering geography in debates around the role and status of sound in science. The third considers the role of sound in memorialising extinction through artworks, and how these works produce relational sonic spaces for publics to mourn and resist extinction. The final manuscript is a research-creation experiment that animates, brings together, and extends several threads in this thesis in a series of audio essays that story the collection and afterlives of recordings of endangered birds. Ultimately, this dissertation exposes the power-laden geographies that impact how (certain) people do (and might) come to know birds through sound, and how sonic environmental knowledge itself produces power-laden geographies.