Recording Marine Worlds: Dialogues on Sound, Conservation, and Culture

This project promotes interdisciplinary knowledge of marine worlds with a focus on sound recording as an array of technologies, practices, and conceptual models.

Project summary

How do we record oceanic sounds – and do oceans themselves preserve the sounds of the species and environments that compose their acoustic worlds? Led by scholars in literature, blue humanities, and sound studies, and drawing on insights from conservation studies and the arts, this project promotes interdisciplinary knowledge of marine worlds with a focus on sound recording as an array of technologies, practices, and conceptual models. Recording has been central to sound studies since the field's emergence, with research now looking beyond modern recording systems to ask how other cultural techniques, including writing and memory, might also be understood to record sound. Meanwhile, scholars of the environmental humanities are asking how the knowledge practices of marine techno-science can be better situated in relation to other oceanic knowledges, including the practices of past eras. This project advances both inquiries by examining how marine worlds have recorded sound, and been recorded, across times, places, cultures, and even species.

What are we interested in?

Recording technologies have been vital to sound studies since the field's emergence. Current research increasingly looks beyond modern recording devices to ask how other cultural techniques, including writing and memory, might be understood to ‘record’ sound. At the same time, new digitally led research is revealing the astonishing range of marine species that produce, respond to, and are vulnerable to sound. Yet historical imaginings of the sea as a silent world continue to shape our understanding. Where such imaginings come from, and what unsilent alternatives may have preceded and indeed outlived them, are growing concerns of researchers in the oceanic (or blue) humanities. What can new sound recording devices, together with new ideas about recording, bring to our understandings of the sea? In what ways might the soundings of prior eras, ‘unscientific’ practices, and inhuman beings prove no less crucial?

The goals of our project

This project will advance interdisciplinary knowledge of marine worlds with a focus on sound recording. The colloquium will build collaborative capacity, networks, and provide a foundation for future research on 'Sound at Sea,' addressing historical and contemporary sound cultures while highlighting the biodiversity of ocean soundscapes.

Outcomes / activities

Two-day colloquium inviting experts in blue humanities, sound conservation, and composition to share knowledge and foster collaboration.