Why is it worth considering sound as a register for sensing species? What are the possibilities of sound to explore multispecies relationality, to provide a portrait of microbial ecologies, to render the indeterminacy of shifting urban assemblages? In this section I set out to place sound and polyphony in a more-than-human context to approach an understanding of species as process.

I am inspired by three areas of scholarship: Pauline Oliveros on deep listening; Maya Hey on microbes and bodily attunement; and Anna Tsing on the arts of noticing, assemblages, and polyphony. I interpret the ideas of Oliveros, Hey, and Tsing to weave together a new experimental approach around microbial relationality and I do so by siting and centering the underground to reveal possibly conflicting or discordant multispecies rhythms. In my approach, I relate a polyphonic mode of composition to a processual and flexible understanding of species and the environments in which they find themselves. By using sound and following the tenets of deep listening as a mode for sensing these organisms, and in turn myself, I mean to question the rules that govern earthly existence by defining the limits of species behavior through fixed identity categories, which do not hold up against the shifting and unpredictable nature of a world fast-changing for the humans that figure themselves as its de facto rulers.

PAULINE OLIVEROS: DEEP LISTENING

I was first drawn to sound studies as an experimental form of creative practice and performance by the work of Pauline Oliveros, a composer and musician who pioneered deep listening (and, later, quantum listening, which will be elaborated further in the next section) in the late 1980s. Oliveros built this artistic and philosophical tradition after recording in an underground cistern “with a reverberation time of 45 seconds” in Washington state with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis.¹ They released their work under the title Deep Listening in 1989 and formed the Deep Listening Band, which continued to release recordings and perform across the US into the 2010s. Deep Listening Pieces, published in 1990, presented Oliveros’ ideas on how to compose similar works by incorporating the full spectrum of sounds in a given environment via deep listening and how to heighten skills of concentration and improvisation toward greater awareness of stimuli both outside of and internal to oneself.

Oliveros had long been committed to listening as a register for raising consciousness. Decades before the Deep Listening Band, Oliveros had been exploring the possibilities of sound and composition from her time on the west coast as part of the early electronic music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, when Oliveros was teaching in San Diego, she published Sonic Meditations, which shared sound exercises that emphasized the embodied nature of performance practice and the ancient power of music and sound as a social force, seeking to dispel hierarchical relations of subject/object or performer/audience. Oliveros referred to these sound exercises as recipes for listening or text scores. One recipe reads:

Lie flat on your back or sit comfortably. Open your eyes widely, then let your eyelids close extremely slowly. Become aware of how your eyelids are closing. When your eyelids are closed, turn your eyes slowly from left to right, around, up and down. Let your eyes rest comfortably in their sockets. Try to be aware of the muscles behind the eyes and of the distance from these muscles to the back of the head. Cover your eyes with your palms and shut out all the light. Become aware of all the sounds in the environment. When you think you have established contact with all of the sounds in the external environment, very gradually, introduce your fingers into your ears or cover them with your palms. Try to shut out all external sound. Listen carefully to the internal sounds of your own body working. After a long time gradually open your ears and include the sounds of the external environment.²

Other scores center Oliveros’ vision for composition as fundamentally collaborative and collective:

Sit in a circle with your eyes closed. Begin by observing your own breathing. Gradually form a mental image of one person who is sitting in the circle. Sing a long tone to that person. Then sing the pitch that person is singing. Change your mental image to another person and repeat until you have contacted every person in the circle one or more times.³

In the introduction to Sonic Meditations, Oliveros stresses that full commitment is necessary for this process and that the recipes for listening are meant to be developed in the course of regular group meetings over an extended period of time. She encourages these collective encounters to be non-verbal. “Members of the Group may achieve greater awareness and sensitivity to each other. Music is a welcome by-product of this activity,” she writes, revealing the primary importance of sonic meditations to tap into a mode of higher consciousness within and beyond the self, with music being perhaps a happy surprise resulting from the process.⁴

At the core of Oliveros’ theory is a distinction between the involuntary act of hearing with the voluntary practice of listening. In her words: “Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is.”⁵ Oliveros developed her sonic theory and practice via Deep Listening workshops and retreats beginning in the early ‘90s, mentoring a generation of artists in experimental creation and feminist collective-building toward heightened connection to and awareness of the environment.

I chose to build this project from the basis of deep listening as a philosophical and field-based practice by recording the underground and striving to listen for lifeways that would otherwise go unnoticed in a dense and complex urban ecology. In my attention to the underground, I also call back to the original Deep Listening recording in the cistern in 1988, an event that reverberated in multiple directions, coalescing for me in a nexus connecting sound, science, technology, and harmony between species. I intended to use sound as a register not just for enhancing the (human) senses toward a greater awareness of the underground and its microbial assemblages, but also to intervene in the concept of sensing as a means of knowing the other. Mediating a relation to the soil and to microbial ecologies through sound, I listened to what is brought into being and into meaning in encounters with the urban environment, in all of its improvisational and indeterminate capacities. I identified a fertile connection between philosophies of music-making and sound and the kind of multispecies relationality I wanted to reveal via microbial ecologies: improvisation and playfulness, noticing and attuning are vital practices to move beyond the empirical in the production of knowledge towards an embodied understanding of how “each organism changes everyone’s world.”⁶

This carries specific implications for urban and industrial environments, which I have chosen as sites for my recording experiments. These places are characterized by a cacophony of unpredictable sounds and other kinds of sensory input that challenge our attention and awareness on an everyday level. In Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, published in 2005 with more detailed writing on listening, consciousness, and Oliveros’ long-term experience practicing both in her compositions, she writes:

“Sounds carry intelligence. Ideas, feelings and memories are triggered by sounds. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. More often than not, urban living causes narrow focus and disconnection. Too much information is coming into the auditory cortex, or habit has narrowed listening to only what seems of value and concern to the listener. All else is tuned out or discarded as garbage.”⁷

I interpret this as an invitation to create polyphonic compositions as part of an urban paradigm of deep listening. For Oliveros, attunement is a conscious and active process that can shape the very design of and quality of life within urban environments. This has implications not just for the composer or sound artist, but for every urban citizen—an identity that applies to more than half of the world’s population and which continues to grow in numbers. I also believe sound and deep listening are fertile terrains upon which the terms of species can be redefined beyond taxonomy and morphology, particularly for boundary-subverting and shapeshifting forms of life such as microbes.

MAYA HEY: MICROBES AND BODILY ATTUNEMENT

Microbes are found across a range of lively contexts, performing feats of transformation that sometimes find themselves intersecting with human projects and scales of time. Aside from soil ecologies, fermentation is another site in which a human-microbial relationality can be identified. Writer and researcher Maya Hey describes bodily attunement as a sensory approach for enhancing a form of microbial relationality through the fermentation process at a natural sake brewery in Japan. “Instead of asking how we know if the good/bad microbes are present,” Hey writes, “attunement prioritizes a way of knowing that temporarily suspends the ontology of what a species is prior to them being affixed as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us humans. This refusal of presettled ontologies could, in turn, help us imagine a more nuanced kind of collective ethics, one that includes multiple species and, perhaps more importantly, does not reify anthropocentric categorizations of life in terms of human benefit.”⁸ As the multiple epidemics throughout New York City’s history attest—from yellow fever in the 19th century and “Spanish” influenza in the 20th to COVID-19 in the 21st—the dichotomy of good/bad microbes features prominently in urban society, structuring the systems and relations by which cities shape public policy around (human) health, safety, and well-being.

Hey intends to “focus on the dynamic processes of co-constitution” that are embedded in human practices around food, such as fermentation, by “tending to the differences and needs of each species without defining the entire relationship by them.”⁹ Embodiment and attunement key into the dynamism of indeterminate encounters with microbial lifeways and allow conscious awareness of the corporeal nature of brewing sake, for instance, revealing relations between bodies that emerge “across species and scale” in that process.¹⁰ Attunement to microbes also holds up a mirror to ourselves, given that “the notion of we already encompasses other species.”¹¹ Microbes are ubiquitous within the human body, making up a vast portion of our cells, and they are fundamental to food practices such as fermentation. “Microbes comprise the very means of our staying alive and in ongoing encounters with every eating event,” Hey writes.¹² In my experiments, microbes are also intimately and inevitably bound up in any encounter with the urban environment, whether they are enrolled to guide measures of disease prevention or are called upon to help humans understand global processes like climate change, as a consensus statement published by microbiologists in 2019 implores.¹³

Attunement is happening in the setup and adjustment of the brewing environment to create the conditions for microbes to grow and flourish and extends even to the calisthenics performed collectively each morning by brewers to foster an environment in which coordination of activity becomes second-nature, which is essential to tasks during the brewing process that are timed with precision. “Given their invisibility, microbes are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, so their activity must be ascertained by other means” Hey writes, and “it is because of this invisibility, not in spite of it, that the brewers see their tasks as ways of engaging with the invisible.”¹⁴ This is a kind of polyphony performed corporeally by a cooperative trusting of the senses, in which the movements of microbes and the movements of brewers act in concert with one another to create something new, with each acting on their own timeframes and scales of existence with a part-practiced, part-instinctual choreography of being and becoming.

The invisibility of microbes and the difficulty of attunement within an unpredictable urban environment—as opposed to the controlled, albeit flexible, environment of a place like a brewery—is what led me to sound as a new measure of attunement and heightened awareness of more-than-human entanglements, by crafting creative forms of experimentation using recording instruments. The role of improvisation and choreography in these attunements also puts Oliveros’ ideas on similar footing as those of Anna Tsing and the arts of noticing.

ANNA TSING: THE ARTS OF NOTICING, ASSEMBLAGES, AND POLYPHONY

Tsing’s arts of noticing implores scholars across disciplines to attend to temporal patterns that fall outside the paradigm of progress, that all-encompassing narrative of 20th century economic growth. She calls for renewed attention to the power of “description and imagination” to enrich accounts of ecological relations beyond progress, incorporating a polyphonic sensibility in this approach.¹⁵ Writing on polyphony—“music in which autonomous melodies intertwine”—to articulate the assemblage as a tool for both gathering and making multidirectional lifeways, Tsing distinguishes this style from the “unified rhythm and melody” that marks modern songwriting practices, another cultural feature of progress as the singular temporal pattern of 20th century social organization.¹⁶ Polyphony as an exercise in attention pushed Tsing “to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together.”¹⁷ Tsing concludes that “this kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage.”¹⁸

The audiovisual compositions I’ve created employ polyphony as an artistic, stylistic, and philosophical choice in line with the aims of this project to engage with the processual rhythms and relations that make species and assemblages. I am taking an approach that creatively engages with the ways by which humans come to know things: observation; experimentation; hypothesis; making representations of the environment using technical instruments. I am working at the intersection of art and science to illustrate how species are not static, coherent, or stable entities or ‘things,’ but rather how organisms embody the effects of complex processes continually transforming on multiple scales of time and space. Microbes and the living ecologies of soil, in their ontological capacity to unsettle categorical boundaries and the notion of the human, as well as their ability to create, sustain, and transform life on the planet, are particularly well positioned to examine these processes.

*

Like “Bush Terminal,” the video accompanying this section, “Prospect Park,” layers visuals and optical effects with overlapping forms of sonic input, the latter in this case primarily from recordings and musical interpretations of the Pocket Scion with MIDI instrumentation converted in Ableton, as well as audio from video clips.

I chose Prospect Park as a recording site due to its presence as the most extensive site of remaining forest within the dense urban sprawl of Brooklyn.¹⁹ I visited the park on two occasions to collect recordings, once with just the hydrophone and another time with just the Pocket Scion. The first site was on the shoreline of an inlet of the Prospect Park Lake which offers an expansive vision of the surrounding area and, with its wide perspective, both filters and concentrates all manner of sound that travels across the water, from the birds and bugs chirping and calling to the droning of aircrafts and skateboarders landing (or trying to land) tricks on the nearby promenade.

I’ve chosen to include the unedited recording I made from above ground at this location as a soundscape playing in the background of the home page of the website I’ve created to house this project, drinkthesound.com, because it captures a rich tapestry of multispecies cohabitation in an urban setting. The recording invites a form of polyphonic deep listening to absorb the space as composed of voices both singular and plural, individual and collective—a challenge that speaks directly to the aims of this project in its attention to species, relationality, and sound as a medium to illustrate both. I also invite the listener to consider the intersection of lifeways that find themselves in a zone of contact at the place and time of recording in the late afternoon on November 2, 2025, when the days were fast growing shorter amid the fading light of autumn.

As you take in the environment of the soundscape and its many sources of activity, I encourage the listener to channel Oliveros’ teachings and, if moved, to follow a recipe for listening I have created for attuning to soil. This can be practiced while listening to any of the audiovisual compositions from this project or to the soundscape playing in the background. This is best performed with the use of over-the-ear headphones, but any kind of earbud or speaker will work:

First listen with eyes open, either watching the audiovisual composition alongside the sound or, if just listening to the soundscape, focusing sight on one object or element in the place where you find yourself. Allow the vision to become a little blurry, then alternate between full clarity and slight fuzziness. Notice what new things become apparent when the eyes are fully focused vs. out of focus: what sonic elements come to the fore or recede; what sounds sit on the surface of the eyes.

Close your eyes. Take note of the difference between listening with eyes open vs. closed. Notice any changes in sonic elements that are apparent now that weren’t before. Consider the space of the soundscape and your position within it. Picture yourself there. Follow, by ear and as a participant in the field of sound, a single element, then another; imagine yourself zooming out in place, expanding to listen to the soundscape as a whole. Alternate between selective and expansive listening.

Consider the terrain of the soundscape, then zoom into a discrete element of it; follow that sound, into the ground, into the surface of the soil, and stay on the surface there for a moment. Pick out a sound and let it glide atop the surface. Listen as if each sound were falling from above and collecting on the surface of the soil. Reach your ears inside the cavern of sound and pick out another thread, listen to it and then find another, and as you glide from one sound to another, you are descending lower and lower into the cavern of sound collected in the soil. As you descend it opens to receive you, collecting still more sound, and you are echoing those sounds through the prism of your body, you are one of those sounds, seeking a soft, quiet, damp, and dark place to rest within the soil, and you have the urge to continue sinking downward. Listen from the perspective of a sound collected by the soil, the source of sound hollowing out as it loses light from above to reflect, to echo across. You start to become rooted there, bound together with the sounds in the matrix of soil, a microparticle channeling its liveliness through you.

What are you sensing? What can you experience without the use of sight or touch or smell while rooted in the ground? Explore the boundary between the sound and the soil; translate the porosity of soil particles, the sensation of encountering a stem, a decaying leaf, a worm, fungi, mycelium, a microbe, a group of bacterial cells, a single cell, a membrane opening and closing, absorbing; bodies growing and tensing with one another, meeting, pausing to take each other in, pausing to absorb the sound, then moving along; consider the experience of staying still, in one place, and the mysteries of movement around you. How do you create your own action and wonder in this stillness, in the liveliness of descending into sound, of becoming one with soil?

Turn your attention from the energy of the earth to the sounds of the microbes within. Channel the microflora of a particular body part, listen to its rhythms, notice its movements; move to another body part and repeat. Cover the ears to increase focus on sounds within the body, maintaining a distant awareness of the soundscape in the background and tuning back into it while transitioning between body parts.

Open your eyes and reflect, writing a response by hand: what have you learned in becoming part of this collective space of sound and soil? What do you sense by being both together with many and spread across distance as one?

*

The audiovisual work “Prospect Park” was created from footage gathered on December 24, 2025, before the most brutal of the season’s cold swept over the city. I used this occasion to test out the Pocket Scion. I did this by connecting its two sensor clips, which register changes in electrical activity from an organic ‘host’ via four different programmed instruments with unique tones and musical qualities that the user can switch between, to a variety of life forms surrounding a decaying tree trunk on the forest floor. In “Prospect Park,” the visuals are designed to render an urban winter forest composed of both light and dark elements, gesturing at a complex network of underground activity through optical effects that create an almost fantastical disorientation or reverie—a blurring of the senses, bending the ontological determinacy of above and below on the level of the frame.

The first organic host for the Pocket Scion was a small fungus clustered at the edge of the decaying trunk. These tiny, round, beige caps seemed a natural outgrowth of the wood, and elicited sound inconsistently as if sputtering, with occasionally clear notes. Further down the trunk I spotted a cluster of much bigger mushrooms, a flatter specimen layered on top of one another, with rings of bright yellow or off-white at the outer edges leading into dark red and brown that almost blended into the trunk host. As a larger specimen of fungus compared to the first ones I found, these mushrooms were much easier to attach the electrodes to, so I spent a longer amount of time recording from them. They also exhibited a higher degree of sonic activity, seemingly bursting with electrical energy.

Near the trunk I found a piece of lichenized bark. Lichen, a symbiotic partnership between cyanobacteria and fungus that forms a hybrid structure, defies easy categorization on the level of species. Lichen can fall into three main categories: foliose (leaf-like), crustose (crust-like), and fruticose (coral-like). Based on visual observation, the lichen I recorded fell into the foliose category.²⁰

I also dug the electrodes into the soil next to the tree trunk. While the piece of lichenized bark was not precisely an element of below-ground activity—rather, an extension of my attention to and interest in organisms that throw the boundaries of species into question, and the result of noticing and observing my environment—I consider the three other recording sites of two species of mushroom and a patch of forest soil to form a patchwork-like portrait of an underground urban forest ecology. The mushrooms, attached to the decomposing trunk that appeared to be sinking slowly into the ground, feed on the decay of the wood; the whole entity forms one hybrid structure, bound together yet separate, fusing in that place in a multispecies moment of deconstruction into new life. By recording from a nearby patch of soil, I intended to tap into the surrounding organic network and to incorporate other communities of invisible life forms as part of the polyphonic electrical symphony.

As an instrument that creatively translates electrical activity into programmed notes and tones, the recordings made from the Pocket Scion are included as an artistic innovation and interpretation of ecological behavior, rather than a representation aimed at a comprehensive or ‘authentic’ understanding of the more-than-human, insofar as such a thing is ever possible. I find the translation mechanism inherent to the Pocket Scion to be in generative conversation with the ways in which any representation of the environment is mediated through a curious mix of the senses and technology acting in concert.

1. Dempster, Stuart. “Dlbhistory | DEEP LISTENING INSTITUTE.” Archive.org, 2026, web.archive.org/web/20190213112824/deeplistening.org/site/content/dlbhistory. ↩︎
2. Oliveros, Pauline. Sonic Meditations. Smith Publications, 1974, p. 28. ↩︎
3. Ibid, p. 17. ↩︎
4. Ibid, p. 2. ↩︎
5. Oliveros, Pauline. Quantum Listening. Silver Press, 27 July 2024, p. 1. ↩︎
6. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 29 Sept. 2015, p. 22. ↩︎
7. Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York, Universe, 2005, p. 16. ↩︎
8. Hey, Maya. “Attunement and Multispecies Communication in Fermentation.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2021, https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2021.3.10846, p. 3. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Ibid, p. 4. ↩︎
11. Ibid, p. 1. ↩︎
12. Ibid, p. 19. ↩︎
13. Cavicchioli, Ricardo, et al. “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Microorganisms and Climate Change.” Nature Reviews Microbiology, vol. 17, no. 9, 18 June 2019, pp. 569–586, http://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-019-0222-5, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-019-0222-5. ↩︎
14. Hey, Maya. “Attunement and Multispecies Communication in Fermentation.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3, 1 Sept. 2021, https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2021.3.10846, pp. 8-9. ↩︎
15. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 29 Sept. 2015, p. 21. ↩︎
16. Ibid, p. 23. ↩︎
17. Ibid, p. 24. ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎
19. “Prospect Park: NYC Parks.” http://www.nycgovparks.org, 2024, http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/prospect-park. ↩︎
20. Allen, Jessica L, and James C Lendemer. Urban Lichens. Yale University Press, 2021. ↩︎