Introduction
In this podcast, we hear selections of music which address the ecology of listening in the modern world, from mp3s ripped from cell phones in the southern Sahara Desert to ultrasonic underwater field recordings, all centering critical understandings of our relationships to sound. I’m framing this discussion within an ecological crisis facing our relationships to sound within late capitalism, characterized by the cultural hegemony of media platforms which threatens to commercialize the act of listening and obstruct the radical potentialities of sound.
Why “ecological crisis?”
“Late capitalism” is perhaps an oversimplification of this issue. What I’m getting at more specifically are the emergent forms of surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism which have arisen more or less in the 21st century, particularly on the internet. Surveillance capitalism refers to the commodification of personal data and the ways in which existing under digital surveillance becomes a way of reproducing these information commodities. This rose in prominence with social media and advertising, where users’ activity offers increasingly valuable insight for companies. Our ability to interpret large behavioral data sets continues to grow, and these companies can exploit that to further lock people into a cycle of consumption through advertising and personalized user experiences.
Platform capitalism is another angle to look at this issue, which focuses on new corporate structures emerging, particularly within Big Tech. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple frame their products and services as access points into an interconnected ecosystem of abstracted digital services which function as a kind of all-encompassing digital realm in which to work, socialize, and be entertained. On the user experience end we can think about Apple products, and how they fit together both functionally and aesthetically, and offer a host of Apple-specific services, such as iMessage, AirDrop, iCloud storage, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Handoff, and so many more that are not even relevant to the average consumer. All of these services are access points into a seamless “Apple experience” which forces consumers into a kind of relationship with the company.
What does this have to do with music?
But what does this have to do with music, and in particular, this “ecological crisis of listening” that I’m getting at? When you look at a platform like Spotify and sort of the direction that it’s going, you see more and more emphasis on algorithms and a particular type of individualized user experience. We have Spotify Wrapped, all of the daily personalized playlists, all the curated genre playlists, and most recently the AI DJ feature, which everyone hated. All of these things point to a convenient, algorithmic solution to what could be seen as the problem of finding music to listen to. In the past you had to go and seek out music you wanted to hear and buy it, and put it on, and so forth, whereas today we have all these technologies which exist specifically to expedite that process and make it easy to have an unbroken stream of palatable music available.
The crisis here is then that these algorithms are not representative of all approaches to listening, and in fact that they actively suppress forms of listening which are not beneficial to these media corporations and the interests of surveillance capitalism, where platforms want consumers to be trapped in their technological ecosystem, so to speak, so that they can be a source of subscription money and also user data which is a product in itself, and so these people sort of become workers for the companies while also paying for their services. So that’s kind of how I would characterize the ways that contemporary media is detrimental to diverse and critical relationships to sound.
Sound can play a major role in ecology, and being able to listen to and understand sound from a variety of perspectives, both human and non-human, is critical to that role of sound in ecological thinking. We tend to perceive and understand the world ocularcentrically—that is, we tend to prioritize sight over other senses, so we think of what we see as an accurate representation of our own viewpoint. This is not the case with sound. I’m going to give an example here of when we see a tiny insect magnified with a macro camera lens. We still take on this role of observer, looking down upon something through magnification, and we may always just look away. But when we listen to sounds of tiny insects, amplified to unnatural levels, it’s a totally different kind of experience. People tend to feel this sort of immersion, almost as though they are among these insects. Sound can make us feel small, instead of its source. Because of this, I think that sound has the capacity to help us think less anthropocentrically and cultivate more empathetic relationships to our environment.
The listening structures imposed on us by streaming and recommendation algorithms prevent us from breaking out of anthropocentric, capitalist perspectives, limiting our abilities to consider sound from critical and ecological viewpoints. Here, we will listen to and celebrate music which uplifts alternative ecologies of sound, including folk music from around the world, field recordings and sound art based on natural environments, and music emerging from marginalized communities.
Sources
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