TY - JOUR
T1 - The Science of Listening in Bioacoustics Research
T2 - Sensing the Animals' Sounds
AU - Vallee, Mickey
N1 - Funding Information:
My thanks go to Jan Jagodzinski at the University of Alberta for inviting me to speak on the topic of bioacoustics in his lecture series Anthropocene, Ecology, Pedagogy: The Future in Question, and also to Susan McDaniel for her invitation to speak at the Prentice Institute for Global Population and Economy at the University of Lethbridge. I would also like to thank the organizers of the Animal Utterance conference in Bristol in April 2017. I am grateful for the financial support I have received from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in particular for an Insight Development Grant (2016–18). My especial thanks are extended to the bioacoustics researchers whose work I continue to observe in the field and in the lab, and all the animals I’ve had the pleasure of listening to for this research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
PY - 2018/3/1
Y1 - 2018/3/1
N2 - Bioacoustics is an interdisciplinary field bridging biological and acoustic sciences, which uses sound technologies to record, preserve, and analyse large datasets of animal communications. But it is also a world, made of the meanings created through inter- and intra-species communication. This article empirically explores a variety of bioacoustics research, including interviews with researchers, as part of a broader qualitative study, in order to theorize the expanding sense and sensation of a global biosphere and sonic data. By giving a sustained and detailed account of the science of bioacoustics, particularly how its modes of measurement allow for a new way of understanding what is involved in the de-centred modes of hearing that re-centre acts of listening and, by extension, the nature of the relation between researcher and researched, the article contributes to methodological discussions regarding the longstanding questions of how researchers and scientists are implicated in the knowledge and objects they collectively produce.
AB - Bioacoustics is an interdisciplinary field bridging biological and acoustic sciences, which uses sound technologies to record, preserve, and analyse large datasets of animal communications. But it is also a world, made of the meanings created through inter- and intra-species communication. This article empirically explores a variety of bioacoustics research, including interviews with researchers, as part of a broader qualitative study, in order to theorize the expanding sense and sensation of a global biosphere and sonic data. By giving a sustained and detailed account of the science of bioacoustics, particularly how its modes of measurement allow for a new way of understanding what is involved in the de-centred modes of hearing that re-centre acts of listening and, by extension, the nature of the relation between researcher and researched, the article contributes to methodological discussions regarding the longstanding questions of how researchers and scientists are implicated in the knowledge and objects they collectively produce.
KW - animals
KW - bioacoustics
KW - biological sciences
KW - data
KW - emerging technologies
KW - listening
KW - sound
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85041845295&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0263276417727059
DO - 10.1177/0263276417727059
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85041845295
SN - 0263-2764
VL - 35
SP - 47
EP - 65
JO - Theory, Culture and Society
JF - Theory, Culture and Society
IS - 2
ER -