In free vocal improvisation, we inhabit intangible and material realms at the same time.
The body, both hard and soft – fluid and bone – ribs, lungs and tongue – becomes a resonant conduit for the unknown, enabling translation and integration of somatic knowledge through states of deeply present and open attention. Moving like a river, each piece has a current, yet no one is driving it. Sound simply unfolds at the meeting point between singing and listening. Attuning to this collective vibratory intelligence, intuiting what the next harmony will be, can feel like a transcendent experience. Indeed, there is a transcendence of everyday communication and the accessing of another kind of knowledge – one rooted in resonance and a shared sonic field. The unity that can occur amongst singers – interpersonal synchrony, when a choir synchronises breathing, heart rate and movement – is like a murmuration.    

My composition, Songs of Silt (2024), brings singers to the riverside in Deptford to listen to and improvise with the Thames and its stones. The score merges the flow of vocal improvisation with environmental listening and cultivates sonic/somatic memory of place. When collective singing becomes acutely sensitive to environmental sounds, rhythms and the touch of stones, one not only enters a web of more-than-human relations but vastly deepens the dimensions of sensory experience. We listen and respond not simply to the sounds we hear but to the elements on our skin, the feel of stones underfoot, to sensations of place. We respond to sounds (vibrations) that do not make (humanly audible) sound but are felt, perhaps as inner images, emotions or memories. Our listening becomes ‘poly-temporal, poly-sensory.’  (MacBride, 55, 2024).

Vibrational ecology acknowledges the vibroscape – the vibrational network beyond the spectrum of human audibility, through which all living organisms and plants communicate. In Sticky Metaphors: The Matter of Meaning (2024), Cannach MacBride proposes a listening that is 'poly-sensory, poly-temporal’, involving ‘listening to “sounds” that are not normatively sounded’  (55). ‘Entities that do not produce sound are entities one can listen to’, they write. MacBride suggests listening might ‘become a temporary metaphor’ for this ‘more-than-sonic experience’, akin to how Fred Moten and Stefano Harney define hapticality in The Undercommons (2013): “The capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you.” (55, 2024). In Attending to Environment as Kin Studies (2020), Zoe Todd and AM Kanggieser also propose a decolonial listening that moves away from aurality, ‘toward sensing, attuning and noticing’.

To practice environmental vocal improvisation is to become part of a sonic ecosystem.
To sense, feel, hear, balance. We try to hear every voice in the group; to make space, adjust, step in or out, support and notice. We aim to create the conditions where we can all be heard, so we can express freely and enable new forms of expression. When we feel safe with one another, our nervous systems settle and we find flow as a collective body; we 'go as a river' (1), even in the vulnerability of our voices. In active listening, which is never knowing, only listening, we participate in a ‘transmission and transduction of sound’ (Eidsheim, 180) across bodies that connects inner and outer worlds, responding, echoing, remembering and changing us. Of this change, Nina Sun Eidsheim, in Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015), writes:

‘Singing and listening are particular expressions of the process of vibration. What we understand as sound ultimately reverberates throughout the material body that produces and senses it; it is precisely because that sound – undulating energy –  is transduced through the listener’s body that it is sensed. On the one hand, when we produce music we ourselves are affected by the process. On the other hand, by projecting music out into the air, we have an impact on the world around us. We do not engage with music at a distance but, by definition, we do so by entering into a relationship that changes us. The most extreme definition of music possible, then, is vibrational energy, which is an always already unfolding relational process.’ (180)

Songs of Silt is a relational, vibrational exchange between body, tide, shore, stone, machine, water, human and countless non-human others. In bearing witness to the uncomfortable tensions of this polluted, industrial river, one is confronted with one’s human identity. Where do we stand (literally and metaphorically), next to the river? How are our bodies intertwined? Where do our responsibilities lie? How can we offer forms of caring attention to water? To sense the complexity of the vibroscape that encompasses both us and the river, the thickly polyphonic world that vibrates amongst, through and from us, is perhaps to repair the felt fracture between body and urban environment, body and (+non-human) other – connecting us in intricate networks of relations, sound respects no human boundaries. It is co-created by us and co-creates us. We listen to pay attention to the vast, responsive ocean of waves we are swimming in, and we sing to listen – to touch and be touched by this field that Pauline Oliveros calls the Sonosphere: the ‘sonic envelope of the earth created by all vibrations’  (2006, 481).  

〰〰
s o n g s  o f  s i l t
〰〰

‘It bonded us in some unspoken way. I felt closer to them even though we didn't really know about each other’s lives or know each other as people yet. I felt these threads of connection weaving between us all and a deep appreciation.’  (singer)

                                                                                                                       
  ‘I felt a safety and connection amongst us.’  (singer)


Songs of Silt (2024). Image by Cuan Roche

At the riverside, I offer the option to focus on one core vibration:

m a c h i n e  
w i n d
w a t e r
s t o n e s
n o n - h u m a n
h u m a n

Singers are invited to care for this sound in the group improvisation: not aiming to be the voice of the environment, but to voice their noticing, making sure this sound is not forgotten. Collective listening creates a fractal perspective of a soundscape heard in an infinite number of ways. Embracing and honouring different ways of noticing, sensing and remembering, is to engage carefully with vibrational ecology.

Joining in vocalising the hum of the environment –  the technosphere, as Oliveros reminds us, is now irrevocably woven with the biosphere (2006, 482) – we find a way to engage with, and embrace, the urban noise pollution. Somehow, the constant bed of machinemade drones  〰〰 boat 〰〰 power station 〰〰 airplane 〰〰  begins to soothe us,  drawing us into a shared resonance: environmental entrainment.

’I didn't realise how many constant drone sounds there were, which was comforting’  (singer)

                          ’I can still feel the calmness of the hum of the generator nearby’  (singer)

I am with the tensions of these engagements with sound pollution. How do we make visceral sense of the place we live in – of the water we are complicit in polluting? Can our bodies connect with the density of an urban soundscape without being overwhelmed? On the one hand, adapting our nervous systems to embrace, even be soothed by, such sounds could be a sort of inner creative agency. On the other hand, we should surely resist becoming totally pacified by these sounds of industry.

We ask ourselves what it means to be close to the water but not to touch it: longing to connect, yet the water is contaminated with waste. We want to be near – we feel comforted, enlivened, fortified by its presence: by the tidal rhythm of the river that flows through our city, connecting us all. The presence of water activates something profound in our own water bodies.

‘I felt like I created a relationship with the Thames, paying attention to it more and having a greater appreciation of it as a body of water, but also finding it a bit disgusting, with the awareness of how dirty the water might be’  (singer)

‘I felt like I was having a slow conversation with the river’  (singer)


Holding river stones and their material memory, we listen. As the sensation of the stone touches our hand, an exchange occurs. Not only are we holding the stone, but the stone is holding us – sensing our hands. The stone holds its own vibrational memory. This is why the final movement of the score of Songs of Silt involves placing the stones back in the river to share their memories of us with the water, in acknowledgement of mutual listening and reciprocity. The stones are perhaps as close as we will get to physically holding the river, to being held by it. What does this stone I am holding know about me? The sense of holding extends beyond physical touch – we hold each other in our attention, these stones that have been in the river, are shaped by the river, will be in the river again.

〰〰 l i s t e n i n g  t o  r e m e m b e r 〰〰

How does the memory of a place / being / memory, imprint itself in the shape of the mouth?


The score invites singers to record environmental sound memories with their bodies to share them with their voices in other contexts. These sonic/somatic memories of place become the basis for future improvisational performances. The ability to somatically remember and share environmental sounds becomes a particularly meaningful skill to cultivate amidst the destruction of habitats and species. The careful attention it requires to do so creates lasting, embodied relationships to place and more-than-human other. This is listening not to surveil, scrutinise or understand a site in a way that would replicate coloniality, but to offer forms of caring attention. To notice our own lack of noticing, to become aware of the wider vibrational networks we are situated in, to observe how our bodies respond to environmental degradation and how we carry this knowledge onwards. Body-transfer of environmental sounds imbues them with personal qualities; sonic memory – the ways we remember (shapes, colours, textures, emotions, tastes, temperature of) sounds – is intimately personal. In transferring these sounds to new places for performances, we add to the sonic ecology of that place with a memory of a different audio sphere. The two become blended as the audience is listening to the sounds of the present environment and the sounds of the singers' memories. Vibrational ecology encompasses all sounds in the space, not only those we are ‘supposed’  to listen to.

Singers are later invited to share the song of a strong personal memory of water while holding a river stone. The stone is both listened to and listening – the memory sung to the stone and passed on to another singer. This becomes a cycle of translation: sound to memory, memory to sound, sound to material and back to memory. These memories are carried by water, to water, from water; memory itself moving like a river, living, never the same. As we listened to each other’s water memory songs, there was a palpable shift in the depth of attention we were offering each other. The vibrational transference that occurred felt profoundly moving. As each singer voiced their memory, I found that images, colours and textures were forming in my own mind, evoking memories and feelings in me. This feels like the ‘poly-temporal, poly-sensory’ listening MacBride proposes, whereby we are collectively able to ‘to listen to times other than the present.’  (2024, 55)

Songs of Silt (2024). Image by Cuan Roche

〰〰
s o n i c  a u t o n o m y

〰〰

Central to this work’s development was thinking about field recording and the question of non-human consent: how can a site give permission to being recorded? In addition, what is being recorded? The slipperiness of sound evades fixity: waves are in constant motion, passing through material, changing, resisting form, just as water does. Memory is similarly mutable and dynamic: recollections surfacing and receding, changing and evolving over time, blending, just as water contains and merges sediment. Thus, for the sound to live in a singer’s memory, rather than in a recording, feels an apt way to reflect the ephemeral, responsive, shifting qualities of sound waves. In retaining the sense of life/decay/mutability within sound, we honour the vibroscape as a living sphere. Sounds interact with the inner world of each singer: their experiences, their emotions, the landscape of their body made audible through sounding. This movement from internal awareness to external, external to internal, sound to memory, memory to sound, describes something of the interplay between environment and human consciousness, the porous boundary between body/mind and place, and the vibrational practice of singing and listening, whereby listening/singing causes vibrational change across bodies (Eidsheim, 180). The way consciousness interacts with the vibrational environment, speaks to the vibroscape as a shared living tapestry in which we not only exist, but are made by and are part of making. It is both outside and inside of us.

In respecting the life of sound, what composer Annea Lockwood terms Sonic Autonomy(3), I hope to create a space of listening and not control: to trust in sound’s fluid unfolding, to embrace uncertainty and collective intelligence. Yet, this freedom exists inside the loose framework of a score to help voices to find coherence with each other and to give the focus that enables deep listening. The work is also held firmly by the wisdom of the tide – the strict times that determine the site’s accessibility. Constraint can be a doorway into wider attention, a portal into the multiplicity of a sonic ecosystem otherwise too dense to hear. By starting simply, awareness settles, and one becomes aware of the polyphonic world we inhabit: the subtlety of sounds, vibrations and sensations.



What does a stone hear?

It was a baking hot day in early July when I heard river stones sing.
Collected from Deptford beach that morning,
I put them in a bowl of water to wash them,
and after some minutes was aware of a high pitched  
buzzing that was changing in pitch every so often.
I tried to locate the sound and eventually put my ear
to the bowl of water containing the stones.
I realised it was the stones themselves that were sounding.
I took the bowl into another room to check, and the stones were still humming.
The tone reminded me exactly of the electricity station behind the beach.
The stones continued to sing for another ten minutes or so before stopping.



〰〰
reflections on facilitation and not knowing
〰〰

While the invitation of Oliveros’s Deep Listening (2005) is expansive, central to decolonial listening practice is resisting the notion that we can hear everything. Not only is it impossible to sense the whole vibroscape, but to aim to, or think we are doing so, would enact a kind of anthropocentric domination. ‘Listening in kin studies’, Todd and Kanngieser write, ‘is to respect the autonomy and the integrity of life (...) To understand that we do not know, and we cannot know more than is ours.’ (2020). Listening to the river, to a stone, we sense but a tiny part of the spectrum. Vital also is the recognition that all beings listen differently. As Kanngeiser reminds us, how we listen is directly coded by who we are in the world; ‘it is an experience that is in no way universal and in no way benign’ (Green Dreamer Podcast, 2024). Listening is shaped by our bodies and countless other contexts. Limits on time or attention, as well as the personal discomfort and unease that can arise during guided listening and vocalising, may all contribute to misjudgments about whether someone is a so-called ‘good’  listener. As Dylan Robinson addresses in Hungry Listening (2020), we should not strive towards an ‘essentialism of listening’ whilst decolonising listening practice (243). There is no ‘right’ way to listen, and it is within this multiplicity that collective listening reveals its deepest resonance, yielding perspectives, discoveries and knowledges that transcend the individual.

Facilitating this work is a dance between different modes of being. At times I found myself caught between the logistics of choreography, recording equipment and working on a transient site, attempting to move in and out of intuitive states of listening without time to ground. In moments, I fell short of tending to the group’s needs and maintaining the values of this site-honouring work – fraught in my dialogue with the living being of the river. I wonder about ways of working with the polyrhythms of tide, site and group, and artistic documentation. To free ourselves from perfection and accept all sounds (a core part of this voice work), feels more challenging while being captured, and recording was never part of the work’s intention – quite the opposite. Yet, I am very grateful to have the images. I wonder who the work is for and how or why to ‘perform’  it? Engaging with vibrational ecology is surely not about presenting something, or simply listening, but entering into a dynamic relational exchange. Stepping into awareness of the vibrational continuum – the vibroscape in which we are all entwined. Eidsheim writes,

If singing and listening are the actions that give rise to sound - in the vibration that surges through the singer, and in the material that envelops the singer and the listener - does this sound, this vibration, have a beginning or an end? It does not (180).



How did it feel to let go of your stone?

- It felt freeing 


- Symbolic


- I was happy it would have another life later. 


- It was hard! I wanted hold onto it, it felt very potent and charged after holding it through the improvising. I had some emotional attachment to the safety and calmness of holding it.
But I felt releasing it back into the water was allowing that to ripple out.    
〰〰〰〰〰〰
b a c k



Bibliography:

Eidsheim, N.S. (2015) Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press.

MacBride, C. (2024) ‘Sticky Metaphors: The Matter of Meaning’, in Revell, I. and Shin, S. (eds.) Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear. London: Silver Press, pp. 50–56.

Oliveros, P. (2006) ‘Improvisation in the Sonosphere’, Contemporary Music Review, vol. 25, nos. 5/6, pp. 481–482. 

Robinson, D. (2020) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Todd, Z. and Kanngieser, A. (2020) 'Attending to Environment as Kin Studies.’ In Constelaciones: Indigenous Contemporary Art from the Americas. 


Acknlowledgements:

To Cuan Roche for the images and film.
To Bethan Lloyd and Katya Barton, who first opened the world of vocal improvisation for me with their work ‘Sounding Body’.
To Jol Thoms for guiding and encouraging my journey into sound,
to Ros Gray, Elly Clarke and all of my Art & Ecology cohort.
To Silt Ensemble, I am awed by your sensitivity, attention and openness, thank you. To the river, for endless inspiration and songs.

Footnotes:

(1) ‘Go as a river’ is a quote from Creating True Peace (2004) by Thich Nhat Hanh.
(2)  Environmental entrainment is the process by which organisms synchronise their biological clocks to environmental cycles.
(3) Annea Lockwood describes Sonic Autonomy in this interview for SF Classical Voice: https://www.sfcv.org/articles/artist-spotlight/annea-lockwood-listening-deeply-environments




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The Journal of Art & Ecology published by MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

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