Tweet … gurgle … pling plong … gurrle … shhhhhhu … memow meee mee mow …

When we think of community we think about human interaction but we know that communities go much broader than the human species. The more-thanhuman have deeper and broader networks than we can comprehend.

My Sound Diaries project has taken place in a local park that I spend a lot of time in. This park is situated in the middle of a city with polar opposite economic states of housing at each end of the park and a University to its side. To sit and listen to this space, a place of coming together, I hear an amalgamation of sounds. There are the sounds of talking, squealing, trainers hitting tarmac, cogs of bicycles, creaks of swing sets, honks, cries, quacks, tweets, hisses, splashes, gurgles, traffic, hums, the more I listen the more intertwined I realise all these noises are. These urban green spaces are where human and the more-than-human intersect, their communities taking up the same space on multifaceted planes.

The events of the day sonically collide as these different communities enact, as Stavros Stavrides puts it, ‘life-in-common.’ My Sound Diaries project started with the plan of finding these points of intersection to record the noises and the unified sound this creates. Starting points for recording were human collective events such as the park run. A number of these events were recorded through a contact microphone and a hydrophone and these became the sole forms of recording for the project. The question that started to really arise was what could it sound like to not hear through my own ears but to hear as another species. Of course we know there are different biologically explainable ways in which other species hear. New scientific advances are showing us all the time that species we perceive as sedate are more aware than a lot of western science had thought, yet many ancient communities have always known this.

‘Listening as’ is a speculative exercise. ‘Listening as’ a tree to hear your boughs sway and collide in the wind while vibrations pulse through of humans running past. Their trainers hitting the tarmac path sending through a rhythmic beat punctuated by their gulps and gasps of breath, vibrating through your thin trunk. Listening as a river creature to the human feeding the ducks, to hear the ping of something small entering the water followed by a fast splattering noise of the swan quickly eating it, all the while loud cries are heard from humans far in the distance. Listening again as the river creature as gurgles of water and swerves are heard of webbed feet, then releases of air creak on, human voices are heard before a steady rhythm from the surface, all the while the trickling of the constant movement of the current.

These situations and steps aside from ourselves, allow us to imagine a world which is not the one we inhabit. It gives us access to this other form of sonic arena where we recognise that we meet and become an intertwined ecosystem; where we can hear noises which we can’t immediately fully identify that quickly become other and alien yet intrinsically linked into who we are. From listening as we can start to build an assemblage of how we see the space, our perceptions changed through the conversation this assemblage allows us to enter. ‘Listening as’ can perhaps enter us into a space of empathy for the other, not by feeling sorry for but by feeling as.

This speculative exercise is interesting in a space of green and blue access in the midst of urban sprawl. The urban landscape is the most segregated landscape between human and the more-than-human, it is a sanitised zone where we have come to forget ourselves. Yet we get these small oases where the human and the more than human get chance to meet. For many humans this is the only space where they will meet with the more-than-human, it is a punctuation in the day to learn more about who we are.

I have looked at recording instigated events and spontaneous happenings in the park. The weekly park run and other regular events seems to give the week a sonic rhythm as it goes in cycles of sounds such as running, gardening, football, and the ice cream van punctuated by sounds of the play area, students conversing, and people feeding the ducks. It makes me wonder, ‘listening as’, if these sounds are a form of time orientation for the more than human? If these sonic cycles mark the passing of the time that form the weeks to lives who have no use of such a system? These almost ritualistic events of human communities give space to that commoning (the happening of feeding the ducks is an interrelated act that builds being in common). ‘Listening as’ is one of the few times the sounds we hear from both human and more-than-human affect each other, it is a conversation through these water movements. Most of the time though, the recordings are more the sounds of space-sharing, of literally being in common.

Through the series of recordings for this sound diary I hope I have listened and also conveyed some of the sonic rhythms this place has for all the species involved. It has been a project on focusing on a different playing field than my ears and blurring out the usual. As a speculative exercise, ‘listening as’ allows me to think outside of my own head, to try to hear a broader world, one with more possibilities than my human brain is prone to seeing. As I perceive the gaggle of Canada geese on the river, unsuccessfully hounding passers by for food whilst hearing the swift movements of their webbed feet navigating the water, ‘listening as’, has a magic to it.