Wolf Listeners: An Introduction to the Acoustemological Politics and Poetics of Isle Royale National Park

Abstract

Listening to wolf howls as both material object and socially constructed metaphor highlights the contested relationship between nature and culture. The author conducted field research on Isle Royale National Park from 2011 to 2015, from which data he offers a narrative wherein citizen-scientists who listen for the howl literally “lend their ears” to a wolf biologist who has led the longest continuous predator-prey study in the world. The theoretical framework of this essay extends acoustic ecology, first theorized by R. Murray Schafer, to include environmental history and cultural theory, which problematizes definitions of “nature” and “natural.” Ultimately, this introduction describes a nuanced form of participatory, situational environmental music that plays out in the everyday lives of those listening on this remote, roadless island on Lake Superior.

Selling Nature to Save It: Approaching self-critical environmental sonic art

“…My own ethnography (DeLuca 2016a, 2016b) starts by listening to wolf howls as both material objects and socially constructed metaphors to highlight the contested relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Relying on field research conducted on Isle Royale National Park from 2011 to 2015, I offer a narrative wherein citizen-scientists who listen for the wolf howl literally ‘lend their ears’ to a wolf biologist who has led the longest continuous predator–prey study in the world.…”

“…This ethnography proposes that Isle Royal acoustic epistemologies – or as sound studies scholar and artist Steven Feld has coined, acoustemologies: ‘a knowing-with and knowing through the audible’ (Feld 2015: 13) – are a politicised, socioesthetic, citizen-science in sound. This context is a nuanced form of participatory, situational environmental sonic art that plays out in the everyday lives of those listening on a remote, roadless island in Lake Superior to critically engage with nature/culture as a dialectic rather than dualism (Kisliuk 1998: 12; Davis and Turpin 2015; Morton 2007; Doherty 2009; Norman 2011: 3; DeLuca 2016a, 2016b). Paying attention to these communities, which surround ecological acoustic spaces, allows for the identification of an environmental sonic art that emerges from human experience, moving beyond interactivity to intersubjectivity.…”

“…For Isle Royale acoustemologies, human communication with the non-human is not achieved by means of dualistic Cartesian thinking but rather through an appreciation of human’s place within nature. This type of interspecies communication is about identifying the differences and similarities between humans and non-humans – leading to a critical, politicised awareness of environmental issues that is not external to the human agent (DeLuca 2016a, 2016b).…”

“…This form of environmental sonic art extends R. Murray Schafer’s ideas about authorial control, showing that we can listen to the acoustic environment as a musical composition while also owning responsibility for its composition. This (de)composition is a form of self-critical environmental sonic art that is playing out right now, in everyday life (DeNora 2000) and which forces its participants to confront their own preconceived notions about ‘nature’ and their relationship to it (DeLuca 2016a, 2016b).…”

Ears to the Ground: Socially engaged sound art as learning in process

“… 11 Listening communities of many types, often united through one particular sound – engines (Krebs 2012); music in detention camps (Cusick 2008); bells (Corbin 1998); the sonic colour line (Stoever 2016); amplified calls to prayer (Lee 1999); the wolf howl (DeLuca 2016); or birds (Feld 1982) – form different contextually rich webs of meaning with competing interests and voices. …”