The recuperative potential of sound: Audio pedagogy and greening media practice

Introduction

In this presentation (originally titled “(In Search of) the Radical Recuperative Potential of Listening and Sounding Practice”), I teased apart strands of technology, economics, aesthetics, sociality and sonic practice in order to interrogate Timothy Morton’s (2021) bold claim that all art is ecological. In the Anthropocene (aka Capitalocene), when recording, playback, and streaming technologies have reached near-ubiquity, ecologically minded sound designers and audio practitioners must consider what comes next in our field. How will we transform our use of these creative tools to prepare for, and perhaps even mitigate, coming crises? How can we shift to a “green” audio practice? This presentation suggested pedagogical strategies aimed at fostering a new generation of audio practitioners forging sustainable listening and sounding practices.

Let us begin with an invitation or incantation, an opportunity for us to connect across time and space. A moment to join together, in the here and now. Start where you are. In a place. A body, breathing in and out, the air gently pressed against your skin. Start with that place. The specific location, where your feet or your butt or your back or front rest on the ground. You are grounded. In touch with the vast earth. Now is the only time here, as you and me and the earth we share spiral through the space around the sun.

Art and ecology

In All Art is Ecological (excerpted from the 2018 monograph Being Ecological), Timothy Morton (2021) describes living in the Anthropocene, during our earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction event, as a fundamentally weird experience (2). Yet, Morton stresses, trying to make sense out of this uncanny catastrophe – to “tidy it up” through an ecological politics of control – is not just wrongheaded. Approaching climate disaster with “bleak certainty” (Morton 21), whether activist (“it is humans’ fault so humans must fix it”), denialist (“it is not really happening”), or nihilist (“I don’t care anyway”), denies the strangeness we inhabit. Such a move towards anthropocentric logic and efficiency reifies the system that does the damage (Morton 23). Morton point outs that:

If ecological action means not doing as much damage, rather than doing things more efficiently, then it’s not ecological to insist or slap upside the head or the other similar current modes of supposedly ecological data delivery in general [through factoids and statistics in an information dump]. These kinds of action are like trying to wake us up from this bardo-like dream – but the dreamlike quality is exactly what is most real about ecological reality.

(Morton 2021, 23.)

Our sense of the weirdness of things illustrates for Morton that “we are already being ecological – we just aren’t consciously aware of it” (43). Accordingly, Morton suggests, aesthetic practices that bring to fruition a dream-like politics that moves along with, rather than struggling against, our current state of affairs.

Creativity allows us to tap into new ways of living – including, presumably, more sustainable ones. Morton asserts that artworks attune us to our relations with everything else, since experiences of beauty bring into awareness the fact of “coexisting with at least one thing that isn’t me” (70). In an aesthetic relation, we are “haunted, charmed, enchanted, under a spell, things could get out of control, but they won’t, at least for now” (71). Such experiences take us out of our habitual anthropocentric sense of scale, tuning us instead into “a conversation between objects and abjection” which Morton compares to “the functions of the body and the body’s symbionts” (72). Ecological experience defined in this way provides alternatives to normative Western subjectivity, which relies on anthropocentric individuation to facilitate human domination.

Further, Morton’s punning imperative/adjective “CARE/LESS” is not a move toward neglect or indifference (100). As a strategy it eschews the ostensible and narrowly humanist “care” born of machinations of control that valorize ever greater efficiency. Here each individual human organism is cast as a cog in the species-machine. Instead, the relinquishment indicated by CARE/LESS as a strategy can help cultivate generosity and care-in-context. Here, Morton’s notions of “playful care” (100) and “playful seriousness” (101) release us from the dire and dour experiences of survival mode – even as they trouble the ostensible protections of anthropocentrism.

Tuning in

CARE/LESS-ly letting go gives permission to relax, to explore both the connectedness and the limitations – the inescapable permeability – of organismal being. In the recuperation enabled by playful care, we may (as the word’s etymology suggests) recover from exhaustion and convalesce from civilization’s maladies and madnesses. Reduce input/output. Revive qualia. Tune in. Slow down. Come to rest in this precious embodied moment and realize how you are inextricable and irreplaceable in this ceaseless flow that is the world.

Slowing down to rest in the here and now, we may find that some unpleasant feelings arise as we encounter the weirdness of our time. Climate anxiety and climate mourning spread as we start to sense widespread ecosystemic shocks. Yet as climate psychologists observe these strong emotions are not solely or merely negative – and should not be suppressed or avoided. Kovács et al. (2024) suggest cognitive reappraisal as one of several affective strategies for cultivating positive action while mitigating emotional harm (3). For example, responding to climate stress with thoughts such as “‘When I’m faced with climate change, I make myself think about it in a way that helps me stay calm’” (6) allows people to reframe their own interpretation of a situation’s significance in order to mitigate its emotional impact (3) – thus allowing the initiation of a beneficial cycle of collective climate action leading to more positive affective outcomes (15).

As Maggiore (2023) points out, the global climate crisis also “a crisis of culture and imagination” (7). Inviting my students to deeply listen to their shared local environment impacts their affective state as they relax into openness and feel their permeability. Listening deeply to the surrounding world also illustrates how the sound of these particular birds, as they listen in a specific ecosystem in time, cannot be replaced by a generic “birds” audio track from a digital database – much less so, by an AI generated “sound of birds” prompt. On the other hand, even considering sustainability can feel risky, as it likely means encountering the degree to which “we” (humans) are not in control. Experiencing the scale of what we have to lose can overwhelm. When asked to design their imagined future soundscape of a beloved place, my students tend towards dystopic, violent or desolate audio-visions. I still grapple with ways to encourage young people to imagine peaceful, inhabitable futures for themselves to realize. Again and again, I find that my only starting point is here and now.

Listening for liveliness

Pressure on educational institutions to participate in profitable and prestigious corporate partnerships, particularly with the tech sector, reflects elites’ promotion of AI (although this varies by nation and region, as governmental organizations race to regulate the tech’s many applications). While my first impulse is to resist the saturation of my daily life with deep learning models, I recall the words of venerable U.S. science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin (2017):

It’s easy to say we don’t need more ‘high’ technologies inescapably dependent on despoliation of the earth. It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new – pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.

(Le Guin 2017, M15.)

In other words, the larger project of dealing with the Anthropocene is (and will long remain) ongoing. There will be no quick fix. Le Guin goes on: “We humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything – all beings – including what we generally class as things, objects” (M15). I tune in, slow down, recuperate awareness of this web in which I am suspended. How weird and wonderful to be a symbiont full of symbionts!

My mentor John Bischoff began his exploration of the relational character of electronic sound-making machines in the 1970s, at the dawn of the digital age. Hardware, software, electricity itself – all have a sort of life, which Bischoff and Chris Brown (2005), innovators of live network music, played with: “Computer music instruments are at their best when they take on a life of their own, surprising their creator/performers with a liveliness and character that cannot be predicted” (389). Despite their origins in the deep heart of climate-changing logics and lifeways, these computational machines are (for better or worse) now an inextricable part of our web of connections.

Recent developments in so-called Artificial Intelligence – an assemblage of energy-intensive technologies, infrastructures, and computational strategies – have drawn renewed attention to the unsustainability of our current technological trajectory (cf. Luccioni et al. 2024). In fact, visionary artists have long outstripped technologists in fretting or dreaming about nonhuman consciousness. African American composer, improviser, and programmer George Lewis explored the nature of our digital instruments through the lens of his own cultural heritage. In a 2000 essay, Lewis points out that “in a number of African musical traditions a musical instrument ‘is often regarded as a human being’” (37). Commenting on his Voyager system – the “computer-driven, interactive virtual improvising orchestra” which he started programming in 1986, Lewis writes:

if there is to be serious talk about ‘our’ identity as humans, those identities are continually conditioned and reinscribed through processes of interactivity, where negotiation, difference, partial perspective – and in the case of music, sonic signaling – enter the picture. Voyager asks questions concerning ways in which historically contingent meanings are exchanged through sound […]. Voyager is not asking whether machines exhibit personality or identity, but how personalities and identities become articulated through sonic behavior. Instead of asking about the value placed (by whom?) on artworks made by computers, Voyager continually refers to human expression. […] Voyager asks us where our own creativity and intelligence might lie – not ‘How do we create intelligence?’ but ‘How do we find it?’.

(Lewis 2000, 38.)

The hype around AGI (artificial general intelligence) pales when one considers the nearly infinite intelligences inhabiting/comprising the ancient earth from which we spring.

Decompositional listening

At same time as artists open themselves to engaging with unknown intelligences, global material realities also require divesting our sonic practices of capitalist excess and the consumerist overvaluation of novelty. Resisting the destructive logics of our current system, which build obsolescence and waste into our media tools. Sustainable listening and sounding practice should not mean normalizing “immersive” multi-channel systems or ever-higher quality recording with which to record and playback the sound of a glacier melting. Indeed, the logic of preservation is itself extractive. And what good will an even more pristine hi-fi recording of an endangered bird species do for future generations lacking access to cloud storage, perhaps without even the capability to generate electrical current for digital media playback? Even as I ask the questions, I remember to reset, return to present conditions, rather than rushing ahead to future scenarios of doom or (re)covery.

Kyle Devine (2019) points out, a fundamental aspect of our sound world is the mediatic conditions of our listening practices. There is no “pure” primeval sonic practice to harken back to. Human musicking has always been technosocial, inextricable from human activity in earthly contexts. Thus, as Devine writes, solutions do not lie in “musicologies of retreatism, ideologies of escapism, or anxieties of intrusion” (186). Yet current musical practices require attention to the decomposing detritus generated by our system, perhaps as much as attending to composition itself. As Devine observes:

To listen to recorded music is unavoidably to tune into the superhuman scales of time and space that are required to create fossil fuels and undo plastics. It is to encounter the multispecies balletics of trees, insects, and rocks as well as miners, drillers, and IT workers. It is to tap into the topology of local and global stories about petrocapitalism and polymer chemistry, forestry and factories, war and waste, gendered labor and geological laceration. These are the conditions that we encounter in recorded music’s political ecology – conditions that are often distinctly unhappy. But if we develop ears to hear these conditions, then we may also be motivated to change them.

(Devine 2019, 189.)

The instructional scores and strategies provided by Pauline Oliveros’ (2005) Deep Listening practice have inspired many activities I share with students. One example takes us out of the wired classroom and into the airy outdoors, starting with Oliveros’ “Extreme Slow Walk” (20). Then, sitting on grass or stones, we attend to the fundamental practice of listening to our vibrating world. I invite students to shift their listening between focal attention, which is “like a lens” (13) and global attention, “diffuse and continually expanding” (13). Notice the sounds existing at various proximities relative to your body: Sounds that are internal, close, farther, distant, possible, imaginary, even impossible. All happening within your awareness – no batteries required!

Media/material/reality

Field recordist Mark Wright (2022) reconceptualizes audio recording as a practice that destabilizes conventional subject-object relations, fostering deep listening attuned to the long-term global consequences of the recording industry’s environmentally destructive practices (detailed by Devine 2019). Building upon Pratt’s (1992) notion of the contact zone as a place of “copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radical asymmetrical relations of power” (qtd. in Wright 103), Wright asserts that any physical site of field recording is a contact zone between human and nonhuman. Accordingly, field recording as a practice must recognize the “asymmetries that allow contact between authors, microphones, and environments [to] dispel the myth that capturing sound is an immersive, friction-free process” (Wright 103). Here we may extend Morton’s notion of attunement from audience to include artists, whereby the creative process entails entering into a symbiotic, contingent relation where site, tools and bodies all coexist in unknown, perhaps unknowable ways. As Wright observes, “the microphone, too, even when offering the promise of close contact, translates a fragile encounter between signal and noise: site-based listening and recording therefore unsettle the fidelity of knowledge” (2022, 104). Thus enchanted, I engage in playful care, recuperating the dream-like potential of collective creation.

Emergent ecological aesthetics: Kokoko!

Different relation to our tools, our surroundings and ourselves is always possible. Kokoko! is a performance collective based in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) that emerged in the mid-2010s from the megacity’s vibrant artistic community, making instruments and costumes from trash and detritus. What in richer nations might be lauded as “upcycling” vividly illustrates how pragmatism and innovation enable co-creation between the human and more-than-human world. Sound-making rooted in embodied human effort that engages with “high tech” materials (often discarded or reused) from the immediate environment shows a sustainable “green” audio performance practice for the future, as we imagine ways to cultivate practice beyond Capitalocene logics of obsolescence. Kokoko!’s collective sound invites listeners to reorient themselves to new aesthetic possibilities, leaving behind the consumerist trap of newer, more prestigious and more expensive high tech – in favor of enlivening symbiotic posthuman energies. While acknowledging the ongoing impoverishment and brutality of the global South, one can appreciate even more how musicians like Kokoko! create space for new aesthetic values and practices to emerge.

In the music video for their 2017 song, “L.O.V.E.,” we can see how garbage is combined with instrumental circuitry into uncanny sounding assemblages (Kokoko! with Nyangombe). Human interaction with electrical current – the most basic condition of audio – is enabled through simple bodily contact. The resulting track is both characteristically local and globally compelling as an instance of playful attunement to difficult conditions.

Towards a green audio pedagogy

These electrified and electrifying sounds and processes of creation, amplified around the globe, are strange and unprecedented, like the climate catastrophe itself. Technological acceleration pushes us to continually learn and relearn how to inhabit our rapidly changing conditions. Wright (2022) suggests pedagogical activities designed to explore audio design practice fits into moves towards sustainability. One prompt suggests discussing “the sonic rights of nature” (156) as students engage in field recording. What are the ethics of sound capture when nonhuman subjects are involved? How might grappling with such considerations change audio practice?

Another evocative prompt Wright (2022) offers: “Why not consider the soundscape a finite resource; each time you record you take something away…Once you have made your recordings, come together as a whole group to discuss overlaps and differences: tally what sounds, if any, remain of the soundscape” (156). Incorporating consideration of the more-than-human into developing communities of critical/aesthetic practice may not answer such questions. But it will undoubtedly irrevocably shift our uses of the audio tools we have available – and the kinds of sounds that we most want to hear (and make).

In conclusion, Morton (2021) asks: “What would an ecological joke sound like?” (80). Let us listen for sparks of laughter that we can share. Inhale, exhale, release, renew.

References

Brown, Chris, and John Bischoff. 2005. “Computer Network Music Bands: A History of the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub.” In At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet, edited by Norie Neumark and Annmarie Chandler. 372–390. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Devine, Kyle. 2019. Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

KOKOKO! 2017. Tokoliana/L.O.V.E. Digital Audio. Uploaded 30 June 2017. Accessed 24 October 2025. kokokomusic.bandcamp.com/album/tokoliana-l-o-v-e.

Kokoko! with Nyangombe. 2019. “L.O.V.E. feat. Nyangombe (Official Video).” YouTube. Uploaded 29 January 2019. Accessed 24 October 2025. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW49Rrmnxws.

Kovács, Lilla Nóra, Gesine Jordan, Frida Berglund, Benedict Holden, Elena Niehoff, Felicia Pohl, Mariem Younssi, Inés Zevallos, Csilla Ágoston, Atilla Varga, and Gyöngyi Kökönyei. 2024. “Acting as We Feel: Which Emotional Responses to the Climate Crisis Motivate Climate Action.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 96: 1–21. doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102327.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 2017. “Deep in Admiration.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. M15–M21. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Lewis, George. 2000. “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in ‘Voyager’.” Leonardo Music Journal 10: 33–39. www.jstor.org/stable/1513376.

Luccioni, Sasha, Bruna Tevelin, and Margaret Mitchell. 2024. “The Environmental Impacts of AI: Policy Primer.” Hugging Face. Accessed 24 October 2025. huggingface.co/blog/sasha/ai-environment-primer.

Maggiore, Della M. 2023. “Emotional Responses to the Climate Crisis: The Role of Positive Imaginaries.” Climate Vanguard London. Accessed 24 October 2025. www.climatevanguard.org.

Morton, Timothy. 2021. All Art is Ecological. London: Penguin Books.

Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse.

Wright, Mark. 2022. Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.