Month: October 2024

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Aquatic plants More-Than-Human

Why More-Than-Human Musicking Now?

On 24 and 25 October 2024, the inaugural symposium of the Study-Group-in-the-Making “Multispecies Sound and Movement Studies” took place in the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD) at Nuremberg University of Music. I was invited to present ‘Sonic Pond Dipping: Collaborating With The Sounds of Aquatic Plants’.

It was delivered using my Sonic Pond Dipping workshops as a template; the idea was to take people on a journey through underwater sounds, starting with common marine recordings and leading, inevitably, to the pond. Scheduled to be the last presentation of the day I was surprised that, despite a varied programme, mine was the first to highlight more-than-human sounds which were distinctly ‘beyond human’ perception. Others tended to focus on communication between canines, cetaceans, and birds.

Sonic Pond Dipping workshops encourage participative intervention. They aim to defamiliarise the landscape, not by aesthetic manipulation, but by close observation [ref]1 . This has become a commonality between my listening and compositional practices. The hydrophone presents a focal point within the water which I have tended to offer ‘as is’ in the form of piece of living music, somewhere between documentation and composition. The audio is only subtly adjusted in EQ to highlight key tones and perhaps spatialised to provide definition. Perhaps it should more accurately be described as ‘arranging’ (flower arranging?!). The pond as a microcosm of sonic inspiration, echoing ecologist Stephen Forbes 1887 seminal paper: “The lake as a microcosm”2. 

Quantised Landscapes

Musical quantisation is the equivalent of straightening a river, offering a metaphor for disassociation with nature. Focussing on recordings made for the album With Ears Underwater, collected near Sunderland’s Nissan factories, I took Luigi Russolo’s claim that “if we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent”3 and proposed that his comment is a result of the growing anthropogenic noise and the Industrial Revolution’s desire for humans to separate themselves from nature.

Fast-forward a few decades and we find electronic/urban genres of music (including Industrial, of course) echoing the monotony of factory rhythms, the Kraftwerkian ‘Man-Machine’4 where quantised rhythms shift around grid-like patterns. Erase meanders and we delete a habitat in which species thrive. The fast-flowing waters that are channelled by the removal of ‘imperfections’ (read: ‘less-economical’) are not favoured by all. There is need to slow down. The news today reports flooding in Valencia, Spain5 where narrow streets became these fast-flowing channels resulting in major loss of life. Restoring river bends can help reduce risk of flooding. Does ‘humanising’ beats bring us closer to nature? (Should that be ‘non-humanising’ beats…?)

Listening to the glitchy complex rhythms of aquatic plants brings us back home, to the waters from which we first emerged. Do we have some rhythmic memory that was passed down from the pulsating beats of early macrophytes? Might the excitement people feel during loud rock concerts or overpowered club PA systems be traced right back to how we sensed beats with our body as vibrations passed through water? (To be continued…). Definitely asking more questions than answering them.

Symposium Link: https://www.hfm-nuernberg.de/en/news/detail/why-more-than-human-musicking-now

  1. Knickerbocker, S. (2012). Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (referring to poet Elizabeth Bishop) ↩︎
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Alfred_Forbes ↩︎
  3. Art of Noises, (1913) – https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/the-art-of-noise/ ↩︎
  4. Kraftwerk. The Man-Machine – Kling Klang (1978) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Machine ↩︎
  5. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/spain-floods-valencia-death-toll-three-days-mourning [accessed Oct 31, 2024] ↩︎
Categories
Aquatic plants

Plant Shaman

I have just finished reading Monica Gagliano’s ‘Thus Spoke The Plant’. Through scientific experiments she proves that plants are sensitive beings which are capable of remembering, perception and responding to environmental stimulus, including sound1.

It was Aristotle who differentiated plants, animals and humans in his theory of biology and his ‘structure of the souls’2. By defining plants as insensitive, Gagliano argues that he effectively turned them into objects which to this day “sanctions the human right to use (and abuse) plants”3, rather than treat them as living, sensitive beings. Through a ritual practice which involves dieting on certain roots, she experiences plants in a new light and begins a journey into dialogue with them.

In many of the chapters, Gagliano makes reference to time and rhythm. The first is on page 14; “once dieted, a plant is a teacher that will stay with you forever and keep teaching you in her own plant time”. Later, she recounts an experience of recognising that “time is not out there; real time is, if anything, ‘in here’. In fact, all organisms are innately endowed with an internal sense of time, a body clock regulating circadian rhythms”4.

“We are able to […] keep track of time thanks to a small groups of cells on our brain, which, together with a handful of genes, have the job to keep everything synchronized (and, by the way, these same time-keeping genes are found in all other animals, as well as in plants and microbes)”5. It made me wonder if the rhythms of aquatic plants have a function beyond a byproduct of photosynthesis? Perhaps their sounds act as a sunshine alarm to beetles who may be taking a nap, like the clocktower that alerts factory workers, or the knocker-uppers6 who woke colliery miners for first their first shift?

To tap into this sense of time, Gagliano often employs the use of a drum describing the monotonous rhythm as a “powerful beat [which] pushed me over the threshold and into the unseen underside of reality”. Within shamanic practice she describes using “the repetitive drumming of a large hoop drum to bring myself into an altered state of perception with the idea of learning more about the osha root, my dream, and – perhaps – the connection between the two, if any was to be found”7.

The repetitive and trance-inducing rhythms remind me of time spent listening to the complex click-trains8 of macrophytes. So I plug myself into the pond and begin to improvise. It is a bright midday and the plants are in full voice. As if in a dream-state, I am listening to the voice of a plant who speaks to me directly. The aquatic plants become the shaman, drumming out an ancient beat which resonates with the cilia of my inner ear, sending me back to a time before we stepped foot on dry land. The hydrophone becomes an aural time machine. I play along to scattered pulses, pulling me in and flooding my senses. 

Intense polyrhythms live at the pond
  1. pp.31-35. See the first example of plants (yellow corn kernels, recorded in Bristol) emitting, hearing and responding to external sounds.  ↩︎
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_biology ↩︎
  3. p.105 ↩︎
  4. p.116 ↩︎
  5. p.117 ↩︎
  6. Definition: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35840393 ↩︎
  7. pp.39-40 ↩︎
  8. term borrowed from cetacean terminology, but might also be applicable? ↩︎