Imagining 'bee-dancing' (part 2 of 2): Early Modern 'taxonomies of monsters,' 'aurality' in 19th-century Colombia, Edison's 'little lamb' (1877), humpback whale songs (1970), and deep listening

So, an acquaintance recently asked for music recommendations—something “dreamy” to help her “feel like a jellyfish” or something.

The “deep listening”—attending to other-than-human ethics—may seem to be pretty abstract, but it actually came in handy in a conversation among friends that had to do with the practice literally listening (to, in this case, ambient music).

On the subject of deep sea music and ambient albums, and as a supplement to the work of those other scholars (see attached post/”Part 1 of 2”):

There was a neat article in the inimicable e-flux Journal (Issue #118) from 2021, by art historian and critical animal studies person Alaina Claire Feldman, called “Minor Listening, Major Influence: Revisiting Songs of the Humpback Whale.”

She traces the history of ambient music/albums, especially after the 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale, as part of longer trajectory of the influence of environmental recording, twentieth-century home-listening devices, and multispecies/human-animal entanglement.

She says:

“The first sound recording was of Thomas Edison singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in 1877. Although the song refers to an animal (and its possession by the girl), it wasn’t until 1889 that the first animal recording was made. A young Ludwig Koch is credited with having recorded a bird on a wax cylinder, which could be played back on an Edison phonograph.”

Fun context for trying to feel like an underwater creature:

“One year before the pressing of Songs of the Humpback Whale, humans landed on the moon for the first time and the extraterrestrial became attainable. The LP similarly transported its audience to the depths of the ocean, another kind of extraterrestrial space.”

(As geographer Elizabeth DeLoughrey has examined elsewhere, for nineteenth-century British administrators of global ocean frontiers and twentieth-century US administrators dispatching satellites into space, there is an imaginative entanglement of both the sea and deep space among ascendant empires which were fascinated by and sought to classify/occupy perceived frontiers.)

Feldman also relates whalesong/ambient music to modernity and the compartmentalization (like a zoo or aquarium) of nature-as-possession:

“Songs of the Humpback Whale wasn’t the album one would play at a club, a birthday, or a social gathering. It was best suited to headphones, an experience that interiorizes the sounds [...]. Popular musicians like Kate Bush, Judy Collins, and Pete Seeger contributed to framing the sounds as musical commodities. The production, circulation, and popularization of these sounds might be compared to Victorian popularizations of aquariums. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, once unknowable species came to be understood via meaning-making technology like microphones, spectrographs, photography, and the aquarium tank. Just as the aquarium brought the ocean into domestic space for amateur scientists and entertainment alike, so too did this record.”

Thus, the “domestication” of previously “alien” environments is often entangled with the advent of new technologies and mediums. I’m thinking of the great article by Sasha Litvintseva and Benny Wagner—”Monster as Medium,” also from e-flux—, in which they describe the rise of botanical gardens in metropolitan Paris/Amsterdam/London and their display of New World “alien” plants as occurring at the same time as the rise of “monstrous bestiary” natural history taxonomy texts:

“Taxonomies of monsters emerge at this delicate moment. They were materializations of a new way of looking - observation as dismemberment of both body and world. […] More than representations of specific beings or things, the monsters themselves were manifestations of the systems of perception and communication through which they emerged. […] There is a media history of monsters to be written, one that methodically charts the specific types of monsters every new media technology has conjured into being. […] This history may include Frankenstein as a product of the nineteenth-century novel, itself a Promethean machine. King Kong and Godzilla are monsters born of the realization of cinema’s capacity to alter the scale of space and time. The serial array of monsters in The Twilight Zone stemmed from the new relations of domestic spectatorship. […] Increasingly frequent journeys to the Americas and the Indies imported objects and artifacts that couldn’t be explained within the systems of natural history that [sixteenth-century European colonial officials] had constructed so meticulously. […] These foreign objects were initially untranslatable within their system of signs. […] In the centuries that followed, both the idea of the monstrous and the taxonomization of the human body grew into ever more aggressive colonial tools for othering. […]” [This excerpt from: Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner. “Monster as Medium: Experiments in Perception in Early Modern Science and Film”. e-flux Journal Issue #116. March 2021.]

Anyway, back to Feldman and her whale songs.

Does the 1960s-1970s shift to appreciation for “the environment” (at the same time that Songs of the Humpback Whale was published) suggest an improvement? As in, are the "strange” creatures perceived as less “alien”/monstrous and instead more human-like?

Actually: Ought we really be ascribing human qualities to whales? Maybe every creature retains an otherness—and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Even if we mean well (like, if we hope to develop a respect/love for whales via listening to their songs), we might accidentally, Feldman adds, end-up still thinking of the whale as too alien:

“Judith Becker describes a ‘habitus of listening’ in Deep Listeners [...]. While Payne intended for listening to relationally bring the human closer to the whale, one consequence was that listening was more apt to externalize the whale as some alien being that could transport the listener far away from quotidian labor and everyday realities.”

How do we better meet the whale--or the jellyfish, or the slug--then?

“Even if humans wanted to, we could never listen exactly like a whale. [...] Human ears are unlike whale ears, or any nonhuman ear for that matter. Humans do not know with certainty how whales listen or what it feels like to be a whale. [...] Ana M. Ochoa Gautier’s book Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia challenges the written historical record of sounds by settler colonialists [of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries] [...]. Their early impressions of local animal sounds and human voices became central to the ontologies and epistemologies of the acoustic in Latin America that still exist today. Dylan Robinson’s book Hungry Listening has also greatly contributed to decolonizing the titular ‘hungry listening’ [...].