An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Alex South (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-25).
“Thar she blows!” Cetacean citings and soundings
Whale songs have been widely celebrated for their musicality since their global dissemination in the early 1970s, and field recordings and the music they inspired were key factors in environmental campaigns that led to the virtual cessation of commercial whaling. In the current era of biodiversity collapse and climate crisis, whales and dolphins are facing mounting existential threats from entanglement, ship strikes, persistent organic pollutants, and noise pollution. Against this background, it is not surprising to find that musicians and sound artists are again choosing to use their powers of empathy and expression to promote the interests of our “alien kin” (Baptiste Morizot) and to re-engage or re-enchant audiences with the more-than-human world.
In this seminar I present my audio piece “Sounding Migrations”, discussing how baleen whales have come to be regarded as climate sentinels as their seasonal movements, tracked via hydrophone arrays, shift in response to warming seas. I also provide a progress report on “Keening: The Song of the Stranding”, a forthcoming site-specific participatory performance that will commemorate a recent mass stranding of long-finned pilot whales on the Isle of Lewis. Alongside this performance, I will draw on practice research and ethnographic methodologies to examine the role of musicians and other performance artists as interspecies mediators or translators. In both projects, I pursue my inquiry into ethical questions arising from the aesthetic employment of “cetacean citations”.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7