Listening with Earth

Drawing on methodologies in deep listening, sound ecology, and non-extractivist research, this talk shares work developed during my Special Studies Program (SSP) for Listening to Earth, a forthcoming book on sonic storytelling with the more-than-human world. At its core is an embodied approach to listening that treats Earth as collaborator and co-author, recognising vibration itself as a form of earth story.

Our ears perceive only a fraction of the vibrational spectrum; yet our bodies are continuously immersed in waves of inaudible sound that act directly on our organs, bypassing cognitive filters. During the SSP, I explored ways of writing about these vibrational narratives and fieldwork conducted in Mongolia, Antarctica, Iceland, and Australia.

The talk will weave reflections from this writing process with insights from new collaborations forged during the SSP, including with the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, the Polar X collaboration, and the British Antarctic Society. In sharing these stories, I aim to show how sound’s capacity to register and transmit vibrational histories offers new ways to understand and communicate environmental change, and to listen, deeply and with care, to the Earth.

Speaker
Dr. Diana Chester is an artist and sound studies scholar whose work produces critically influential studies, methods, and outputs that use sound to traverse disciplinary boundaries and explore sonic capacities core to the human condition. Chester is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, associate editor for sound and audio analysis for the journal of Computational Humanities Research, and vice president of the World Listening Project.