S4E3: Bioacoustics with Mickey Vallee
In this episode Claudia continues the focus on methodology as it relates to animals and sound. This time Mickey Vallee joins The Animal Turn to talk about the concept of bioacoustics and how using bioacoustics methods alters the ways researchers relate to their research subjects – who are often animals. They discuss some of the theory and ideas circulating bioacoustics generally and Mickey’s experiences more specifically.
Mickey Vallee is an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Athabasca University in Alberta, where he also holds the Canada Research Chair in Community, Identity and Digital Media. His work focuses on developing interdisciplinary sonic methodologies to develop new insights on human/animal relations. He has been working on a theory of critical bioacoustics, which grows out of his empirical research with bioacoustics researchers across Canada and the United States. Against a mechanistic ideology of bioacoustics sciences, critical bioacoustics, by contrast, builds a new ethical system that is less focused on the atomistic constitution of the organism than it is on the primacy of relations in sonic communication. Read more about Mickey here or connect with him on Twitter (@mickeyvallee).
Mentioned:
Keynote Lecture by Prof Rosi Braidotti at the Posthumanism and Society Conference;
Wikipedia page about Little Nipper; A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Delueze and Flex;
What would animals say if we asked the right questions by Vinciane Despret;
Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy and Charlotte Mandell;
Indri Lemur sound recording by Mark H. Barsamian and Macaulay Library at the Cornell lab of Ornithology;
Giant Lemurs are the First Mammals beside us found to use Rhythm by Jack Tamisiea;
"What is a being that gives itself over to listening, that is formed by listening or in listening, that is listening with all its being?” - Jean-Luc Nancy (2007), Listening.
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Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab) for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John (Website) for the logo, and Hannah Hunter for the Animal Highlight