Symbiotic Resonances: Sounding More-than-human Worlds

The Anthropocene, a contested term to describe our species’ footprints on the earth, is both a crisis and an opportunity, an epoch whose defining challenge is the necessity of becoming-with a pluriverse of others—plant, fungal, animal, mineral, machinic—in cooperative and sympoietic ways. Amidst mass extinction and the collapse of planetary boundaries, can we learn to listen and reattune to the environment, learning from cultures and species that have long known how to world otherwise?

This chapter argues for the generative potential of attuning to the vibratory, the interstitial, the entangled. From birdsong to forest symphonies indexed by bioelectric sensors, and planktonic chimeras at the root of all life, sound mediates relations that challenge the fixity of boundaries, the conceits of mastery, and the fiction of the autonomous self.

Symbiosis, as Lynn Margulis and Scott Gilbert argue, is not the exception but the precondition for life. Nature may, in fact, select relationships, and the autonomous self is a misreading: We are always multispecies, always more-than-individual.¹ In this “pluriverse,”² what kinds of politics, ethics, and subjectivity become possible? How might art and the sensorium attune us to these realities, overcoming the legacies of Enlightenment separation and capitalist commodification?

As Donna Haraway insists, recognizing the importance of sympoiesis (making and becoming with) is only the first step to “staying with the trouble.”³ Multi-species sociality is fundamentally political, and attunement is an embodied and relational matter. To interrogate these possibilities, we must foreground the sonic as both epistemology and politics⁴—a move from ocularcentrism to acoustemology, and from representation to resonance. Ursula Le Guin’s concept of geolinguistics invites us to conceive a language in terms of matter and process—a language that might be spoken by rocks, plants, and fungi. Le Guin further raises the speculative question of what plant art would be: “[T]he first passive art known to us.”⁵ Grappling with Le Guin’s frontiers of thought, this chapter propels the question of plant, fungal, and more-than-human subjectivities and what sound in its multiple variations (vibrations, resonances, reverberations, etc.) means to the plants, fungi, and their complex symbiotic networks. 

Such questions find a methodological resonance in Steven Feld’s concept of “acoustemology” which fuses acoustics and epistemology, positing that listening is not passive reception but embodied, emplaced engagement.⁶ The listener is always situated, attuned, co-constituted with the place and the “others-in-relation” who coinhabit the world. Acoustemology, then, is not merely about hearing sounds, but about sensing worlds, about listening “through” and “with” the more-than-human. Extending Feld’s framework, Tim Ingold emphasizes that light and sound are not objects to be perceived but “phenomena of experience,” mediums through which worlds become sensible and in which agency circulates. They are the mediums in which we are entangled, the plenum of life.⁷ Sound “ensounds” the body; it is not embodied as an object, but we become-with it. Sound is always in motion, compelling us to exceed the fixities of geography or identity. Sound’s relational, participatory, and vibratory qualities cross, indeed, dissolve the boundaries between subjects and objects. As Donna Haraway’s Phonocene⁸ and Vinciane Despret ask: How can we hear crises—climate change, extinction, catastrophe?⁹ A vital question remains: in ways that matter for whom? How can we hear the Phonocene in ways that also matter to our nonhuman counterparts with whom we share a planetary future?

Anthropologists and art historians have noted that, since the turn of this century, artists are not merely referencing science but actively appropriating its tools, methods, and aesthetics to generate new forms of knowledge, forms best described as experimental and empirical modes of inquiry. These artistic practices do not simply represent scientific ideas. They operate as epistemological interventions in their own right, challenging the modern hierarchy that positions science as the sole or superior authority on empirical knowledge production.¹⁰ In this light, art becomes a crucial site for both the critique and advancement of contemporary understandings, a laboratory for methodologies that, as Isabelle Stengers suggests with the notion of “Earthly Sciences,”¹¹ ground knowledge in worldly, entangled, and plural relations.

Within this landscape, composer David Dunn’s experimental practice emerges as remarkably prescient. Informed by systems theory, sympathetic magic, cybernetics, and autopoiesis (self-creation), Dunn employs sound as an “environmental language,”¹² extending consciousness beyond the confines of disciplined subjectivity. Dunn’s work resonates with Haraway’s vision of “making kin”¹³ and “cross-species sociality,”¹⁴ a recognition that art is not separable from politics, and that creativity itself is a multispecies affair. In Le Guin’s spirit, Dunn’s practice embraces speculative elements.

Dunn’s exploration of interspecies sound relations is exemplified in the project, The Sound of Light in Trees (2006).¹⁵ Dunn spent two years recording the astonishingly complex acoustic world within piñon pines (Pinus edulis) in northern New Mexico, landscapes increasingly decimated by pinion Engraver Beetle (Ips confuses) infestations exacerbated by drought and climate change. Using custom-built vibration transducers inserted beneath the tree bark, Dunn captured a polyphonic soundscape of minuscule agencies: the pulsing, crackling movement of sap and air, the flex and creak of wood, and above all, the frenetic gnawing and stridulations of Ips confuses beetles and other wood-boring larvae. These bioacoustic recordings made audible phenomena entirely inaccessible to unmediated human ears. Such acoustic events constitute, as Dunn notes, a world of communication, labor, and negotiation within the phloem and cambium of a living tree.¹⁶

Dunn proposes that these vibrant microacoustic environments mediate ecologies of interaction and even selection. Drought-stressed trees, as they lose hydraulic integrity, emit ultrasonic “cavitation” pulses and—remarkably—brief flashes of light (sonoluminescence) inside their vascular tissues.¹⁷ Dunn hypothesizes, building from both science and speculative thinking, that bark beetles are attuned to such signals, using them not only to locate vulnerable hosts but to coordinate spacing for colonization—an eco-semiotic feedback loop involving tree, beetle, and the several fungi species the insects transport. These symbiotic fungi accelerate vascular failure and tree death, creating further acoustic cues and freeing up resources for beetle reproduction.

In The Sound of Light in Trees, Dunn collapses the divide between scientific investigation and artistic experimentation. The collaged, temporally layered composition is both a mode of research—yielding new insights into the bioacoustics of infestation—and a poetic soundscape that challenges listeners to inhabit the mysterious, resonant interiors of trees. Rather than present his fieldwork as a linear recording, Dunn performs an ecological imagination. By juxtaposing and compressing sonic events of more than fifty piñon pines, Dunn helps listeners appreciate not only these trees’ diversity but also their intricate relationships within the arboreal acoustic worlds. Dunn’s cross-disciplinary approach—a “science fiction that might lead to science fact”¹⁸—embodies a philosophy of speculative synthesis. He acknowledges that, as an artist, he can reveal new phenomena, propose novel connections, and craft metaphors that invite scientific testing. For Dunn, this is the critical role for artists in an era of ecological crises: not replacing science, but expanding the repertoire of what can be perceived, conceived, and ultimately cared for. Listening becomes a method and a metaphor for attending to the multiscalar, multispecies drama of deforestation and climate change. 

Recent advances in plant bioacoustics further deepen and complexify the notion of environmental language developed in Dunn’s work. No longer confined to metaphor, the idea that plants can “listen” or respond to sound is now supported by an array of scientific studies, from Monica Gagliano’s demonstration that pea roots grow toward the sound of water,¹⁹ to Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft’s finding that Arabidopsis senses and chemically responds to the vibration of caterpillar chewing, and that drought-stressed plants emit their own ultrasonic clicks—potential distress signals—into the air.²⁰ As Zoë Schlanger details in The Light Eaters,²¹ these findings reveal that plants exist in and actively navigate a world suffused with vibrations, using the language of sound and resonance to communicate, adapt, and sometimes even warn their neighbors. 

This ecological, crossdisciplinary ethos is acutely enacted in Dunn’s pioneering work Mimus Polyglottos (1976), co-created with Ric Cupples.²² A groundbreaking attempt at interspecies communication with Northern Mockingbirds. Over a months-long process of relationship-building between human composers and multiple Northern Mockingbirds, Dunn and Cupples observed how members of both species learned to interact with each other through sound. They composed a series of analog synthesizer tapes that imitated Northern Mockingbirds’ pitch range and song morphology—but crucially, did not simply mimic the birds’ calls.²³ These electronic compositions were broadcast in situ to the wild birds, and the ensuing responses were themselves recorded, analyzed, and (in a recursive circuit) became new sonic material and environmental language.

What emerged was neither a straightforward conversation nor a one-way projection of human anthropomorphic desire. Instead, it was a feedback loop: a living, evolving relay in which mockingbird and synthesizer, animal and machine, composer and place, continually reconfigured each other’s possibilities. In the words of Jennie Gottschalk, “the bird deftly interacts with various aspects of the recording, including pitch, rhythm, and timbre, but never settles either on a single aspect or on direct imitation. A great musical mind is at work, full of facility and flexibility and creativity.”²⁴ Dunn’s role thus becomes less that of a traditional composer and more an instigator of multispecies improvisation, a co-participant in an unpredictable resonant encounter. In the sonic field, human and bird co-create in a shared medium, improvising new rules for worlding. 

Weather, wind, rain, and the breath of trees: all are acoustic phenomena, indices of planetary metabolism, and invitations to think beyond the boundaries of the human. As Emanuele Coccia observes, to think with plants is to immerse ourselves in the cosmogony of air. Plants force us to reimagine subjectivity as participants in a cosmic process of “fluidification” where boundaries are only temporary eddies in a multispecies flow.²⁵ Within this atmospheric framework, the late Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) stands out as a figure whose work bridges music, environmental activism,²⁶ and sonic philosophy, embodying the transformations from the ocular to the vibratory, from separation to sympoiesis. Like Dunn, Sakamoto envisions sound as a field of multispecies relation and planetary attunement.

Sakamoto—internationally celebrated as a founding member of the iconic synth-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) and acclaimed film scores such as Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), The Last Emperor (1987), and The Revenant (2015)—was an experimental sound artist who fused art, technology, and ecology. Sakamoto’s work combines a highly sophisticated use of technology with the intelligence of biocomplex-minded systems, giving birth to multiple displaced identities and recomposing the boundaries of the self. Sakamoto’s compositional intent stands between that of John Cage, who wanted to decontextualize sounds by allowing them to be themselves, and that of Dunn, who strives to recontextualize them as nature’s “evidence of purposeful minded systems.”²⁷ Influenced by the director Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic and sonic sensibility,²⁸ Cagean indeterminacy,²⁹ and Buddhist philosophies of impermanence, Sakamoto approached listening as an active, embodied practice, a way of being present in the world that resists the passivity often assumed of perception. To Sakamoto, the world overflows with sounds not always conventionally musical. He advocated abandoning inherited musical forms, challenging Pythagorean ideals of harmony with an embrace of asynchronicity and chance. Sounds themselves, he insisted, are actants, agents with whom we might enter into Feld’s “subject-subject relations”³⁰ rather than simply treated as objects or background.  

This sonic philosophy finds material form in his collaborative installations. Forest Symphony (2013), created with Japanese visual artist Shiro Takatani and YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media),³¹ makes trees themselves audible collaborators. YCAM’s bioelectric sensors, affixed to trees worldwide, register changes in each tree’s bioelectrical potential, linked to photosynthesis and environmental variation. Sakamoto translates this otherwise inaudible data into evolving soundscapes, while Takatani visualizes the data in real-time. Forest Symphony expands the human faculty of hearing into transducing³² the photosynthetic process, making nature signals audible to human ears. Photosynthesis, literally “putting together with light,”³³ is a “cosmic process of fluidification of the universe.”³⁴ Forest Symphony amplifies the hidden rhythms and biosignals of forests, inviting us to hear climate, light, and life as entangled resonant and vibrational events. Thus, listeners enter trees’ embodied temporalities far slower and stranger than our own. To borrow Dunn’s words, Forest Symphony shows us that sound is a “different way of thinking about the world, a way to remind ourselves of a prior wholeness when the mind of the forest was not something out there, separate in the world, but something of which we were an intrinsic part.”³⁵

In an age where scarcely any environment remains untouched by human impact, Sakamoto’s work asks listeners to encounter nonhuman forces with humility and openness. This attunement intersects, politically and philosophically, with Foucault’s understanding of the body as a site of resistance. If the body is disciplined by power, then the sensorium, shaped by noise, signal, and interference—what Stefan Helmreich terms a “sensory transducer”³⁶—becomes a relational field where new possibilities for connection, critique, and creativity emerge. Artistic interventions challenge common perceptions and provoke audiences to engage more deeply and become conscious of their sensory and ecological entanglements.

Life’s unpredictability and the untamable force of nature informed Sakamoto’s relationship to sound. After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Sakamoto encountered a tsunami survivor piano still producing sound. He reflected: “The industrial revolution made possible the production of an instrument like that one. … We say that the piano needs tuning, but actually matter is trying to return to its natural state. The tsunami became a force of restoration … the piano retuned by nature actually sounds very good to me now.”³⁷ His later cancer diagnosis only intensified his sense of bodily and planetary interconnectedness: “Inside me, it’s all connected: the force of nature, the piano, my body. … Everything is part of nature, or a process of it. Being damaged by the force of nature is just another process.”³⁸

Sakamoto’s support for environmental issues and “acute awareness of sensitivity toward the mortality of all living things—including the planet,”³⁹ reminds us that we are all interconnected in porous inter-species intra-actions.⁴⁰ The installation Plankton—A Drifting World at the Origin of Life (2016), developed with Takatani and the scientist Christian Sardet,⁴¹ turns to the micro-ecology of plankton. Plankton are the organisms that made life on earth possible through their oxygenating labor.⁴² Using Sardet’s macro and microscopic photographs and Sakamoto’s sonification, the piece makes palpable the formative, planetary work of organisms mostly invisible to our unmediated senses. Plankton acts as a sonic and visual homage to Margulis’ notion that symbiosis and symbiogenesis are the basis of evolutionary life, reminding listeners that we remain, in a deep sense, of the sea. 

Sakamoto’s activism and art alike serve as an invitation to participate, not evade, in planetary becoming. Whether composing in response to environmental disaster, transducing biosignals, or reflecting on illness, his work blurs the modern lines separating science, art, self, and the environment. Thus, Sakamoto models a participatory, attentive listening, a sonic method for “staying with the trouble,”⁴³  for cultivating more-than-human solidarity, and for co-creating ways of worlding that resist both nostalgia and techno-fixtures. As Sakamoto contends, we are the first species able to inflict our own extinction.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, in Margulis’ spirit, we can remain optimistic. We may go extinct as a species, but life on Earth will never cease to exist. Plankton will continue singing the cosmic music of the universe.⁴⁵

What then are the political and ethical stakes of multispecies attunement, especially in an era marked by resurgent nationalism, renewed exclusions, and the retreat from planetary consciousness? Latour, Stengers, Serres, and Despret, among others, urge us to supersede the “modern constitution”⁴⁶ that has long separated politics (the affairs of the polis) from science (the domain of nature). They propose new natural contracts—object-oriented democracies, parliaments of things, planetary cosmopolitics—in which nonhuman agents are not mere resources but active participants in collective world-making.

Stengers’s cosmopolitics, as developed across her work, is not a blueprint for global harmony but an invitation to dwell with uncertainty: to participate in what she calls an “ecology of practices” that recognize, negotiate, and sustain profound difference. This is a cosmopolitics of hesitation, risk, and transformative encounter, one that prizes creative learning, experimentation, and the improvisational navigation of the unknown. For Stengers, neither science, nor art, nor any practice should aspire to final consensus or a single world-picture. Instead, cosmopolitics is about holding open the space for many worlds to coexist, resisting the closure imposed by universalism, technocratic solutions, or authoritarian fixations on sameness.⁴⁷ Especially in moments of political retrenchment and renewed tribalism, cosmopolitics is harder and more necessary than ever. It asks us to compose futures that are provisional, unfinished, and attentive to the uncertainties and differences that make up our more-than-human worlds.

Within this fragile but urgent ecology, the arts—and especially the sonic, relational, experimental practices explored in this chapter—become more than aesthetic interventions. They are laboratories for the ecology of practices on which cosmopolitics depends. If the Anthropocene indexes the fragmentary, precarious, multispecies present, art practices offer vital cartographies for re-worlding: experimental knowledge production that challenges the hegemony of disembodied rationality and brings forth new forms of conviviality and attunement. 

As we attend to the sympoietic resonances of sound art, as exemplified by Dunn, Sakamoto, and the broader turn to more-than-human listening, we are reminded that listening with the world—expanding the sensorium to include trees, wind, water, birds, plankton, and even the sound of planetary loss—becomes a ground for new forms of ethical coexistence, inventive solidarity, and hope. By aiming for the expansion of human faculties, rendering the divide between the human and the “environment,” the digital and the “real,” limitless, and moving beyond the visual into the haptic, such works call for a re-evaluation of what it means to be human in the age of the Anthropocene. Art’s capacity for improvisation, risk, and speculative world-making—the very qualities that normative politics often suppress in favor of structure and certainty—may offer a crucial resource for survival amidst rising closure. Embracing multispecies perspectives across diverse modalities reveals new pathways for cultivating more ethical and sustainable ways of living on a damaged planet.⁴⁸