Deep listening the animal other: trash-foraging gulls at Ämmässuo waste treatment centre

ABSTRACT

For centuries, seeing has dominated other senses in Western thought. To a certain extent, this has also been the case in animal philosophy. In this article, animal otherness is examined through listening. We explore otherness in animals that share urban environments and utilise material surplus discarded by humans: gulls. Our fieldwork takes place at Ämmässuo, a waste treatment centre located in Espoo, Southern Finland. The method of listening is Deep Listening, a composer’s sound practice developed by American composer Pauline Oliveros. In Deep Listening, listeners are connected with their environment and all its inhabitants through listening. What is heard is always changed by listening, and in turn, listening changes the listener. The article utilises the concept of sonosphere also created by Oliveros, as well as the concept of atmosphere as it has been described by Andrew Whitehouse. It proposes a method of listening-with gulls which acknowledges the diverse differences and similarities between species while also taking into account the agencies of infrastructures and machines affecting both human and nonhuman lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Deep listening
• atmosphere
• gulls
• cultural studies
• trash animals
• animal philosophy

Acknowledgments

This Article was supported by the Kone Foundation under grant 201800897 and by the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), University of Turku, Finland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental audio for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2022.2062564.

Notes

1. Bevis, Aaaaw to zzzzzd, 88, 91–92, 94–96.

2. Cajander, Lintu ja ääni, 33, 88. The vowel “ä” in Finnish is pronounced similarly as the letter “a” in words “that” and “hat”.

3. This article is part of Tanja Tiekso’s artistic/practice based research project “Experimental composition after the silence” (2019–2022) which explores musical subjectivities in the context of posthuman theory and feminism. The main task of the research project is to explore ways to use Deep Listening as a tool for artistic exploration. Other parts of the project include, for example, sound performances and workshops. Tiekso gained Deep Listening “eartificate” at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2018. In 2019, Tanja invited Karoliina Lummaa to participate in the first part of the project in which she aimed to listen to birds in a waste treatment centre. Lummaa has studied bird vocalisations and waste in contemporary poetry and art and Tiekso has no previous experience of bird studies. Ämmässuo was a natural choice as the site of the exploration, since it is the biggest waste treatment centre in Nordic countries and is located in an app. 15 km from Helsinki, where Tanja lives. Also, the bird species at Ämmässuo are regularly counted, which offered valuable background information for the study. Lummaa’s focus in her previous research has been on the cultural and poetic agencies of birds and waste. She has no scientific training on ornithology nor is she an active birder, but her research methodology includes careful comparisons between scientific and artistic discourses and knowledge of birds and human-bird-relations.

4. Oliveros, Deep Listening, 7.

5. The concept of “becoming worldly” has been borrowed from Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, 3, 95.

6. Oliveros, Deep Listening, 18–19.

7. See Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing.

8. Bolhuis & Everaert, Birdsong, Speech, and Language.

9. Mason, Ornithologies of Desire; Moe, Zoopoetics.

10. Feld, Sound and Sentiment.

11. Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds; Mynott, Birdscapes.

12. E.g. Bolhuis & Everaert, Birdsong, Speech, and Language.

13. Whitehouse, “Listening to Birds”.

14. Whitehouse, “Senses of being”, 63.

15. Whitehouse, “Listening to Birds”, 58.

16. Strasser, Waste and Want; Bauman, Wasted Lives; O’Brien, A Crisis of Waste.

17. Nagy & Johnson, ”Introduction”; Blechman, ”Flying Rats”; Haraway, When Species Meet, 78–82; Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 78–9.

18. The Ämmässuo Waste Treatment Centre in Espoo manages the municipal wastes of people living in Helsinki (the capital of Finland) and the densely populated nearby areas. In addition, Ämmässuo also treats the wastes of over 50,000 companies. The main activities in the Ämmässuo centre include biowaste treatment, treating of ash and slug from the local waste-to-energy plant, collecting and utilising landfill gases, and waste sorting services for private citizens, communal actors and companies. In total, the Ämmässuo waste management area expands over two square kilometres, covering the old Ämmässuo landfill.

19. Holmström, Ämmässuon jätteenkäsittelykeskuksen.

20. Hyvärinen & al., The 2019 Red List of Finnish Species.

21. Watson, “See Gull”, 34.

22. Nagy & Johnson, ”Introduction”, 25.

23. Watson, “See Gull”, 36.

24. Mitchell, “The Bard’s Bird”, 179.

25. van Dooren, “Authentic Crows”.

26. Nagy & Johnson, ”Introduction”, 7–8, 21; Strasser, Waste and Want, 4–7.

27. Blechman, ”Flying Rats”.

28. Whitehouse, “Senses of being”, 63; Ingold, The Life of Lines, 72.

29. Oliveros, Sounding the Margins, 73.

30. Ibid., 73–4.

31. Ibib., 23.

32. Ibid., 78–9.

33. Ibid., 77.

34. Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxv.

35. Birkhead, Bird Sense, 49; Lederer, The Hearing of Birds.

36. Birkhead, Bird Sense, 42–48, 54.

37. Beason, “What Can Birds Hear”, 93.

38. Marler & Slabbekoorn, Nature’s Music.

39. Whitehouse, “Senses of being”: Ingold, The Life of Lines, 136–39.

40. Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, 23.

41. Abram, Becoming Animal, 190–91; Lummaa, Kui trittitii, 90.

42. Oliveros, Deep Listening, xii.

43. Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxv.

44. See Lummaa, Kui trittitii, 71.

45. Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxv.

46. Goddard, Halligan & Hegarty, “Introduction”.

47. See Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise; Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound.

48. Nagy & Johnson, ”Introduction”, 55, 62–64, 70.

49. Bryant, ”Wilderness Ontology”, 21.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Koneen Säätiö [201800897] and Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku.

Notes on contributors

Tanja Tiekso

Tanja Tiekso is a PhD and adjunct professor in musicology (University of Helsinki, 2013) currently affiliated at the Uniarts Helsinki. She specialises in avant-garde art, sound art and experimental music. She is also the author of Todellista musiikkia. Kokeellisuuden idea musiikin avantgardemanifesteissa (2013, Poesia), and Finnish translator of Luigi Russolo’s book of noises, Hälyjen taide (2018, Tutkijaliitto). Her recent essay Fantasma (2022, S&S) explores mediaeval and ancient writings of plants and animals, among other things. She is a previous Fulbright grantee at Columbia University, NY, USA (2017–2018) and holds a Deep Listening certificate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY, USA, 2018).

Karoliina Lummaa

Karoliina Lummaa is a PhD and adjunct professor in literature and ecocriticism, currently working as a collegium researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS), University of Turku. Lummaa’s publications include two monographs on Finnish nature poetry and posthumanist theory (2010; 2017), five co-edited anthologies on Finnish literature, multidisciplinary environmental research and posthumanism (2007; 2012; 2012; 2014; 2020), and several research articles on environmental humanities, with topics ranging from waste studies and human-animal-studies to multidisciplinary Anthropocene research. Lummaa has no previous experience in Deep Listening. In her monograph Kui Trittitii. Finnish Avian Poetics (2017) Lummaa examines the intertwinings between poetic language, rhythm, and bird vocalisations.