The Sounds of Climate Change: Sonic Rhetoric in the Anthropocene, the Age of Human Impact

Abstract

Because of its temporal and vibrational qualities, sound is a particularly useful rhetorical resource for communicating our currently volatile experiences of climate change and extinction. A critical sonic rhetoric moves us from a disembodied marketplace of ideas to an immersive, interdependent soundscape. This move is exemplified in the work of sound artists Susan Philipsz and Bernie Krause, which provides experiences of surface time (sounds arising and decaying) and what climate change scholars call “deep time” (species coming and going from the earth), along with the affective dimensions of nostalgia and grief that saturate these experiences with individual and cultural meaning.

Notes

1. ¹We thank RR Editor Dr. Theresa Enos and reviewers Dr. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Dr. Kenneth F. Zagacki for their substantive and encouraging responses; Dr. Gillian Silverman, Dr. Rodney Herring, and Dr. Michael Harker for their repeated close readings of this manuscript; Dr. Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Dr. John Tinnell, Dr. Mary Ann Cain, and Dr. Luis Rivas for constructive feedback on early drafts.

2. ²In “Introduction: Threading Women,” Maureen Daly Goggin identifies the “material turn” as “a growing body of research over the last two decades on material objects and practices conducted by scholars who have traditionally focused almost solely on texts” (5).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Comstock

Michelle Comstock, Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, has published articles in the journals Computers and Composition, Community Literacy, and JAC among others and coauthored Composing Public Space (Heinemann) with Lil Brannon and Mary Ann Cain.

Mary E. Hocks

Mary E. Hocks, Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University, has published articles in the journals College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Computers and Composition, among others. She also coedited Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media (MIT) with Michelle R. Kendrick and coauthored Handbook of Technical Communication (Pearson) with Laura J. Gurak.