I’ve been working this morning on an audio recording of whooper swans. The video features a quick mixdown of the results, just whooper swan calls with a few simple processing techniques. The end result sounded surprisingly like brass instruments, quite haunting. This was all the more surprising as the call of the whooper swan is, to my human ears anyway, not obviously of aesthetic interest — it’s fairly abrasive and quite comical in a way. “Honking’ is a descriptive term that seems to be widely used, and that’s pretty accurate. ‘Strident’ is another more diplomatic term.
Here’s the unprocessed audio example.
To begin to explore the question of animal ontology entails attempting to imagine non-human subjective experience. Bird calls are a good starting point. What does it feel like to create avian sounds and to hear them being created by others and by oneself? This is to try and put ourselves in the place of something fundamentally alien to us. How do we begin to really imagine the experience of something so different? The entire comportment of bird physiology is radically different to human embodiment, not to mention the nuances of its sensorial life-world. And since cognition is rooted in embodiment, what about avian psychology? The bird world is not my world. But birds would seem to be more or less entry-level difficulty in the game of imagining trans-human embodiment. There are still spiders, octopuses, plankton…sea cucumbers!
Listening to this recording of processed whooper swans brings me back once again to the recurrent theme of this blog. What are the undisclosed aspects of animal experience? What am I missing as a human listener encountering animal vocalisations? Would it be wiser to assume that when whooper swans are calling in groups, what sounds to me like incoherent honking and squawking is experienced by them as something closer to the mood of this processed recording? They certainly seem to be enthusiastic about making these calls. Why should this be? Two opposing possibilities come to mind.
1) It’s because they’re insensible, tone deaf, barely conscious conglomerations of biological matter, forced by a blind life preserving instinct to automatically produce rather ugly sounds at a certain time of day.
2) It’s because they are participants in the midst of a strange ritual, infused with unknowable significance, expressed as a long-form, post-spectral, microtonal, site-specific drone installation.
What I’m suggesting is that the sense of the uncanny that my human ears detect in this processed recording, reflects a similar aesthetic import for swan ears, as they listen to and produce their unprocessed calls. The psychoacoustic experience is not the same for swans and humans, but perhaps the mood that surrounds that experience is similar. And of course, my Romantic take on this is that the human tends to have access to an impoverished version of what animals experience.
As it turns out, I recently read that this idea correlates with certain strands of archaic quasi-shamanic attitudes that found their way into ancient Chinese Taoism. Mircea Eliade points out that “animal life was, for the Chinese, the pre-eminant example of an existence in perfect harmony with the cosmos” (Eliade, Yoga, Princeton, 2009, p 61). Eliade also suggests that neo-Taoism appropriated older ‘mystical’ ideas that expressed “the immemorial nostalgia for the bliss and spontaneity of animals” (Ibid, p. 62).
In terms of the audio processing, I didn’t actually need to change the original sound very much. The processes were related to time and filtering, both perceptual zones that we know vary from species to species and from individual to individual. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to consider that animal temporality and audition are different enough to yield perceptual results that humans would consider highly unusual. So, in terms of digital processing those eerie microtonal sonorities were very close by, all along. Perhaps this is also the case in terms of perception. It only took a handful of simple steps to transform these swan honks into something more Lovecraftian and wyrd, which, I like to think, defines at least some aspect of whooper swan experience.