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Listening Field Notes - April 2026




April 2026 | Research | Field Notes


Listening Field Notes are a monthly log of thoughts, reflections, and activities that relate to my ongoing inquiries and entanglements with listening, sound, transmission ecologies, and the more-than-human world. 


listening and recording the vibrations of the fence in the spring winds (LOM Geofón mic)



Activities:


Reading:

  • Anthology for Listening vol. II, Bureau for Listening
  • Open Field Listening Station, by Femke Dekker
  • Radio Art Zone, (an anthology of the Radio Art Zone event)
  • Ecotones: Investigating Sounds and Territories (an anthology)




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Question: How does listening as a practice deepen our relationship with the other-than-humans?

 I love how one question leads to many more. My intention for engaging in listening and practice-led research is more about being with the questions than seeking to find definitive answers. The guiding inquiry always begins with deep curiosity and leads into what feels like play. 

This quality of curiosity interwoven with the non-linear action of play is evident eveytime I am outdoors - recording device in hand, and the ok-ness of being with the process no matter what materializes. 

This month I strung up my antenna in the apricot tree, sat on the cement well house, and listened to the otherwordly sounds of my new shortwave radio. This practice is new to me. I am enamored with this practice of listening as it is never the same. Sometimes the bleeps and boops that come through sound melodic, other times it transports me to some distant future or perhaps it is the actual past, I do not know. 

I wander around, staying curious about the sounds that are hidden, those that are out of range for our human hearing. Last week when the winds were kicking up tumbleweeds and heaps of dust I decided it was the perfect condition for listening with the twisted old barbed wire fence just outside my door. Using the Lom Geofón I listened as the winds shook the fence, sending reverberating vibrations through the mic which sounded as if I were in the hull of a giant ship at being tossed about at sea. 

This ability to listen in the present moment, to become transported to some imaginal place, to become a part of the dreaming is what keeps me listening. This month concludes my 3-month Deep Listening intensive. This final modality is focused on dreaming, listening in our dreams, collective dreaming, and inviting in daydreaming and the imagination. 

I notice how this practice enlivens my listening and relating with the other-than-human world. What if the sounds in these listening sessions are portals for ecological entanglement? How do these practices and the sounds I hear inhabit my body, or influence my thoughts and mood?

I carry the questions posed in the What is Postnature? seminar with me as I wander. The encouragement to challenege and disrupt normative ways of relating with what we call “nature”. Feeling captivated by the swarm of honeybees in the mulberry tree outside my house and how my dreams were also of swarms erupting into the sky. 

I listen to my internal world, my thoughts and sensations, my feelings about all these things, I listen to my listening, and I notice how aware I am of my own thoughts in my dreams. I listen so I can be with, I listen so I can interrupt and disrupt human-centric modes of being, I listen-with so I can shift attention away from my thinking and toward a collective curiosity. I listen so I can remember how to play.