AM Kanngieser: Enlivening our responsiveness to the world (ep421)
“For some reason, particularly in Western philosophy, silence is diminished to this idea of lack, loss, or emptiness when really silence tells us so much more than the omission of something.”
In this episode, geographer, writer, and sound artist Dr. AM Kanngieser invites us to reconsider the diverse ways in which we register both sound and silence — pushing back against the idea that listening itself is a virtuous act with universality in experience.
Through their own journey as a geographer and sound artist, Kanngieser sheds light on the colonial repercussions of extracting sound, knowledge, and information from landscapes and communities that have historically been taken from without consent.
What are the moral considerations for using recording technologies initially developed for military surveillance? How do we ask for permission to capture sounds—not just from the people of a place but also from the land themselves? And what does it mean to blur the boundaries of our various senses as we become more attuned and responsive to the world?
About our guest:
Dr. AM Kanngieser is an award-winning geographer, writer and sound artist. Their practice engages listening and attunement to approach how people collectively determine conditions of liberation and care in the face of ecocide and environmental change. Kanngieser is a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures and works in collaboration with Oceania-based anti-colonial storytellers, artists and grassroots organisers.
They are the author of Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013) and Between Sound and Silence: Listening towards Environmental Relations (forthcoming), and have written for a range of interdisciplinary journals. Their audio work has been commissioned by Documenta 14 Radio, BBC, ABC Radio National, The Natural History Museum London, and Deutschland Radio, amongst many others, and has been reviewed in publications including The Wire, Quietus, Transmediale, Outline and Art Quarterly.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Lunar Landing by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by Camille (art from noticing)
Dive deeper:
Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, a book by Dr Dylan Robinson
“Listening as taking-leave” by AM Kanngieser
Sonic colonialities: Listening, dispossession, and the (re)making of Anglo-European nature by AM Kanngieser
Knowing and Learning: An Indigenous Fijian Approach, a book by Unaisi Nabobo-Baba
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening by Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Oceanic Refractions, a collaborative art exhibition with AM Kanngieser
Expand your lenses:
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
AM Kanngieser: It's an interesting tension with listening because I’ve observed this strong desire, particularly amongst white people, to embrace this idea of listening and learning, this idea that we just need to listen.
And there's this image that I always get in my mind of this concerned kind of white lady with hands clasped together as if, ‘I'm just going to listen’. And I think that listening is a very contentious thing. I think that there's this idea that listening has got to do with care, kindness, generosity and connection.
I'm not saying that listening doesn't have to do with those things, I think often the way that listening is leveraged, particularly amongst white activist communities and advocacy communities and organisations is as a tool of control. So there is this element of listening as surveillance. This is what Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls ‘the white possessive’. Stó:lô philosopher Dr. Dylan Robinson also talks about it as well in his book, Hungry Listening, where he talks about this idea of the white listener as possessing or having knowledge or of owning. I think Robinson talks about it as ‘square pegs in square holes’. This idea is that if you listen, you create the knowledge of something that you then have some ownership or possession or knowledge over this thing in some particular kind of way.
And that's that sticky side of listening as a grasping and taking and controlling. And I think that element of listening doesn't get incorporated much into the liberal ideas of listening as part of a democratic and inclusive process. So that's where my interest in listening comes into it. And there have been several scholars including Robinson, but also Jennifer Lynn Stoever and other scholars writing about race and listening that identify the ways that how we listen is not this universal kind of benign action that everybody listens the same because that's patently untrue. I find communicational disruptions and glitches and conflicts interesting precisely this fact is that it's so easy to see how we don't all hear and interpret the same thing. And there's a slipperiness as well in a lot of these kinds of liberal discourses around listening that conflate listening with interpretation and listening with understanding, right? So there's a lack of attention to how we listen physiologically.
Listening is not just done with the ears, it's a whole-body, sensorial experience.
How we listen is the same and how we hear is the same and what we're going to derive from what we hear is going to be the same. This assumption is a complete fallacy.
The way that we listen and the way that we interpret the things that we hear are completely shaped by our social, cultural, economic, racial, ethnicity, sexuality and gender by all of the experiences and belongings that we have in life completely shape and changes how we listen to certain things. And then also how we define those things. It’s an experience that is in no way universal and in no way benign. Listening is always going to be coded by who you are and your position in the world.
Kamea Chayne: I have sensed that over the past years, especially with the rise of different social movements, people feel that they just need step back and listen. So this is an important conversation to have. And I had the honour of interviewing your collaborator, Dr. Zoe Todd, not too long ago. And that conversation taught us a lot about how freshwater fish listen with their whole bodies. And like you just said, you've also talked about how listening is more than about listening for words that are spoken and also perhaps more than about the auditory experience. So I would appreciate it if you could share more about this more expansive and rooted way of situating the act of listening and how this might influence the ways that people relate to each other and our more-than-human worlds.
AM Kanngieser: Yeah, in my work I talk about listening as a practice of sensing, attuning and noticing. And I think it's very easy to understand how listening is more than just with the ears, right? I often use the example of, if there is a car or a truck idling outside of your front window, you can feel it in your body, you feel the resonance in your gut. There are oftentimes vibrations of sound that we can feel that we don't necessarily hear. They might be out of the range of oral audibility, either high frequency or very low frequencies, but it's certainly something that we can feel regardless. There's a famous musician Evelyn Glennie, who talks about this in terms of her musical practice feeling the resonance of instruments in her body. This is something that we need to be a bit more attentive to when we're thinking about listening.
Often something will happen in an environment and your body will sense it before you have even registered it on a conscious level and made a story out of it. I think is a useful way of thinking about listening because it emphasizes the need to be present and tuned in to what is happening around us.
We would probably all swear up and down that we are brilliant listeners, but there are always going to be idiosyncrasies there. And I think a part of that is because it's very easy to take for granted, ‘Oh, I'm listening, I'm paying attention’, but not paying attention to multiple registers with which your body might be experiencing sound. And one of the things that I've spoken about about my practice is how this also relates to, non-human communication, listening to environments and I've had many instances in the work that I've done where I will enter a particular kind of habitat or space. So, for instance, a forest or bushland or something like that. And we'll notice immediately that the birdsong and the wildlife will fall silent. And that for me is an indication that I have been registered as a threat. You can hear this with insects as well.
I wrote a whole piece called Listening as taking-leave, precisely about registering the environment, kind of not wanting you to be there, or you being perceived as a threat within an environment. And paying attention to how over time the environment might respond to you, so the insects or the birds might start making sounds again. And constantly being attuned to that, I think, is a very different register of attunement and paying attention than, I think, is often talked about in terms of listening in a political sense.
Kamea Chayne: And to go deeper into the idea of listening not being universal, I'm curious if you think the dominant culture sort of privileges and teaches certain modes of listening over others. I'm guessing the answer is yes, but I'm curious what you have to say on this.
AM Kanngieser: Yeah, I think the kind of idea that we have around listening is tied to this sort of moral or virtuous position, right? ‘I'm a good listener’ becomes equated to ‘I'm a good person’, or ‘I am in a good relationship’ in some kind of way.
That idea does a disservice to how hard it is to listen. Realistically, listening is extraordinarily hard. You know, being attentive and being present takes a lot of energy and it really requires a lot of practice. And I certainly notice in myself, I've started to practice saying to people, ‘Hey, I don't want to listen right now, or I'm not able to listen right now’, rather than to kind of like wear this cloak of ‘yes, I'm listening’ when I don't want to or I'm not capable of it to kind of disrupt a little bit this very dominant idea of listening as tied together with goodness as tied together with like something that you should always be available for or this expectation of virtue around it.
I think what needs to be talked about more are the different ways that people listen and what that means for them. But then also the different ways that depending on whatever state we're in at the time that we draw stories and narratives and interpretations out of what we hear because those things change a lot depending on the context we're in, how we're feeling that day, the mood we're in how hungry we are. All of these different things affect how we listen and then what we make of it.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, certainly. And on top of it being important to interrogate how we listen, it's also important, as you've shared, to interrogate the technologies surrounding recordings. So you've also talked about the challenges you've had with doing field recordings. And I believe you had used the word ‘deadening’ when you talked about this. And that reminded me of Dr. Sophie Chao's collaboration with the Marind people and how they see Western map-making to translate these dynamic living landscapes into flattened and linear representations as sort of deadening the place. It also reminded me of Dr. Enrique Salmón talking about Hopi elders who refused to have their knowledge recorded because they said that would kill it and that it needed to be alive when it's spoken and heard. So I'm curious to hear you dive deeper into the nuance of this medium of field recordings and recordings in general, perhaps, and what other difficult questions you've had to sit with as you engaged in them for your research?
AM Kanngieser: Recording is a difficult and troubling practice, and I sit with that all the time. It's often more and more, that I find myself not recording anything anymore. I haven't recorded in a long time. I think one of the key aspects for me is always thinking about where these technologies come from and their original purpose. And I think particularly if you look through disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, ethnomusicology, the ways particularly that Indigenous people were recorded by Anglo-European people for capture, to this idea of taking something and taking a recording of Indigenous culture and keeping it in some way as a defining characteristic or feature. But also the recording of Indigenous peoples as a marker of their impending extinction. The ways that recordings of Indigenous peoples and landscapes have been leveraged towards colonialism and white supremacy are very notable.
And that is something that doesn't get that much discussed in field recording practices, which is precisely why I wrote the Sonic Colonialities paper, because there is a strong tendency, particularly when people start working with interdisciplinarity, to remove the technology and to remove the method from its historical purposing and to kind of say, ‘well, we're not connected to that anymore.’ But I think there is a real danger in that.
I think we always need to look at why were these technologies created. What purposes do they serve, particularly around surveillance, eavesdropping and military deployment? A lot equipment like microphones come out of military research and development.
Where do these things come from? What was their purpose and usefulness? And how do I then interrupt or in some way intervene or grapple with that history and those purpose things of the technologies that I'm using? I don’t think recordings actually can capture that much. Recordings are a very inaccurate portrayal of a particular situation or a particular event or encounter.
For me, there's no delusion that it's like a representation, like a replica or representation of what something is. Recordings can only do so much. You're always limited by the technologies that you're using in that sense. But one of the big questions for me was always around permission and consent. And that is something that I've worked on for a long time now. I started with the questions around permission and consent and that is something that I have been working on for a very long time now. I started by recording people that I was collaborating with and interviewing in the framework of projects that I was doing around listening and ecocide in the Pacific.
And there's one process —that I'm not going to go into too much because it's like university bureaucracy and things like that—there's one set of processes for recording and interviewing people, which are complex problematic and troubling in themselves. But there is no real instruction for how to seek permission and consent from places, particularly not in Anglo-European cultures or ideas around documentation and recording. This is something that I found nothing about in terms of Western philosophy or geographical methods or anything like that. And I was very lucky and very privileged to be able to sit for a long time with people who with people in Kiribati and Fiji who talked me through, ‘what are you doing? How do you ask permission for a place? How do you seek permission to press that button to record?’
And with them, I developed over a long time, some tactics, I suppose. I wouldn’t call it a method, but some indicators where I could understand whether it would be okay for me to record or not. And in all of my work, I always erred on the side of no that was always my kind of base I will assume that it's probably not okay. If I receive a sign that it is okay, definitely, then I will go for it. But 90 per cent of the time I would leave something because I also learned quickly that when I didn't leave, things would go wrong with my technology.
I had one instance where I was swamped by a freak wave that destroyed my recording device. And then I decided that I was going to notate what I was hearing and my pen snapped and I was like, ‘That's fine. This is not for me to record. There are too many signs already now.’ So that was always the kind of process and is continually the process for me is erring on the side of no, because the times that I have recorded where I have received a very strong sense of a yes have been some of the most incredible, incredible moments for me, but they are very rare and few and far between.
Kamea Chayne: I imagine it might be difficult to even develop a universalized approach to seeking permission through research institutions because maybe the act of seeking permission looks different everywhere as well. So just like how there's no universal way of listening, there may also be very diverse ways of seeking and understanding what permission and consent look like. So yeah, maybe that's just something else that cannot be universalized like a lot of other things.
AM Kanngieser: Absolutely. One of the difficulties in even discussing this with people is that you're discussing on a level of energy and spirit and a feeling. Something that people often ask me is what does yes feel like? And it's so hard to explain to someone a feeling in your body, particularly when talking to people who might not be so connected to sensations in that kind of way. But it is not an easy thing for me. It's something that's come from decades of practicing and working on it and trying to figure it out because it's very important to the work that I do as well. But there are so many things that get lost in translation or that maybe should not be translated at all, which is something that I'm always very mindful of. That kind of search for some kind of method, I think is a misplaced one.
Kamea Chayne: Your work, as I mentioned earlier, just raises a lot of questions that I think a lot of us have never really thought about before. Like, do we even have the right to record the soundscapes around us? Does, as you ask, the waterfall want to be known by way of a recording? There are also more technical inquiries, like how recording devices pick up on different and limiting frequencies compared to our diverse living and multi-sensory experiences of listening. So listening to recordings cannot fully reflect one's experience from that situated movement.
There are also questions of what gets left out. As I go down these rabbit holes of intellectualizing these things, I also wonder to myself, what if sometimes becoming more attuned to the world isn't about sense-making or trying to place meaning on certain things that we open ourselves to sensing? And what if I'm being invited to just witness and experience and become porously present to the world without judgment or impositions of any of my subjective experiences?
And with that, how do I then balance or embrace the both/and of listening to just be and absorb or listen for signs to process or use to influence or guide my presence or relationships in some sort of way? And what do you mean when you talk about listening, not as turning away, but as sort of turning to?
AM Kanngieser: Yeah, for me listening is about responsiveness, which is very hard, right? I feel like so much of my life at least is this kind of sense of urgency or rush, or you always need to be on it. But with sound, I always feel like I'm behind the sound weirdly, right? Like the sound is happening and I'm just kind of following where it's going. I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know what's going to happen next. I have no idea.
And so in just being responsive and being a little bit behind and following the way that sound goes, I find that such an incredible way. I'm not saying it's easy. It's very difficult because it requires you to always kind of step back. Listening in that kind of way means that you can't anticipate what's gonna come. I'm running ahead of myself again, or I'm running ahead of this now, or I want this thing to happen, or I want that sound to come up now. It’s always being a bit behind.
I think for me, that's a useful practice in general to allow that gap between what I’m hearing and following to be there. If that makes sense? It's like inhabiting uncertainty at all times while you're listening without any expectation, without anticipation of what might come, but just observational uncertainty and embrace of that gap, of not knowing. And I think that's why I’m talking about turning into that uncertainty, turning into the not knowing and it being okay to not know, it being okay to maybe never know.
It's not about always knowing and grasping and holding and explaining and translating and understanding. Sometimes it's just about not knowing.
Kamea Chayne: And speaking of the gap in between, I'm aware that silence has also played an important role in your work as a sound artist and in your curiosities related to acoustic ecology, specifically on the soundscapes of ecocide. And here I think about how when we look at something visually and then it disappears, it might lead us to see some sort of afterimage. Or after having a snack, we might have a lingering aftertaste in our mouths because of the absence of what came before. So it makes that more powerful. And I know it can be challenging to articulate around silence, but I wonder about the after-effects of silence as well. Like what might arise when we become more attuned to that space in between or what is missing or what is left unsaid? What would you like to weave into these curiosities here?
AM Kanngieser: Yeah, silence is a deep preoccupation of mine because there are so many interpretations and understandings and meanings of silence. Silence is an extraordinarily overflowing and excessive thing, I find. And there's someone whose work has been very instrumental and important for me, Professor Unaisi Nabobo-Baba, who is a Fijian scholar who wrote a brilliant book called Knowing and Learning: An Indigenous Fijian Approach. She actually does a rigorous taxonomy of Indigenous Fijian or itaukei forms of silence and there are numerous forms of silence that she details. I found how she looks at cultural kinds of silences. There's silence around harvest time and silence within the village and silence within particular relationships to do with taboo and relational kinships and things like that.
But even just expanding the conceptualization of silence from the dichotomy of silence or being silenced, which often are kind of presented as oppositional things, really to kind of expand and say, no, there are all of these meanings and variations of silence in Indigenous Fijian culture and I think that that's an interesting way to kind of think, like, what could the other meanings of silence be? Because silence is not always about erasure. Like there was something there before and there's not something there now. Silence doesn't need to be necessarily bound to that. There can be very respectful silences. There can be very reverential silences. They can be very warm and inclusive silences. There are all these different kinds of silences that I think we experience and that we move with, but
For some reason, particularly in Western philosophy, silence is kind of diminished to this idea of lack or loss or emptiness, when really silence tells us so many different things that's not just about the omission of something.
Kamea Chayne: We started by talking about how there has been a lot of cultural critique about the visual gaze and you've invited us to interrogate listening and not see it as a universalized way of engaging the world. I know your work has focused more so on sounds and I'm also curious if you've thought through the ways that our other sensorial experiences ought to be interrogated as well, like our senses of touch, taste, smell, and ultimately what are the underlying threads here, as in where might leaning into these questions of universality lead us?
AM Kanngieser: Yeah, I think it's really interesting because I also don't think that listening can be taken away from the other senses. I never feel like there's this clear-cut distinction. I mean, I certainly feel like sometimes I could taste sounds or I can see sounds, the boundaries are messy. And just recently I had the opportunity with a collaborator of mine, artistic co-producer, Mere Nailatikau to work on a project called Oceanic Refractions, which was an interactive and immersive installation that's based a bit on the work that we've been doing in the Pacific. We worked with sound artists and filmmakers, but we also worked with an olfactory artist to create the scent of a story that I was told by a good friend of both Mere and myself, Krystelle Lavaki, who was a marine biologist at the time. She told us about her experience of going to Lau Island in Fiji after Cyclone Winston, which was a category five cyclone that made landfall in Fiji.
It was the worst cyclone to hit the Southern Hemisphere at the time. And she was talking about what the beach was like afterwards. She had to go there to kind of do an inventory of the scale of destruction on the marine life and the reef and stuff. And she was talking about just seeing the beach lined with the bodies of marine animals and seaweed and this kind of image of all of these bodies and plants and material like on the beach that shouldn't be there and talking about the smell of that, the post-apocoloptic kind of aftermath in a way.
We worked with an olfactory artist to try to recreate that smell or to create a smell that was similar to that and it was so interesting the different experiences and memories that people who interacted with the exhibition spoke about in terms of the smell so it evoked for people like a harbour that they grew up on or a bay where their grandparents lived. It had these kinds of resonances with people in all of these really interesting ways and it was so fascinating to think that again there is no universalized smell. Some people didn't smell the smell at all which was intriguing to me because for me it was like migraine level of overwhelm by that particular smell because it wasn't nice like I wouldn't classify it as a nice smell it was like the smell of like rotting fish and seaweed and diesel and plastic and it was a quite intense smell. But then someone also said that they could smell of feet and it was such a great experience to be like wow people interpret things differently. Even if for me, it was so clearly one particular thing.
And the fact that other people could smell something so different—not for the life of me would I have ever thought that someone couldn't smell is that it was just completely absent because it was such a strong smell. You could taste it almost, it was that dense. It was almost like you could feel the oiliness on your skin. So I think this exact approach to listening is, I feel, across all the senses, and I think that an idea of a universalized experience is it's just such a fallacy and I don't know why we still kind of default to that.
Kamea Chayne: Right. There's no objectivity and there's no universality and like smells and every other environmental cues are really richly storied and uniquely storied for each of our bodies. So that's very vital to remember. This has been super fascinating. We are coming to a close for our main discussion. Your work traverses so many themes and curiosities that I couldn't even begin to know how to ask. So I would love to leave this space for you to share anything else lingering on your mind that you feel called to share here, as well as any calls to action or deeper inquiry for our listeners.
AM Kanngieser: I don't think that there is a universal smell or a universal listening or anything like that. But I do think that there are spaces for resonance where we can have conversations about things and I think that it's in opening up that uncertainty where things become super interesting. It's really in opening up to say, ‘hey, this is my experience, what's your experience?’ Like to break down this tendency towards assimilating everybody's experience into your own, but allowing for difference as a fantastic thing, the necessity of working across and through with difference, rather than fearing it.
How do we organize across differences, not as a threat or something that needs to be absorbed into one understandable thing. But instead, how do we navigate our differences in a useful way?
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, AM, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honour to speak with you. So we appreciate you being here. As we wrap up, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
AM Kanngieser: I would say listening in itself isn't enough and that people will always tell you what they need so make sure that when people ask you something you enact what they actually are asking.
