Sonic ecologies - A conversation with Samuel Hertz

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

In this conversation, I'll be speaking with Samuel Hertz. Sam is a Berlin based composer, sound artist and researcher working at the intersections of sound, sonic sensualities and climate change. He is currently a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement III with a collective research focus on ecologies as well as human and more-than-human interactions. Today, we will talk about the notion of sonic ecology by discussing his research practice, where he investigates the connections between sound and climate through an emphasis on geologic, geographic, ecologic and social listening practices. Sam, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you! Thanks for having me.

Sam, as an artist and researcher, one of your prime interests is sound and the way sound allows for an embodied cognition of our relationship with the world, as well as into hearing practices as a material engagement with our environment in human and non-human scales. How did you develop this interest?

My background is as a composer, as you said, and I initially came to this work in graduate school, working in electronic music composition, studying mainly with Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne, two American composers who are very influential in my education. The reason why they were very influential has to do with a couple of different approaches to sound that I kind of fostered through studying with them. One comes more from Pauline's background, which has to do with this notion of deep listening, which is a particular practice that's instantiated somehow in training, but in my kind of more informal understanding of it it's a bit more of an embodied encounter with the world around you as a kind of listening apparatus and understanding listening as a sort of holistic function that happens-with and in communication with environments and other listening bodies around you. With Maggi Payne, who is another composer in Mills College, where I studied, I focused a bit more actually on the kind of importance of the role of the body and the physical practices of listening that are involved in how we understand the world around us in very discreet and concrete ways, through the combination of both of those; through a kind of focus in terms of physical acoustics and understanding physical acoustics and environmental acoustics as a sort of embodied approach that eventually led me to engage with the listening environment around us and then kind of transferring from there to environments as a whole. How do we understand environments around us through embodied listening practices and through acoustics practices? In that way, i am seeing the human body as a kind of nexus for physical and somatic understanding.

In your practice, you employ sound and performance as strategies for broadening our sensitivities and, while you were talking, I was also thinking about the notion of touch and specifically the way that it has been expressed by Karen Barad as a vehicle to accept and approach perhaps the infinite alterity of the self. I'm talking about the understanding that we are all entangled into relations of becoming, essentially constantly transforming and by exploring these other sensibilities, we are experiencing this infinitude of the world as it constantly unravels in the present. I was wondering how do you approach the materiality of sound within your practice?

For me, it was eventually through these studies of acoustics, the physics of it, and Karen Barad also definitely figures into this, like you said, with the notion of touch. I mean sound and listening properly is actually a physical phenomenon of touch, essentially. Because of how our sense of hearing is located, we understand them as being slightly separate things. So my resting my hand on my knee is distinctly different than me hearing the sound of your voice. But somehow, we can also understand these perceptive mechanisms as being very similar. A lot of this also comes from the work of another composer from the US, whose work I'm very indebted to, Maryanne Amacher, who did a lot of work around one specific phenomenon called otoacoustic emission, which is the fact that your ears are also producing sound at the same time as you're hearing. At the same time as we're being constantly touched by sound, we're also producing it at the same time. So, earlier when I said that the body turns into a little bit of a nexus between the sort of embodied approach and the physical touch of sound, this is true in a double sense, in the sense that we're actually co-creating with environments, because the way that we're hearing -cochlear hearing-, the sounds that we're perceiving are happening basically in conversations with sounds that come to us or sounds that touch us. For me, this becomes a really important baseline for the place where I take my understandings and research of sound after that. If we understand that sound and listening properly and being touched by sound as a co-creative act and one that can be understood somatically, also as touch and sensually as touch, rather than pretending that we're basically microphones walking around in a free floating world, for me, that becomes a really interesting baseline to start considering the political materiality of sound or environmental materialities of sound when we talk about fields like bioacoustics or again, in this political realm, coming from publications that people like Brandon LaBelle who talk about the political affect of sound. For me it's essentially this notion of touch that kind of puts all of these into frame as being not something that happens to us, not something that simply touches us, but that we kind of reach out and touch as well and that becomes incorporated also in how we understand sound as touched and touchable.

I think that this symbiotic relations that we are talking about, all this affective approach to the way that we live ties also to the program that you're part of right now, but also to the issues that you're exploring in climate change that we will talk about in a bit and the way that you approach that through your practice. I would like to go back to The School of Infinite Rehearsals. Its title is "everything equally evolved" and in one of our previous chats together, you were telling me about how we can define sound as something that...

That it moves... How did I say it before?

It moves equally...

It moves equally in all directions at the same speed.

Yes!

So, The School of Infinite Rehearsals is conceived as an interdisciplinary collective research program and Movement III has a collective focus on the issues of ecologies. I would like to know how did you decide to apply for the program?

My initial impulse to apply for the program was twofold. One, based on the kind of broad notion of ecology in the sense of meaning -I don't believe that the words are synonymous- but in the kind of popular understanding of ecology meaning environment, which I think we've done a nice job in our group of complicating these ideas. But for a while now, I've been working with the idea that sound can function as a very powerful tool for understanding environmental concerns. I would say simultaneous to that there's this notion in sound studies called 'sonic ecology'. It's a very broad term, but starts to encompass not only literal ecological frameworks of sound -the environmental-, but the ecology of sonic practices or ecologies of listening strategies. Those are quite close to me and I saw possibilities to pursue that type of research reflected in the collective research statement that was put on by the call. But secondly, particularly because of the -in conversation with James- the emphasis that he's putting and the way that he's thinking about the ecology of technology. Like in other work from other theorists, like Isabelle Stengers, who are talking about an ecology of practices, for example, or what James is referring to -also from another researcher whose name I'm now forgetting-: the idea that each field realizes what its own ecology is and that technology maybe is a field which hasn't quite realized fully its own ecology. I see that as quite related to a lot of work I'm doing right now research wise and also in performance practice about the field of bioacoustics. And there, we see a really interesting combination between technological apparatuses, the scientific technological apparatuses of measuring environments, measuring critical ecologies, understanding how interspecies and interspecies communication works and how those reflect changing environments and this is a technological procedure which is really bound in a lot of very interesting and more meta-conversations on the use of technology to track living environments and on how we understand essentially the ecology of that technology to be sort of woven into the fabric of our everyday lives or our Anthropocene lives, if you want to use this word. In that kind of double way, James's approach to what an ecology of the technological apparatuses or technological lived lives would be was very interesting for me to reconsider how I was already thinking about technology -somehow it was maybe a bit of a positivist sense-, to critique it or rearticulate it within bounds of people with very different practices and to see how those ideas could be fleshed out somehow.

I was thinking about the essay that you just mentioned. It also speaks about the need to suspend this one truth that scientists usually have and understanding the synapses between the different disciplines or the complexities within one discipline and how we, at least now, are in need of deconstructing this epistemological canon that has been there for so many years and trying to find how we can better collaborate together to get a better understanding of the world and also to get us through all of these destructive changes that the world is going through. Your essay "The Big Bang and What We Left Behind" was particularly enlightening to me. It was the fact that through this careful study of our sonic environment, we can also allow for a different conception of time. We are not waiting for a future to come and for the loss, but actually the process of losing is happening in an ongoing present, which I think is very important in what we're experiencing right now. But let's go back to your collective research here and the time that you've been spending as a group. As far as I know, you decided to focus on water and water bodies. Water is perhaps one of the very first indicators of climate change on a global scale and we hear a lot in the news about the fact that the sea levels are rising, while in the case of the lakes or the rivers, we observe the opposite and at the same time, water analysis shows us high levels of toxicity in the water. So, it's for sure a collective concern, but I would be interested to know how did you decide to work with water as a group and how did you actually make this decision together?

It came up in a really interesting way and quite early in our group's conversations. I can't really remember its sort of origin point, but it came up in a conversation and I think we kind of put an asterisk next to it to flag it and say "this seems to be something that's kind of occurring in all of our work", after visiting it a bit more, realizing that even though maybe individually some of our particular practices don't deal directly with water. Personally it's an issue I've dealt with tangentially through some of my research and I have one particular project, which is a collaboration between myself and Christina Gruber, called Zugzwang. We had an installation which dealt a little bit with that. I mean, it's water based essentially, but that's actually a bit more from Christina's side as she's a freshwater ecologist and I'm a composer. So that's one kind of personal engagement with it. But suffice it to say that I haven't been dealing with water as my main research practice. But as a group, we kind of came to it actually through the realization or a kind of thorough investigation of the properties of water and in looking at what the different properties of water are from a very abstract sense. I mean, you can talk about it concretely. You can say it's wet, it's a liquid, it can change states, it can become gas, it can become solid. Therefore, it's formless, but also somehow bounded. We began to follow this kind of thought process and really quickly in a giant brainstorm of maybe 20-30 different properties began to understand that those material relations we could all relate to directly in some way from our individual practices. And the more we kind of honed in on what our personal interests would be following those kind of qualitative impulses and what that could mean collectively as a group to all sort of focus on the same object, but from very different angles, we decided that that would be a very interesting way to start pursuing the research. So, that led us to a lot of very interesting places?

What water quality resonated with you?

I became particularly fascinated by what I think comes from the text of Astrida Neimanis who's talking about the need to basically consider the hydrologic cycle as being a very complex cycle. The understanding is and we're taught in school that it rains on the ocean and then some rain gets on land and then it gets evaporated back up into the sky and it's kind of a really easy circle. So, you just understand that water kind of moves in a circle rapidly and it quickly becomes clear that that's not really how the cycle works. Maybe you could consider it to be a very broad cycle where things move generally in a cyclical pattern, but it doesn't really actually bear out to be the case. There's a lot of cyclical components within this broader cycle. Water also can stay still in reservoirs for millions of years. So, if you consider a single water molecule, it's not guaranteed that it ever actually completes a full cycle. It can get stuck in a reservoir. It can be continuously caught between precipitation and transpiration for thousands of years. Maybe it never becomes salient water. Maybe it's constantly being filtered or something like this. For me, this is not really sound related, but in the same sense that led me to a similar type of temporal understanding as I approach with the way that I speak about how sound kind of reveals new temporal layers through scientific studies, like the field of bioacoustics. In the same way complicating the hydrologic cycle for me is a similarly interesting way to think about what's the sort of time-scale of movements of this very, very large and present mass on Earth, i.e. water. How is it moving around? Or mostly it's not moving actually. Also, 0.0005 % of water on Earth is actually moving at any moment in time, which makes you realize just how much water -there's not a better way to say it- there is on surface of the Earth and under the surface, and that huge kind of temporal scale of what we consider to be a cycle is actually stretching far beyond the visible and tangible moments of human access to the hydrologic cycle, which is mostly going swimming or getting caught in a rainstorm or seeing fog. This is the very small percentage of what's kind of going on. It's the easiest for us to latch onto because it's kind of the most available to us, sensually, but it kind of occults what's actually happening, this sort of grand scale or movement that's happening a bit behind the scenes that I think is really important for understanding things, like notions of deep time. That's why this complication is incredibly important for me.

How did you proceed with researching this subject and all the complexities of water? What path did you take as a group?

We've done a number of things. I would say the way that we started was also by understanding what these qualities were. We sort of dove into them a bit deeper and in a way explained to each other what our particular interests were also in terms of working on the publication, delineating what might be our particular interests and also expressing to the group what our kind of inroads are. Following from that impulse, essentially it came to the idea that it was going to be really hard to do this research in Athens. Of course there's water here and within Athens I'm sure that there's a huge amount of water politics going on, but we came to the idea that we wanted to be a bit more immersed and of course, it's a very weird time to be in the city.

Exactly!

It's impossible to travel and there's a lot of really interesting water components in the city in particular, but it was just actually harder in a weird way, harder to reach them than it was to leave the city. So, we kind of followed that impulse to figure out where is a place where we could go where sort of all of our individual perspectives on the interest of water-based research would be, a place that reflects that interest personally and then also collectively. Where is a place we could go to where we could also be immersed as a group to not only do fieldwork in the sense of observing and sampling and these sorts of things, but also to do an immersion with each other, to share practices, to develop tools and methods with each other? So, we came upon Prespes.

A trip is always a good idea!

Yes!

Prespes is in the north of Greece and there are also a lot of socio-political issues around these two lakes because the Greater Prespa is divided between three countries. How long did you stay there and what exactly did you do there?

We were there for a week and we made a bit of a schedule for ourselves. Because as you just mentioned, it's a quite -politically and socially- complex place, being that it sits on these three borders, which are also very fluid borders, we initially felt and continued to feel that we needed to meet people there. It would also be inappropriate to show up and just start looking at water because water would conveniently cover a lot of the political issues that happen there. And in fact, it's very ingratiated in the political issues. So, we wanted to deal with those at the same time. We managed to meet with a lot of really interesting people there that covered also a broad overview of what our particular interests would be. We met with biologists, people involved in conservation work, a mycologist, these sort of people, as well as with Stefanos who's sort of based there, but had done a lot of work about border conflicts and these sorts of things. We wanted to get a very broad spectrum and then beyond meeting people and talking to them there, we also were generally exploring the area and getting tips from locals on where to go to visit very specific locations. The area of Prespes is a national park and the national park exists on the Greek side, but is shared between Albania and North Macedonia as well, and it's a very specific ecology that's comprised of these two lakes, which also kind of exists in a sort of lake network that extends further North, which is partially where the political enters in a way. Around the lakes is a wetlands, which is a very fragile ecosystem and very particular to that area and this was sort of a big focus because it's a very easy place to see, where very conflicting conservation rules and regulations get played out basically in real time in front of your eyes. So, we did a lot of exploring of the wetlands, of the lakes themselves and of the mountain regions that are surrounding them.

You mentioned the borders and I also had the chance to listen to your discussion with Stefanos, -we are talking about Stefanos Levidis who is a researcher. In your discussion with him, I remember this very interesting point that he made that the borders are also kind of indicators of the climate change because when the lake level goes down due to the climate change, new lands are revealed and these are contested lands because they are in-between these borders. This takes me back to your research into climate change and I was wondering if there was a particularly interesting finding for you in this region.

Where I started to take a lot of interest is precisely in the realm of the border struggles. It's not that the borders are being actively struggled over right now, but the way that problematics that are related to conservation issues or issues resulting from climate change can be complicated by borders. That's something that also in terms of sound -coming from my personal practice- is hard to articulate in a way. But in the same sense, as I was mentioning with the hydrologic cycles, for me it is also something that bears a particular relationship to time, particularly in the way that conservation management works, because it's time related. I mean, it's about the understanding of yearly populations returning and again understanding the way that if this specific ecology should happen in a cyclical way. We had a really interesting talk with a biologist there who explained to us about the wetlands. I don't know exactly why I thought this way, but it was a conception in my mind that water levels should remain quite even. But it turns out for wetlands, it's actually helpful to encourage biodiversity. They're sort of fluctuating all the time, which doesn't also mean generally decreasing, which is obviously quite bad, but in the sense that this ecology should also be fluctuating and in cyclical ways. You can see over longer periods of time the fact that they is a slow degradation or a slow loss and that's accounting for essentially by conservation techniques. So for me, you can the wetlands, in particular there, as being a very interesting meeting point of border politics and seeing conservation wrapped up actually in issues of nationalism. What animals are protected because they're meaningful to a sort of sense of national pride? How much does water need to be regulated in the region? Because actually, the water from the Great Prespa is being lost to North Macedonia, but the flow to that lake is actually controlled by the Minor Prespa, which resides totally in Greece. So in a way, Greece has a little bit of control over how much water can be leaked into North Macedonia. And then, it becomes really a border issue that's maybe tied in with conservation issues, but you can understand that it suddenly gets a little bit complex when your conservation issues also can be easily mismatched on the other side of the border, where they're also probably trying to preserve very particular water levels. That's where my interest is.

It sounds very complicated.

Yes.

Did you make any field recordings there?

Yes, I have a number of really nice sound recordings, particularly from the wetlands. We were there in March, which is not really far into spring yet and the weather there is still quite cold. It was snowing for most of the time that we were there. But even then, in the wetlands, you can hear an enormous diversity of wetlands creatures moving around, birds, of course, but also more than birds and humans too were also in these recordings.

I'm very jealous. I'm looking forward to listen to that. But we're nearly in the end of our discussion and I'm curious to know what's next for you.

Currently I have two major active projects. The first one is an ongoing research project with also a performance output, which is called Librations and happens with my collaborator Carmelo Pampillonio, who's based in the US. The basis of it is producing what's called an Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) moonbounce, which uses radio telescopes to balance essentially off the surface of the Moon radio transmissions that we develop here. This is a project which has been ongoing since 2019 actually. We had a premiere of a performative version of it in early 2020, but the research is kind of ongoing as we're collecting more and more partners. It's a really fascinating research project. You mentioned earlier, Karen Barad and in a way it is based of a lot of the flipside of this notion of touch that we were talking about earlier, touch in the sense of being in physical contact. Karen Barad actually complicates that and says we're never really actually in physical contact. It's always sort of like a molecular repulsion. We kind of work with this idea of communication over very large distances and literally using the Moon as a reflector and a sort of collaborator in a way. We like to speak about the sensual identification with electromagnetics and the possibilities or impossibilities of touch and what it means to be touched or not touched at these very long distances at the speed of light. That's one ongoing project and the second one, which has been ongoing for quite some time as well, is based on the research I've been doing on the sort of more artistic side of bioacoustics research. It is a collaboration with my collaborator Layton Lachman in Berlin, which is called DOOM. DOOM is a sort of four headed doom metal band that we have created. I guess we were kind of making a compositional environment that is a little bit based or predicated on the scientific methodologies that come from bioacoustics. It also comes out of this essay of mine that you referred to earlier, "The Big Bang". Thinking about what are the ways that we can attune our senses of listening and sight and touch to detect very slow changes happening over long periods of time. It just happens through some research I was doing that I came upon "doom metal" and "drone metal" as a kind of performance strategy for this very heavy, low and deep sounds that evolve very slowly, but in a very sonically oppressive environment that really forces your body to feel the changes happening. Because of the kind of immense power of the sound, it's truly embodied and the smallest change can already give your body so much information. For me that really actually gets to the heart of what I can prescriptively aim for bioacoustics to educate about. It is to be able to understand very small changes as being in and of themselves quite significant.

I think we need to develop other conceptions of these sensations that you are talking about, because the only time I think I had this kind of deep listening -I don't know how to describe this sensation, but it relates to sound-, is while an earthquake is happening. Just before it starts happening the air vibrates and somehow you feel it and then it happens and of course you can hear it more clearly. But I'm thinking, why do we have to wait until it happens to get this kind of sensation?

Earthquakes are a really good example. There's a very famous "cyclorama". It was an exhibition that opened in London in the 1800s. I'm going to really have to fact check these dates, but it was kind of the first or one of the first surround sound multimedia performance experiences where they tried to basically recreate the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. That could be right as a date. They basically understood actually how to communicate the terror of an earthquake. Basically, they kind of made this sort of almost operatic recreation of it where they were really literally vibrating the seats and sending smoke in the room and they had this kind of panoramic painting with holes cut in it, so that you could see flames behind it. They really understood actually vibration, that in order to communicate the seriousness of this kind of Earth magnitude phenomenon, you actually also need to shake people. I mean, it has to be embodied. Maybe looking at pictures doesn't quite communicate the extent to which we need to understand the scope of what these changes mean for the Earth. And the same goes for looking at data, which doesn't mean we shouldn't look at graphs that show the decline of animal populations, but there is a somatic dimension. I think that's very important and kind of fermenting an understanding of what those changes mean to us and what's the significance of those changes beyond a conceptual understanding of the loss of numbers. I think that if we had a more embodied understanding or a more central relation to what loss really means, that would shift a lot of the ways that we continue to make even really practical things, like climate policy. I think those things become a lot more tangible to us when we can feel them.

I'm very curious to know how does the Moon sound like from your experience with the Moon sounds. I don't know if I'm getting this correctly.

Yeah, because the part of this Librations project is indeed recording, but the sounds that we're recording are, generally speaking, our own sounds that we're sending at the Moon and then kind of collaborating with it in a way, waiting for the sounds to make their return trip. The particularities of what our physical position to the Moon is and where exactly our signals are hitting on the Moon and where exactly our receiving station is and the atmospheric conditions between, there's a lot of changes that occur to the sounds that return. So, while the Moon doesn't have a sound in and of itself on the frequencies that we're listening for, it does definitely as a celestial body in and of itself affect our sound and so bears a kind of sonic signature upon the sounds that we work with.

Well, Sam, it's been a real pleasure talking with you today and thank you for your reflections on sound, materiality, time, space and all these wonderful ideas that you shared with us. I would like to close our discussion by making a very simple perhaps question for you as a sound artist, which is what is the most interesting sound that you've ever listened to?

Good question. The answer I'm going to have to go with is first that I think it changes all the time, but secondly, if I'm really thinking about it, I had a very particular experience. I was in Iceland and working on a residency there, working actually on this essay, on "The Big Bang" and with my collaborator Andrea doing recordings there and documentation for another publication we wrote at the time. We were taking daily trips out down the fjord. We were living in East of Iceland in Seydisfjordur, which is in one of this sort of glacial fjords along a path that's about 14 kilometers inland. You can do these really amazing hikes into the fjords around there and it came one day that we found ourselves at this huge overhang, looking straight down into the water and I could hear these amazing ducks there. It took me a while to figure out where they were and it turns out they were actually quite close to me. It's one of their nesting places and they were in such a huge mass and producing such an enormous volume of sound that wasn't really reaching me directly -because I was kind of sitting on top of them- rather was bouncing back across the fjords and it made this enormous echo, which is a totally astounding way to hear space. You can't really understand. You can hear the ducks in particular. I mean, you can eventually understand that they're ducks, but it made this completely mind-blowing avalanche of sound. I have a recording of it and it totally doesn't sound like I was hearing it in person, but it was such a particular psycho-acoustic effect that I was trying to replicate with the microphone. It's a really great recording. I have to say that it was an ephemeral experience because it faded, but it had this kind of unendingly powerful avalanche of sound which was happening. You can also see this vast space that we're standing in front of and it really sounded like it. That's an experience that's hard even for a sound artist maybe to replicate.

That sounds very sublime!

Yes, that would be the word.

Well, thank you for this memory and thank you for this discussion and I hope that you come back to Athens very soon!

I would love to! Thank you, Myrto.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations. Please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.