Blackbird Songs: More-than-Human Aural Histories in the Anthropocene

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_chapter_18209
dc.contributor.author	Cortés Zulueta Concepción
dc.title	Blackbird Songs: More-than-Human Aural Histories in the Anthropocene
dc.type	Chapter
dc.language.iso	en
dc.description.abstract	Due to the anthropocenic momentum of the pandemic, birdsong turned into an alternative avenue of research. First, the relative human silence allowed birds to be more present and audible, even if they were singing at a lower volume, and this aroused a nostalgia for what we were losing to anthropogenic noise. Then, a reflection followed about how history and birdsong intertwined, even about birdsong as history, as a non-human or more-than-human history that sings and offers multispecies stories of a certain place and time. This chapter adopts a situated approach that combines academic research with moments of attentive listening and personal experiences involving birds and their sounds and specifically, blackbirds, and an individual male blackbird in particular. Stressing the materiality of the text and the instant (of listening, of writing) it attempts to offer, in parallel, blackbird episodes as lived and listened to from a human perspective together with a reflection on the songs of this blackbird as a collection of sounds (from other birds, from humans) selected from the surrounding soundscape in as many episodes, with the aim of presenting those songs as more-than-human stories and histories of that situated place.
dc.relation.ispartof	The Future Contemporary
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Venice University Press, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.issued	2023-12-14
dc.dateAccepted	2023-09-15
dc.dateSubmitted	2023-07-11
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/libri/978-88-6969-756-2/blackbird-songs-more-than-human-aural-histories-in/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/978-88-6969-756-2/003
dc.identifier.issn	2785-1613
dc.identifier.eissn	2785-0986
dc.identifier.isbn
dc.identifier.eisbn	978-88-6969-756-2
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
item.fulltext	with fulltext
item.grantfulltext	open
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Aurality
dc.subject	Birdsong
dc.subject	Blackbird
dc.subject	Mimicry
dc.subject	Narratives

Chapter
open access peer reviewed

Blackbird Songs: More-than-Human Aural Histories in the Anthropocene

Concepción Cortés Zulueta Universidad de Málaga, España

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abstract

Due to the anthropocenic momentum of the pandemic, birdsong turned into an alternative avenue of research. First, the relative human silence allowed birds to be more present and audible, even if they were singing at a lower volume, and this aroused a nostalgia for what we were losing to anthropogenic noise. Then, a reflection followed about how history and birdsong intertwined, even about birdsong as history, as a non-human or more-than-human history that sings and offers multispecies stories of a certain place and time. This chapter adopts a situated approach that combines academic research with moments of attentive listening and personal experiences involving birds and their sounds and specifically, blackbirds, and an individual male blackbird in particular. Stressing the materiality of the text and the instant (of listening, of writing) it attempts to offer, in parallel, blackbird episodes as lived and listened to from a human perspective together with a reflection on the songs of this blackbird as a collection of sounds (from other birds, from humans) selected from the surrounding soundscape in as many episodes, with the aim of presenting those songs as more-than-human stories and histories of that situated place.

Published

Dec. 14, 2023

Accepted

Sept. 15, 2023

Submitted

July 11, 2023

Language

ISBN (EBOOK)

978-88-6969-756-2

Keywords: Blackbird • Aurality • Birdsong • Narratives • Mimicry

permalink: http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-756-2/003

Copyright: © 2023 Concepción Cortés Zulueta. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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