Australian Feminist Studies

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Sonic Technoecology: Voice and Non-

anthropocentric Survival in The Algae Opera

Milla Tiainen

To cite this article: Milla Tiainen (2017) Sonic Technoecology: Voice and Non-
anthropocentric Survival in The�Algae�Opera, Australian Feminist Studies, 32:94, 359-376, DOI:
10.1080/08164649.2017.1466651

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AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 32, NO. 94, 359–376
https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1466651

Sonic Technoecology: Voice and Non-anthropocentric Survival

in The Algae Opera
Milla Tiainen
Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

ABSTRACT
Prompted largely by human-induced ecocrises, interspecies
performance, which examines the enmeshment of human
existence and responsibility with other species and the more-
than-human world, is a proliferating trend in the performing arts
and in their study. While there have been notable sound-based
performances working with interspecies themes in recent years,
there is a paucity of detailed, let alone feminist, research on these
projects. This article addresses this by examining the potentialities
of sound in interspecies performance, as exemplified by the
musical and multisensory project, The Algae Opera, and by
introducing the concept of sonic technoecology into studies of
performance and feminist non-anthropocentric theories.
Reconfiguring the quintessentially Eurocentric sphere of Western
opera, The Algae Opera by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta
presents possibilities of multispecies survival and points to
ontological and ethical stances beyond the human through an
experimental, ecologically sustainable practice of food production.
This practice interrelates an opera singer with purpose-built
biotechnology and cultures of algae. With my concept of sonic
technoecology, I demonstrate how this project uses the technicity
and connective, ecological capacities of the singing voice and
musical composition to enact horizontal relationality across
traditionally separated terms, from human and other-than-human
to corporeal and technical.

Interspecies performance is a proliferating trend in theatrical and performing arts and their
study. This is evidenced by the ongoing expansion of artistic projects, theorisations, and
publications that explore the mutually constitutive relations between humans and other
species, as foregrounded or refashioned by means of performing arts. Humans’ inter-
relationship with other animals, and generally with the world beyond the human, is not
a novel concern in the field of performance studies. It can be traced back several
decades to site-specific performances, ecological theatre, and growing interest in
animal studies (see, for example, Chaudhuri 2003; Pearson 2010; Arons and May 2012).
Yet, as argued by Courtney Ryan (2013) and Tuija Kokkonen (2014), among others,
there is a heightened awareness, in contemporary performance – especially interspecies
performances – and its field of study, of the ontological co-formation of human and

CONTACT Milla Tiainen milla.tiainen@helsinki.fi

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
360 M. TIAINEN

other-than-human beings, in contrast to traditional naturalist taxonomies that place

human–animals above all other species, and organic and non-organic matter generally.
Consequently, performance projects that engage with the more-than-human1 stress the
need to unlearn deeply ingrained Western ideas about human separateness, sovereignty,
and exceptionality. This paradigmatic change has been largely brought about by the signs
and repercussions of anthropogenic climate change, the sixth mass extinction, and eco-
crises (such as pollution and decreasing biodiversity) that have become a part of daily
experiences globally (Kokkonen 2014, 179–180).2 The cultures of performing art are
increasingly engaging in what Haraway (2016) calls ‘staying with the trouble’. Many endea-
vours in interspecies performance probe the ‘modest possibilities’ of multispecies flourish-
ing, ‘partial recuperation and getting on together’ on this troubled planet, which is
endangered by the human, gendered, racialised, and classed pursuits of capitalism and
exploitation of both humans and other-than-human nature (Haraway 2016, 2, 10).
Performance projects and related analyses have already inquired into the enmesh-
ments of human existence and responsibility with various co-species. To give some
examples, they have highlighted the co-influencing relationships between people,
urban plants, and social issues through portable plant installations (Ryan 2013); sought
‘flat’, instead of hierarchical, forms of economic collaboration between humans and
more-than-humans, from sheep to trees through performance of new ‘technological/
data/matter assemblages’ (Nikoliċ 2011); explored theatrical plays that foreground and
revision the overlapping of human and insect lifeworlds in the time of ecocrises (Chaud-
huri 2013); and focused on the flora and fauna and ecological issues of particular sites
(Arlander 2014; Kokkonen 2014; Kokkonen and Read 2014). Many of these inquiries
draw on feminist research in the areas of new materialisms and environmental theory,
non-anthropocentric or posthumanist thought, and biophilosophy.3
Although there have been notable music and sound-based performances working with
interspecies themes over the past few years, there is scarce detailed, let alone feminist,
research on these projects (however, see Neumark 2017; Tiainen, Forthcoming). This
article starts filling this gap by examining the potentialities of sound and music in interspe-
cies performance. Directing attention to the sonic seems urgent in the case of performing
art endeavours that examine the ontological interconnectedness of human and more-
than-human processes. This is because, as researchers in sound studies, feminist theory,
and philosophy have argued, sound has a distinctive capacity to emerge in and establish
relations (Cavarero 2005; Dolar 2006; Fast 2010; Goodman 2010; Thompson 2017). Sounds
can work to demarcate spaces, times, subjects, and things, but they can also be powerful
agents of connection. The material and sensory qualities of sound – as dispersed air
pressure waves apprehended by the human sensory apparatus and other sentient and
material beings – can produce transversal relations that confound and challenge many
foundational distinctions of Western traditions of thought, such as self/other, inside/
outside, human/environment, and animate/inanimate. Thus, sound in its myriad forms
may offer an effective means to demonstrate the co-implication of humans and more-
than-human organic and inorganic entities, and to dispel the imaginary privileged discre-
teness of the human.
My main aim in this essay is to begin to explore the hitherto scarcely studied signifi-
cance of the more-than-human relationality of sounds to interspecies performance and
feminist non-anthropocentric thinking. I examine how this significance is exemplified by
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 361

the musical and multisensory project, The Algae Opera (2012–), while introducing the
concept of sonic technoecology as a new intervention into discussions of performing
arts, possible multispecies survival, and non-anthropocentric theory. This concept refers
to co-constitutive relationships between sound, life forms (human and other-than-
human), and technology that stage an ontological ethics that decentres or disperses
the ‘human’. As I outline in more detail below, I formulate sonic technoecology as a
means for exploring horizontal relationality across heterogeneous beings instead of verti-
cal hierarchy, and how this relationality can be effected through sound. As The Algae Opera
works with the supposedly most human type of sounds, the embodied (singing) voice, my
approach is new in connecting and encouraging engagement between feminist posthu-
manisms, new materialisms, and voice studies. The latter is a burgeoning interdisciplinary
domain that investigates both specific vocal practices and the significance of voice to such
wide concerns as embodiment, subjectivity, and technology (see, for example, Neumark,
Gibson, and van Leeuwen 2010; Tiainen 2013; Thomaidis and Macpherson 2015).
Occasionally, this tangle of previously rarely connected approaches will also include
insights from feminist musicology and the recent field of ecomusicology, which focuses
on the co-influencing relations between musical practices, endangered material environ-
ments, and human attitudes toward more-than-human nature or worlds (see, for example,
Allen and Dawe 2015).
The Algae Opera was devised by London-based designers and conceptual artists
Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta. Its début performances took place in September
2012 in the courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum during the London Design Festi-
val.4 Burton and Nitta collaborated with opera singer Louise Ashcroft, composer Matt
Rogers, and actor Samuel Lewis to create a vocal experiment that brought human and
algae-life forms together through sound and taste. In this performance, singer Ashcroft
wears a biotechnological suit and mask, designed by Burton and Nitta, equipped with
transparent tubes that transfer carbon dioxide from the singer to glass tanks containing
algae. The algae feed on the carbon dioxide exhaled by the singer during her acts of voca-
lisation which are specifically designed and modified for this purpose. They are then, in
turn, eaten by the gathered audience in the form of a sushi-like meal.
A key distinguishing feature of The Algae Opera, then, is its emphasis on the mutually
defining relations between humans, other species (particularly algae), and technologies
through vocal sound and breath. More precisely, this is the only arts project I know of
that elaborates on the vocal techniques and musical composition of the Western opera
form in a type of interspecies performance with detectable leanings toward non-anthro-
pocentric thinking and questions of ecological sustainability.
In this article, I aim to contribute to the non-anthropocentric strands of thought in per-
forming arts and feminist research by exploring how The Algae Opera presents possibilities
of multispecies survival on ‘a wounded earth’ (Haraway 2016, 10). As an ‘opera’, this is a
work that is based on a quintessentially Eurocentric art form that is historically enmeshed
in racial, class, and gender inequalities (Lyne 2005) and lauded as a musical-dramatic art
that approaches the sublime heights of human expression. In reconfiguring opera as a
more radical art, The Algae Opera goes some way in challenging Western anthropocentr-
ism, human exceptionalism, and passive nature, and the attendant views of the human
subject modelled mainly on white, adult, affluent males (see, for example, Alaimo and
Hekman 2008, 1–22; Braidotti 2013, 13–30).
362 M. TIAINEN

I attempt to demonstrate the more-than-human potentialities of The Algae Opera in

relation to the following questions: How are the human body–voice and acts of (operatic)
performing used in The Algae Opera as ways to bring into view co-constitutive relationships
between humans and species or other-worldly processes that are more-than-human? How
can the operations of the project’s vocal performance be conceptualised as technoecological
capacity? What kind of agency, if any, do the algae exhibit in The Algae Opera’s relations
between the human and the more-than-human? In so far as this project amounts to an inter-
species performance in the sense of aspiring to possibilities of multispecies survival and non-
anthropocentric ontological and ethical stances, how might this aspiration be discernible in
the project’s musical techniques? How could these techniques be conceptualised with the
notion of sonic technoecology? Finally, are there tensions in The Algae Opera between
views of ontological interdependence and the persistence of human exceptionalism?

Music for the age of ecocrises?

The Algae Opera is a collaborative venture across different art forms, types and scales of
being, and areas of concern. This orientation resonates with Michael Burton and
Michiko Nitta’s description of their projects as collaborations with varied individuals and
institutions spanning the fields of performance, choreography, design, architecture, and
science. The thematic foci of these projects include human futures in relation to technos-
cientific development, current interrelations among humans and other-than-human
nature, and the search for newly viable symbioses between humans and wider nature
(BurtonNitta 2012–2015).
The project’s most foregrounded human actor, from the audience’s vantage point, is
mezzo-soprano Louise Ashcroft. She is trained both in ‘classical’ operatic singing and in
what is known as ‘extended vocal techniques’.5 Standing and gesturing in front of the
audience, Ashcroft performs the vocal textures that are pivotal to The Algae Opera. Diver-
ging from mainstream ‘classical’ voice techniques, especially in terms of the power and
audibility of breathing, these textures were crafted for the project by her and the British
award-winning contemporary composer Matt Rogers under the pseudonym of Gameshow
Outpatient (BurtonNitta 2012–2015).
Ashcroft’s acts of sound production are intrinsically connected to a type of algae at the
level of performance arrangements and in terms of their desired aesthetic (or sensorial)
and material effects. While vocalising, Ashcroft is conjoined with aggregates of algae via
the elaborate-looking mask-suit. The task of the mask-suit and tubes is to transport the
carbon dioxide in Ashcroft’s breath to the algae so as to enhance their growth. The
project works with a type of green algae, which are a large and ancestrally heterogeneous
group of photosynthetic organisms, some of whose life on Earth spans hundreds of
millions, if not billions, of years. In The Algae Opera, the algae dwell in glassy tanks next
to Ashcroft’s smallish performance podium, immersed in liquid that contains some fertili-
ser. Meanwhile, actor Samuel Lewis, who is clad in a lab coat and chef’s apron, performs
behind a table on the other side of the podium. He transfers bits of algae, which have been
‘nourished’ by Ashcroft’s breath, from small glass containers to slices of sushi. The project’s
audiences can then taste these mixed outcomes of plant life, technological intervention,
and human activities, ranging from distinctive vocal and breathing techniques to the
use of a fertiliser (BurtonNitta 2012–2015).
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 363

The thematic setting that Burton and Nitta outline for The Algae Opera’s interrelations
among humans, algae, specific performance practices, sound and air pressure waves,
purpose-built technology, and nutritional acts can be linked quite readily to ecocrises,
such as food insecurity precipitated by rapid changes in weather patterns. They ponder
the likelihood that the kinds of algae figuring in the project will be an ‘important future
food source’ for the earth’s populations – human, but potentially also other animals (Bur-
tonNitta 2012–2015). This scenario is at the core of the project’s narrative frame. Imagining
what life on earth will be like in the near future, Ashcroft proposes that by the year 2060,
algae will have become the globe’s chief food supply (Ashcroft 2012a). Despite its futurist
orientation, this scenario can be seen as referring to the already unfolding ecosystemic
changes, such as declining biodiversity, which are caused by climate change and other
human-induced planetary mutations, and to the ecological costs of current industrialised
food production, which will force global changes in the growing, processing, and con-
sumption of foods (albeit along geopolitically, socio-economically, ethnically, and environ-
mentally differentiated lines). It is in relation to these shifting prospects of earthly food
supplies and living conditions that The Algae Opera’s human participants emphasise the
transformative functions of operatic singing. Through the interdependent relationships
of her body, the algae, and biotechnology, Ashcroft’s vocalisations contribute to a new
experimental form of food production (BurtonNitta 2012–2015; Ashcroft 2012b). This
mode of production would be ecologically sustainable, in the sense that it engages in a
low-energy and pollution-free manner with an organic species which is arguably able to
thrive on the changed earth. Therefore, human cropping and consumption would not
endanger it.
While The Algae Opera raises interesting questions about the constitutive relatedness of
humans to other species and about survival in the age of ecocrises, many aspects of the
project could be subjected to feminist and intersectional critique. For a start, although the
project touches on apparently global issues, its key human performers, Ashcroft and Lewis,
are white and able-bodied. They thus represent privileged groups in both local and global
systems of power. This is far from insignificant with regard to the capacities to deal with
problems caused by environmental changes to humans and our co-species. Secondly, the
respective tasks of these performers imply problematically familiar gendered divisions of
labour. Singing was for a long time – and still remains – the most socially available form of
music-making for subjects categorised as women in the fields of opera and other Western
music cultures (Green 1997; Cusick 1999; Cavarero 2005). Meanwhile, the roles of scientist
and chef are coded as masculine. Moreover, Ashcroft’s role as the nurturer of the algae can
be associated with the various responsibilities of care-giving traditionally assigned mostly
to women. Finally, it is worth questioning whether The Algae Opera enables significant
reconsideration of ‘who initiates and dictates the terms of the event, and, crucially, who
or what benefits from it’, to quote Knowles’s (2013, 316) postulation about interspecies
performance. Do the algae play an active part in the project? Or do they mainly provide
lively raw material for human needs in a manner that replicates old power hierarchies
between humans and other-than-human nature? Indeed, when attending the project’s
first performances in London, my initial impression was that agency – in the sense of a
capacity to initiate states of affairs or make a difference – rested with the project’s
human performers, while the algae seemed pliable targets of action
364 M. TIAINEN

Without brushing these well-justified critiques aside, I will nonetheless seek to illustrate
in the course of this essay that The Algae Opera also involves non-anthropocentric and
non-androcentric potentialities beyond the gendered, racialised, and human-centred
limitations sketched above. These potentials necessarily exceed the intentions of the pro-
ject’s human makers. They reside in the various documented processes of the project’s
emergence and are formed in conversation with relevant theoretical debates. To
borrow the phrasings of Braidotti (2013, 73, 89), I will focus on such dimensions in The
Algae Opera that, in their subtle ways, promote ‘creatures of mixity’ across the traditionally
separated terms of human, other-than-human, physical, and technical, and which point to
‘trans-species flows of becoming’ as the necessary condition of a shared and perhaps still
modestly attainable planetary survival. Mapping these dimensions is all the more impor-
tant given the profound complicity of Western modernity, societies, and cultures in the
making of Earth’s ecological crises. Because of this complicity, it is urgent that Western
practices, including the performing arts, participate widely in striving for liveable futures
for a multitude of beings. Sonic technoecology is a useful conceptual collaborator in exam-
ining how The Algae Opera arguably participates in these endeavours.

Assembling the concept of sonic technoecology

Following feminist elaborations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy, I view
concepts as always composed of several conceptual or ideational elements, and as
open-ended potentialities which help to make sense of the world and transform its
states of affairs in ever-renewing connections (see Colebrook 2005, 1; Moisala et al.
2017, 6–7). Let me offer the following starting points regarding sonic technoecology.
My understandings of technology, and technique, are drawn from recent feminist
media theory developed, for instance, by Kember and Zylinska (2012). Through a re-
reading of Marshall McLuhan and other media theorists, Kember and Zylinska (2012, 7)
argue that ‘the question of technology’ must be regarded simultaneously as ‘the question
of biology’. With this, they refer to how ‘we’ humans – our sensorium, ideas, biological
states and life prospects – rely on the informational, communicational, medical, and
other technologies that populate our worlds. We are ontologically ‘part of that technologi-
cal environment, and it makes no more sense to talk of us using it, as it does of it using us’
(Kember and Zylinska 2012, 13). Furthermore, Kember and Zylinska (21) insist that technol-
ogies and the techniques of using them must be comprehended in terms of constant
emergence. Importantly, Norie Neumark, among others, has recently drawn similar scho-
larly attention to the voice. The relations of the human voice to media and other technol-
ogies must be considered as co-determining and ever-evolving. However, as a bodily and
sonic phenomenon, the voice is already, in itself, a result of specific corporeal, social, and
mental techniques (Neumark 2010, xv, xx–xxiii; Tiainen 2013). I will elaborate on these
overlapping conceptions of technology, technique and voice in my readings of human
and more-than-human vocality in The Algae Opera.
My understanding of ecology expands the insistence on co-extensiveness stressed by
Kember and Zylinska in regard to humans and technological environments. Rather than
referring only to the interrelationships of living beings with each other and with physical
milieus, I understand ecology as an even broader ontological principle of relationality that
concerns heterogeneous types of being. Ecologies, in this sense, consist of the ways that
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 365

‘diversities co-inhabit the same field of becoming … and co-compose’ this becoming, rela-
tive to one another (Manning and Massumi 2014, 22, see also viii, 109, 128). Accordingly,
an ecology may comprise any more or less consistent, yet dynamic, set of relations that
affect the state and capacities of the actors, things, and fields involved in those relations
(on the understanding of ecology evoked here, see also Guattari 2000; Fuller 2007). A
similar ecological understanding is discernible in several influential reconsiderations of
agency and human corporeality developed in recent years by feminist theorists of new
materialism, such as in Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality (2008, 2010) and Jane Bennett’s
agency of assemblages (2010). Trans-corporeality views human embodiment in terms of
transits and impacts between or across specific human bodies and the varied material
forces of their environment (Alaimo 2010, 1–22). Departing from atomistic models, Ben-
nett’s approach recasts agency as a capacity to act that always depends on ‘the collabor-
ation, cooperation, and interference of many bodies and forces’ (2010, 21). Notably,
parallel views of ecology are also being articulated in ecomusicology. There is a pervasive
emphasis in this field on how the states of other-than-human nature and human practices
and attitudes, including those apparent in musical activities, are mutually affective and
thus ontologically entangled in complex ways (Rehding 2002; Torvinen 2012). My
notion of sonic technoecology draws on these different but resonating theoretical
strands while directing attention to the work of sound in interspecies performance and
(feminist) non-anthropocentric thinking.

Operatic voice as technoecological capacity

When explaining the participation of an operatically trained singer in The Algae Opera, the
project’s instigators, Burton and Nitta, announce somewhat vaguely that they identified
‘the opera singer as the perfect body morphology for the production of algae’ (BurtonNitta
2012–2015). This statement begs the question about the more specific operations and
meanings of Ashcroft’s voice and body in the project. What was the significance of her
background in ‘classical’ singing to these operations? How did her voice and body
become reconfigured in their communion with the other elements of The Algae Opera?
Let me begin with Burton and Nitta’s (2012–2015) introductory summary of the project
and their articulation of Ashcroft’s role therein:
[In The Algae Opera, a]n opera singer is transformed with biotechnology to form a unique …
relationship with algae. The algae, which are a photosynthetic plant-like organism, feeds on
… the carbon dioxide in the singer’s breath. As an important future food source, the singer’s
… algae can also be eaten.

Burton and Nitta elaborate:

The role of transformation in The Algae Opera is a physical and cultural one … The singer’s
large lung capacity was perfect to exhale the maximum CO2 to feed the algae. To facilitate
the process further, the singer, Louise Ashcroft, worked with composer, Gameshow Outpati-
ent, to re-design her singing technique. (BurtonNitta 2012–2015)

In the first quote, Burton and Nitta demarcate the ‘technological’ rather conventionally, as
they restrict this notion to the mask-suit. In claiming that it is this construct that is respon-
sible for bringing about ‘a unique relationship’ between the opera singer and algae, their
depiction echoes certain traditional understandings of (technical) mediation that have
366 M. TIAINEN

posited technical or other material and symbolic mediums ‘as a third intervening and
negotiating factor’ between otherwise distinct and thus ontologically pre-constituted
terms (see Kember and Zylinska 2012, 19–20). However, Burton and Nitta also draw atten-
tion to more multi-directional and co-constitutive relations between the mask-suit struc-
ture, Ashcroft, and algae. Considered technoecologically, the realm of the technological
or technical in this project simultaneously expands from biotechnology to Ashcroft’s
body–voice and the growth of the algae.
This expanded understanding emerges in relation to the artists’ reference to the
‘perfect’ suitability of Ashcroft’s embodied capacities for this project, meaning primarily
her ‘large lung capacity’ that helps her to feed the algae. This reference brings forth the
specific technicity of Ashcroft’s singing body and voice. As voice artist and researcher
Norie Neumark reminds us, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and several other researchers
from history to cultural studies have devised concepts of technique in order to examine
the manifold co-determinations between the bodily activities and labour distinctive to a
society or a part-culture and individual bodies and psyches, though these co-determi-
nations are never inalterable. Scholars such as philosopher François Dagognet have con-
sidered voice as a technique that inhabits the mind–body juncture and concerns particular
bodily movements, like those of the diaphragm, the musculature, and breathing (Neumark
2010, xx–xxi). Elaborating on these views, Neumark (xxi) posits that voices are effects of
‘the techniques through which someone learns to walk, breath, and run – affecting how
much oxygen she gets, how she develops her nerves and muscles, how she nourishes
and shapes her organs’.
Burton and Nitta’s contention about the specific capabilities of Ashcroft’s body and
breathing resonates with the above ideas. It indicates the way that her movements,
organs, and skills have taken shape in a particular cultural and technical musical sphere:
that of Western ‘classical’ and operatic singing. Conceived in this manner, the ‘technical’
in The Algae Opera is not limited to other-than-human technologies and built apparatuses.
It also encompasses the varied, always historically and socio-culturally situated, techniques
of the human body – and voice. At the same time, these techniques interrelate with many
kinds of alterity, to use Kember and Zylinska’s (2012, 17–18) term, which invokes the inter-
dependence between human activities and more-than-human entities. In The Algae Opera,
one of these forms of alterity is the biotechnology which reconfigures the existing
capacities of Ashcroft’s body–voice apparatus.
Traditionally, the techniques of operatic singing have helped to advance various gen-
dered, ethnocentric, and classed agendas. In ‘classical’ music culture and opera, voices are
still usually categorised into dichotomously gendered voice types, such as the sub-cat-
egory of mezzo-soprano for female singers, which Ashcroft represents. Despite becoming
more multiethnic and transcultural during the past decades, the world of Western opera
has a heavily Eurocentric history associated with white upper-class and bourgeois lifestyles
and is notorious for the othering of non-white ethnicities (see, for example, McClary 1992;
Potter 1998, 47–66, 158–159; Smart 2000). These linkages are still present in The Algae
Opera through Ashcroft’s background in ‘classical’ singing.
Yet the project transposes her bodily-vocal techniques toward new relations and fields
of operation. Interlocked with the transmissive capacities of the mask-suit, Ashcroft’s
singing and breathing reincarnate here as techniques for nourishing the algae. In this
project, the value of her techniques resides mainly in their ability to affect the living
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 367

material composition, enhance the edibility, and support the growth of an other-than-
human species. It is these renewing relations of operatic singing to which Burton and
Nitta arguably refer with their above remark on ‘physical and cultural transformation’.
Or, to quote Haraway (2016, 2), the technicity of Ashcroft’s vocality and breathing function
in this project in a new more-than-human assemblage of ‘living-with and dying-with’,
which thrives on co-constitutive relations and is at least moderately multispecies-friendly
(see also Neumark 2017, 11). While this assemblage does entail the fostering and then the
ending of algae life for the sake of human alimentary needs, the exploitation is modest in
scale and it does not threaten the overall survival of this or related species.
If technology and techniques thus designate both human and more-than-human pro-
cesses, and if ecologies concern the ways diversities ‘co-compose’ a field of becoming
(Manning and Massumi 2014, 22), then the operatically trained body–voice of The Algae
Opera can be described in terms of sonic technoecological capacity. This capacity pertains
to technology and techniques in so far as it relies both on the learned actions of a singing
human body and on its physical, ontological cooperation with a more-than-human device.
The capacity is ecological in so far as it does not exist as the singer’s self-contained prop-
erties. Rather, it actualises and exercises specific effects in the relations among, or across,
The Algae Opera’s heterogeneous elements.

The agency of the algae in the performance assemblage

Do the algae play any kind of active role in The Algae Opera’s configuration of relations? Do
they affect the project’s unfolding and other participants or are they merely the object of
actions? To what degree is The Algae Opera ‘a horizontalist and rhizomatic project in which
no one partner in the exchange and negotiation dominates’, to deploy Knowles’s (2013,
316) postulation about the aims of interspecies performance, and in so far as the
project includes this kind of horizontally distributed participation, does it extend to the
algae? I argue that while humans may figure as the project’s most obvious relationally
operating agents (due in no small part to our anthropocentric perceptual habits), the
algae, too, display some agency that emerges in the relations and collaborations within
this performance assemblage (see Bennett 2010, 9, 21). Some indication of this relational
agency can be found in Ashcroft’s (2012a) reflections in one of her blog posts:
The opera voice, traditionally built for the size of the opera house and therefore requiring a
sustained line, is re-built [in The Algae Opera] to the food needs of the world’s population
… Due to this re-design, the musical structure and performance practice of today’s operatic
tradition shift and enter a future state … This design means I have to make a significant
shift in the use of breath. The algae mask … requires a non- reflexive breath cycle to maximise
CO2 output. This means the singer needs to take the breath cycle to the point of collapse. In
today’s opera tradition, this type of breath cycle is considered inefficient and undesirable due
to issues surrounding sustainability and aesthetic. However, in The Algae Opera, a breath cycle
based on a point of collapse is considered efficient and ultimately desirable, for it produces
more algae.

Signs of the agency of the algae can arguably be noticed when Ashcroft explains how she
needed to transform aspects of her operatic singing technique in relation to the ‘algae
mask’ and the growth of the algae, which further relate to the ‘food needs of the
world’s population’. In particular, she discusses the process of unlearning a reflexive
368 M. TIAINEN

breath cycle, which refers to a ‘natural’ (largely unconscious) way of breathing. In place of
this type of breathing, Ashcroft strove to develop a highly intensified breath cycle up to a
‘point of collapse’. These sorts of maximal inhalations and exhalations produced more
algae by enhancing their rate of growth and flourishing, even though this kind of breath-
ing technique goes against the aesthetic preferences of mainstream ‘classical’ singing
(such as the vocalisation of long notes and attendant ‘economic’ expenditure of air).
The way the algae thus seem to have affected Ashcroft’s voice production and thereby
human activities in The Algae Opera can be examined with new materialist theorist Ben-
nett’s (2010) potent transpositions of Western understandings of agency beyond individu-
alism and exclusive anthropocentrism. Following Bennett, the agency of the algae could
be considered as both negative and positive thing-power, which Bennett (2010) theorises
as the active role of other-than-human materials and beings in everyday life and which, in
her view, always occurs relationally. The algae exhibited negative, resistive power because
their specific materiality did not conform to human plans through any means whatsoever.
Ashcroft had to change her bodily habits before this materiality responded in the desired
manner. The agency of the algae was positive and productive because these organisms
inspired new human behaviours and contributed to an experimental interspecies mode
of coexisting (Bennett 2010, viii, 1–2, 9).
Similar notions of positive and negative power can be applied to the algae more gen-
erally. As an organic species that can apparently thrive in changing ecosystems, they may
significantly shape life (human and other) in the future through their role as edible matter.
For Bennett (2010, 39–43), edible materialities provide a salient example of the agency of
other-than-human beings, both inside individual human bodies and mental dispositions
and in terms of their broader societal effects. On the other hand, there are currently
efforts in several parts of the globe to manage so-called Harmful Algal Blooms that prolifer-
ate in the oceans due to anthropogenic nutrient pollution. While fish, marine mammals,
and corals die of the pollution, (micro-)organisms such as algae and bacteria grow profu-
sely. This is frequently considered ‘bad’, from a human standpoint, due to the toxins that
accumulate in these oceanic creatures, but also because they do not represent the kinds of
life humans find attractive (see, for example, Schrader 2012). From this perspective, algae
is not necessarily considered to be a useful co-species for humans. Implicated in the sixth
mass extinction that involves the polluted oceans, they also display material and relational
agency beyond human control and designs. This aspect adds complexity and poignancy
to the presence of algae in The Algae Opera.
To return to the technoecological capacity of voice in the project, its co-emergence with
the agency of the algae makes it clear that this voice does not only affect its environs and
the vocaliser’s fellow beings. It is also affected by the other, more-than-human, agentic
entities of the performance assemblage, such as the biotechnology and the algae. In
this manner, The Algae Opera innovatively extends the relationality of sound and voice
into the vibrant more-than-human world. To recall Stacy Alaimo’s concept (2008, 238), it
presents both Ashcroft’s body–voice and the algae as trans-corporeal by highlighting
and enabling co-constitutive transactions between them. The co-emergent agencies of
The Algae Opera also incite ecomusicological understandings of how musical perform-
ances can participate in enacting mutually defining (that is, ecological), less anthropo-
centric, and possibly ecologically sustainable relations between humans and other
natural phenomena.
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 369

Sonic enhancement and technoecological interspecies composition

Composer Matt Rogers’s musical textures for The Algae Opera span several stylistic labels,
from opera and ‘classical’ to experimental music. This is how Rogers describes his and Ash-
croft’s redesigning of more conventional operatic techniques:
We wanted to create a vocal ritual overtly focused on breath as much as singing, since breath
is a fundamental connection between singer and algae, with breath control a technical funda-
ment of singing itself. With this in mind we revisited traditional singing techniques to make
explicit the role of breath and breath control in them, the impact on tone colour and
stamina for example … We wanted the piece to represent an imaginary ‘folk’ music, born of
a Human/Algae symbiote culture where breath itself is the revered symbol of existence. (Bur-
tonNitta 2012–2015)

Ashcroft comments:
In terms of the sonic enhancement of the algae, our relationship to pitch, tone and vocal
colour also changes. Tone and colour in the algae framework is no longer linked just to
text and texture, but also to flavour. What this means for me as a trained singer, is that I
have to re-think technique, the purpose of the voice and explore a new vocal aesthetic to
ensure that an algae sound creates food to feed you and me. (BurtonNitta 2012–2015)

Rogers’s account of The Algae Opera’s sound materials refers to the role of Ashcroft’s
modified breathing as the focus of the compositional process and a key ingredient of
the project’s human–more-than-human relationships. He explains that the project’s
vocal textures were an imagined ‘folk music’ form created in and for ‘a Human/Algae sym-
biote culture’. Ashcroft recounts, in turn, how her and Rogers’s approach to musical par-
ameters such as pitch and tone shifted because of their synaesthetic relation to taste.
Singing, in this project, functions primarily to enhance the life of the algae, rather than
the musical score or the excitement of human audiences (as in traditional opera).
Burton and Nitta explain that the concept of sonic food enhancement comes from
empirical research in the field of experimental psychology into trans-sensory food con-
sumption. Researchers have found that auditory stimuli affect the taste of food – high
pitches accentuate the taste of sweetness, while low pitches enhance bitterness (Burton-
Nitta 2012–2015; also see Fleming 2014). These findings are tested and elaborated on in
The Algae Opera through the offer of algae tasters to the audience while Ashcroft sings.
The project’s two musical acts comprise higher and lower pitches, respectively, in order
to ‘enhance the audience’s taste of bitterness and sweetness as they eat [the algae-
filled sushi]’. Thus, not only do Ashcroft’s reworked vocal vibrations affect the growth of
the algae (and vice versa); they also inflect the sense-based experience of eating this
vibrant matter – at least as far as the human sense of taste is concerned.
Together, Rogers, Ashcroft, Burton, and Nitta assign novel roles to musical composition.
Feminist musicologists in particular have criticised understandings of composing that
were for long and still often remain prevalent in the fields of Western ‘classical’ and
avant-garde music and also music studies (see, for example, McClary 1991; Citron 1993;
Moisala 2000; MacArthur 2009, 2010). Traceable to nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century European music philosophies, these understandings entail individualistic
notions of musical creativity and views of music as a self-contained technical–expressive
medium. They have also coded composers strongly as male and masculine. Rogers and
Ashcroft’s musical composition departs from these traditions. First, Rogers and Ashcroft
370 M. TIAINEN

stress the human collaboration – between composer and performing musicians – that
informs compositional processes, but which is frequently bypassed in theoretical and quo-
tidian discourses about music. This collaboration blurs clear-cut distinctions between pro-
cesses of performing and composing (as well as between the human agencies involved).
Second, The Algae Opera’s vocal expressions transpose received ideas of Western
musical composition more profoundly. Practices of composing – especially within ‘classi-
cal’ music – are conventionally understood as techniques and technologies for organising
sound materials. The organised sounds then comprise larger scale structures and musical
works which are ideally received by attentive human listeners. Compositional practices in
contemporary and experimental music and sound art have widely contested these notions
through emphasising chance, improvisation, and the role of environmental sounds and
unconventional sound sources in music-making (see, for example, LaBelle 2015; Thomp-
son 2017). Yet The Algae Opera’s vocal lines pose a newly extended challenge to pre-exist-
ing forms of composition. Rogers and Ashcroft go beyond simply testing the limits of
human sound production to produce entirely new, expanded relations beyond the
human/other-than-human divide. I propose that their way of working could be termed
technoecological interspecies composition, informed by non-anthropocentric aspirations.
This is because their fashioning of vocal textures was not concerned only with the sonic
relations between Ashcroft’s utterances or with their auditory perception by human listen-
ers. As Rogers’s notion of symbiote culture suggests, these textures were also motivated
and shaped by the transmissive powers of the mask-suit and the specific sensing materi-
alities and ecological, multispecies significance of the algae. They were composed for a
world where human life and cultural practices, technological procedures, and other-
than-human natures are always-already interlocked in technoecological relations.
But while The Algae Opera provides a view of living and inorganic entities as shaped by
their interrelational and ontologically open-ended activities, it is still worth asking how the
project ultimately positions the human in connection with its fellow beings. Is it in the end
humans – and mainly humans in the affluent, technologically advanced parts of the planet –
who can profit from new interrelations among technologies, other-than-humans, and
human techniques linked to sustainable food production or other future scenarios?
Whom does The Algae Opera’s technoecological practice benefit?
Some aspects of the project suggest that it perpetuates anthropocentric assumptions
about the primacy and exceptionality of humans. Considered in terms of sonic technoe-
cology, the project does not frame the human as a self-sufficient cause or solver of eco-
crises, but insists on human–technology and inter- or trans-species interdependencies.
Nevertheless, the ecologically sustainable form of food production that it conjures up is
tied most readily to prospects of human survival in the age of deteriorating biodiversity
induced by human activities. Apparently, the chief purpose of the project is to ensure
food supplies ‘for you and me’, as Ashcroft puts it (BurtonNitta 2012–2015; see also Ash-
croft 2012b). To this extent, there is tension between the project’s aspirations toward non-
anthropocentric relationality and the persistence of human exceptionalism.
I argue, however, that this tension notwithstanding, The Algae Opera’s entanglements
of human and plant life, biotechnological innovation and musical technique, and artistic
practice and prospects of ecosystemic sustainability hold potential for challenging anthro-
pocentrism and the speciesist favouring of humans. As some previous commentaries have
noted, the project strives for mutually beneficial interrelations (Schwartzman 2012). This
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 371

occurs in The Algae Opera more through an emphasis on biodiversity or at least on the
importance of symbiotically supporting the life forms still left on the planet than in the
spirit of maximal industrialised exploitation of other species to the benefit of humanity
or some privileged humans.
From this vantage point, the algae in this ‘micro opera’ (Ashcroft 2012a) do not only serve
human survival. They actively share a technoecological field of becoming with humans,
diverse other species, and technological processes. The participants’ wellbeing, or perishing,
hinges on their mutual relations. The alternative to anthropocentrism that The Algae Opera
tentatively offers could consequently be described, in Alaimo’s (2008, 245–246) words, as
‘an environmental ethics of partnership’. This ethical approach, which Alaimo outlines in con-
junction with trans-corporeality, insists on the necessary relationality between human ways
and potentialities of being and the prospering or crisis of other-than-human species and enti-
ties. A trans-corporeal ethics of partnership admits the limits of human knowledge in foretell-
ing how specific interdependencies will play out, since they are multicausal and temporally
evolving. Simultaneously, the pressing ethical aim is to discover such co-implications that
could foster the existence of as many involved terms as possible instead of prioritising one
type of existence – that of humans with a privileged geopolitical, social, or gendered location
– at others’ expense (Alaimo 2008, 245–246). It is as a sonic technoecology composed in
relations across humans, machines, techniques, and other-than-human living beings that
The Algae Opera arguably canvasses this sort of ethics. In doing so, it showcases uniquely
voice- and music-based non-anthropocentric potentialities in interspecies performance.

Conclusion
Through my technoecological investigation of voice, music, and human–other-than-
human interrelationships in The Algae Opera, I hope to have illustrated several key
points. First, previous discussions of interspecies performance have already demonstrated
how performing arts can bring into view ontological interdependencies that might
support the development of more sustainable relations between human and more-
than-human. However, the significance of sound and music to these explorations warrants
further attention. This is because of the distinctive, multisensory capacity of sounds to
interconnect and affect across heterogeneous beings and traditional ontological hierar-
chies. With my concept of sonic technoecology, I proposed that the relationality of
sounds is not just human, but also more-than-human, and that this entails notable poten-
tial with regard to understanding the ontologically co-constitutive and non-anthropo-
centric aspects of reality, as urged by the current ecocrises. To quote Haraway (2016, 4),
human attempts to survive with other beings are ‘always situated, someplace and not
noplace’. Through its vocal sonorities that engage particular bodies, materialities, tech-
niques, and relations, The Algae Opera offers an example of this situatedness.
Second, the project highlights the difficulty or sheer impossibility of completely shed-
ding anthropocentrism. This ambiguity indicates a twofold, more general methodological
lesson pertinent to feminist posthumanist research. On the one hand, it is important to
critique the insistent anthropocentric, gendered, racialised, and classed biases of such
artistic and theoretical enterprises that seemingly promote human and interspecies
equity. On the other hand, it is likewise important to affirm the potentialities for existing
otherwise that these very same projects might suggest, however modest or elusive those
372 M. TIAINEN

potentialities may be. The concept of sonic technoecology provides one way of teasing
out more non-anthropocentric potentials in such examples that involve sound without
trying to resolve their complexities and ambiguities.
Third, in addition to the simultaneous practising of critique and affirmation central to the
methodologies of feminist posthumanities (or to any kind of feminist research), there are two
key ways in which my analysis of The Algae Opera speaks to specifically feminist concerns. The
first of these ways relates to the long-term significance of sound and voice within feminist
endeavours of rethinking human subjectivity and agency beyond ideas of self-contained indi-
viduality. Feminist theorists from several fields of study have put forth pioneering understand-
ings of the voice as a crucial transgression of the classic dichotomy between subjective
interiority and external reality (Silverman 1988, 80), as an intimate dimension of our perform-
ances of socially regulated identity markers from gender and sexuality to race (e.g. Cusick
1999), and as a phenomenon that couples each speaking subject’s unique corporeality
with other, perceiving, bodies and with the symbolic realm (e.g. Cavarero 2005). Some
pivotal developers of feminist posthumanist and new materialist thinking have enthused
about the power of sound to foreground affectivity and dissolution of boundaries between
humans, technologies, and other-than-human environments (e.g. Braidotti 2002, 153–157).
Yet the full potential of sound and voice in advancing feminist relational, processual, and
multi-determined notions of subjectivity and the human in posthumanist directions awaits
in-depth exploration. My analysis above is meant as one step in that process.
Last but not least, the second key intervention of my paper into feminist debates is that
it presents the burgeoning practices of interspecies performance, specifically those invol-
ving sound, as a noteworthy area with which feminist studies can aspire to non-anthropo-
centric thinking and politics. As is well known, science fiction in its various forms has
inspired many feminist thinkers’ ground-breaking work toward posthumanist understand-
ings of the human (e.g. Haraway 1991, 2003, 2016; Braidotti 2002; Åsberg 2013). I argue
that interspecies performances, which often seek to combine unique artistic concepts
with theoretical and political accounts of humans’ more-than-human conditions of
being, can also expand feminist understandings of humans’ co-emergence (always from
within particular sociocultural locations) with non-humans. These artistic projects
provide feminist research with examples of how less anthropocentric modes of existing
are being implemented as embodied, embedded reality (see Braidotti 2013). Meanwhile,
feminist posthumanist theorising remains a living and open-ended process insofar as it
keeps probing the implications of its concepts – such as non-human agency or trans-cor-
poreality – in conjunction with specific modes of practice, and insofar as it also devises
new concepts – such as sonic technoecology – which, inspired by these practices,
suggest situated initiatives for shared planetary survival.

Notes
1. In this article, I use the terms ‘other-than-human’ and ‘more-than-human’ interchangeably. My
understanding of more-than-human does not imply the surpassing of or ontological superior-
ity over humans. It refers to activities and contingencies belonging to any number of existen-
tial categories and to ongoing and future changes in currently human potential (see, for
example, Alaimo 2010, 2; Massumi 2013, xxiii).
2. This holds even if people may find these developments hard to grasp because of their scope
and complexity and due to possible difficulties in linking them to their personal lives.
 AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST STUDIES 373

3. By feminist new materialisms, I refer to approaches that, despite their heterogeneous topics,
disciplinary locations, and theoretical affiliations, are connected by their emphasis on the
active organisational, interacting, and emergent properties of all kinds of matter. These
approaches challenge conceptions of materiality as passive or devoid of processes, ten-
dencies, or relational capacities of its own. Feminist new materialisms often deal with
current technoscientific, economic, social, and environmental developments. Their further
defining feature is the investigation of materialities in relation to the genealogies of feminist
thought and to key concerns of feminist studies, such as gendered, racialised, and sexualised
power dynamics (see, for example, Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2010; Hinton
and van der Tuin 2014; Åsberg, Thiele, and van der Tuin 2015; Tiainen, Hongisto, and Kontturi
2015). By posthumanist feminisms, I refer broadly to efforts of challenging the human and
androcentric heritage of Western thinking, including the humanities, which elaborate on fem-
inist traditions of thinking and seek to further feminist theoretical and political agendas (see,
for example, Åsberg 2015; Braidotti 2013, 45–50; Åsberg and Braidotti, Forthcoming).
4. The Algae Opera has since been reperformed at different European festivals and events
focused on the entanglements of the arts, new media, science, and technology (BurtonNitta
2012–2015).
5. I use quotation marks around the term ‘classical’ to stress the socio-historically specific and
value-laden nature of this vocal tradition. The concept of ‘classical’ singing became estab-
lished in nineteenth-century Europe and encompassed ideas about art formulated in
Western Ancient Greek and Renaissance philosophy. As singer and voice theorist John
Potter (1998) discusses, the concept was used to distinguish a supposedly elite form of
singing from other varieties, and to endow it with both aesthetic and moral legitimacy. On
the concept and features of extended vocal techniques, see Potter (1998, 54–55, 170, 178).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Milla Tiainen is a musicologist whose research and teaching span cultural and feminist studies of
music, performance and voice studies, feminist new materialisms, and posthumanist thinking. She
is a Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Helsinki. A founding member of the COST-
funded action ‘New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to
Matter”’ (2014–2018), she co-chairs the action’s working group centred on the creative arts. Her
current research focuses on non-anthropocentric approaches to/in musical performance and on
vocal practices in today’s performing arts and media cultures. In addition to numerous articles in
peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, she is author of Locating the Composer (2005; in
Finnish) and Becoming-Singer (2012). She is also co-editor of Reconfiguring Authorship in Music and
Theatre (2005; in Finnish), Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari (2017), and special issues
for the journals Body & Society (2014) and Cultural Studies Review (2015), among others. Her mono-
graph on a process ontological and Deleuzian feminist approach to operatic performance is forth-
coming with the University of Minnesota Press.

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