Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155

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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Conservation acoustics: Animal sounds, audible natures, cheap nature

Max Ritts a, *, Karen Bakker b
a
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, 16 Mill, Ln., Cambridge C2B 1SB, UK
b
Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This paper asks why growing numbers of government agencies, professional conservation authorities, university
Conservation researchers, citizen scientists, and private companies are turning to bioacoustical approaches for conservation
Sound research and management needs. These varied activities describe a set of agendas we examine here under the
Digital capitalism
rubric of “conservation acoustics.” More than a scientific response to urgent environmental problems, “conser­
Nature
Science
vation acoustics” is a contemporary formation of power-knowledge: digital technologies and associated techno-
social innovations that are enhancing capitalism’s capacity to appropriate new, previously uncommodified
sources of “work/energy” (Moore 2015). By pairing Moore with recent work on the political economy of digital
music, we can better grasp the structural forces that have given rise to “conservation acoustics” – including
advances in digital sound compression, the economic interests of Big Tech and the territorial ambitions of the
environmental state. Within this examination, Donna Haraway reminds us of the importance of listening to the
stories scientists tell about themselves, which can reveal epistemological closures and political openings that may
not be visible from the grand historical view. At the same time, capitalism’s organization of nature via the
intermediation of digital sound suggests that Haraway’s own insights regarding vision and the “God Trick”
require a reframing with respect to sound. We draw from literature reviews, a meta-review of over 2000
scholarly papers on bioacoustics and eco-acoustics, and 15 expert interviews to advance our claims.

1. Introduction with digital sound valorized as an indicator of processes difficult to

The past decade has seen a growing number of government agencies,
professional conservation authorities, university researchers, citizen
scientists, and private companies exploring the benefits of bioacoustical
approaches for conservation needs (Teixeira et al., 2019; Sethi et al.
2020; Shonfield and Bayne, 2017).1 Vast amounts of bioacoustics data
are now complementing (and, in some cases, replacing) visual data as a
primary source material for conservation monitoring and planning, and
as a driver of new conceptual frameworks in conservation and ecology;
ascertain through other means (Sueur et al. 2019; Odom et al., 2020).
Alongside bioacoustics, ecosystem-level investigations – enrolling
techniques from the nascent sub-fields of “eco-acoustics” (Farina and
Gage, 2017; Towsey, Parsons, & Sueur, 2014) and “soundscape ecology”
(Pijanowksi et al. 2011) - are also proliferating.2 Their insights likewise
encompass questions of quantity (the bio/ecological consequence of too
much/little sound within a given space), and quality (the bio/ecological
consequences of shifting sound frequencies, textures, patterns).
This research activity has given rise to a set of agendas we propose to

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: mjr223@cam.ac.uk (M. Ritts), karen.bakker@ubc.ca (K. Bakker).
1
The market report also notes industrial agriculture and health care as major drivers of this new economic activity (Bousfield et al. 2020). For us, the salient point
is conservation has become a major outlet for the growth in bioacoustics sensing tools and technologies, not that it captures all the growth.
2
Bioacoustics is behavior-centric and focuses on the acoustic signals of individuals and species. Ecoacoustics is concerned with broader ecological processes and
scales of activity and predicated on the idea that landscapes have distinct acoustic "signatures" whose health can be measured through quantitative forms of
"soundscape analysis" (for discussion, see: Farina and Gage, 2017). A significant proportion of bioacoustics work occurs at the level of individual species, as scientists
have long understood that many animals vocalize, communicate, or otherwise emit sounds that encode information about their presence, behavior and activities
(Bradbury and Vehrencamp 1998). Ecoacoustics, in contrast, measures and records the composite sounds of landscapes—combining biotic and abiotic variables.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.04.022
Received 11 August 2020; Received in revised form 5 April 2021; Accepted 28 April 2021
Available online 20 June 2021
0016-7185/© 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
examine under the rubric of “conservation acoustics.”3 Here, we are
particularly interested in scrutinizing what has become the dominant
narrative explaining the rise of eco and bioacoustics research. According
to this narrative, newly inexpensive digital recording technologies,
combined with escalating concerns over environmental crisis, are
driving interest in the analytic potentials of sound for conservation
management (Teixeria et al. 2019). The cultural diffusion of free “bird
song apps,” increasingly popular for citizen scientists (Moye 2017); the
policy announcements of large organizations like The Nature Conser­
vancy and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who promote eco and
bioacoustics as a “cost-effective way for ecologists to survey wildlife
populations, animal musical platforms finds, lend support to this
narrative (e.g., Hausheer 2018; WWF 2020; Gyllenhaal 2020).4 But this
is only part of the story. Absent in most of the mainstream coverage are
the significant contributions of two key players: over the same period of
ascendant interest in sound for conservation, sound has become an
important site of speculative activity for nation states and Big Tech.
According to one industry report, the global bioacoustics sensing market
is expected to reach 8.7 Billion USD by 2025, up from 5.6 Billion in 2017
(Fior Markets 2020). For scholars unfamiliar with bioacoustics, an
interdisciplinary science concerned with the study of animal sounds,
these numbers might seem surprising. But they are expressive of
growing efforts from the state and capital to support large, multi-scalar,
interlinked, acoustic surveillance networks, whose apparent benefit
extends not only to environmental governance, but smart agriculture,
urban planning, and military surveillance. The unifying ethos behind
these diverse interests in acoustical sensing can be summarized with the
claim given by one Big Tech insider: “Sound has so much hidden data”
(Smart Industry 2020). And data, of course, is the central commodity Big
Tech produces and exchanges under digital capitalism (e.g., Zuboff
2019). Such details will be used to inform the critical narrative we
present here. More than a specialized concern, we read “conservation
acoustics” as a contemporary formation of power-knowledge: digital
technologies and associated techno-social innovations that are
enhancing capitalism’s capacity to appropriate new, previously
uncommodified sources of “work/energy” (Moore 2015).
We should distinguish at the outset between bioacoustics – a set of
scientific practices and situated knowledges – and “conservation
acoustics”. The latter is a “regime” in multiple senses – encompassing
environmental management, digital technologies, audio surveillant
practices – to which bioacoustics provides one entry point. Through a
study of conservation acoustics, we seek to elevate the problem of sound
within the critical agendas of digital and environmental conservation
(Adams 2018; 2019; Sullivan 2018; Bakker and Ritts 2018; Gabrys 2019;
Machen and Nost 2021). We conducted 15 interviews, a literature re­
view, and a meta-review of over 2000 scientific papers to develop our
overarching thesis, which is that the intersection of conservation and
capitalism, via the intermediation of digital sound, is heralding impor­
tant changes in the content and conduct of conservation. Conservation
acoustics exhibits a tension between fostering innovative forms of con­
servation and falling prey to compromise or co-optation (of both
methods and data) by private actors.
To argue these points, we draw extensively on Jason Moore’s (2015;
2016; 2017) “World Ecology” approach. World Ecology helps us un­
derstand how technological, cultural, and economic forces have come to
engage sound as an inexpensive source of ”work/energy“ - one that can
3
Xie et al. (2020) finds a considerable increase in rates of publications across
both eco- and bioacoustics beginning around 2011, and with the same high-
ranking journals, including PloS One and The Journal of the Acoustical Society
of America. This supports our contention that the subdisciplines can be grasped
within an overarching trend.
4
See for examples: https://blog.nature.org/science/2015/09/14/eavesdr
opping-on-the-sounds-of-the-rainforest/ and https://www.wwf.org.uk/p
roject/conservationtechnology/acoustic-monitoring
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Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
be resourced for purposes of profit-fueled algorithmic governance.
Moore’s writing does not broach the question of sound, but recent
writing on the political economy of music restages many of his core
concerns in that medium (Gopinath and Stanyek 2014; Drott 2018;
2019; Scherzinger 2019). A central interest of this literature is with the
way social enactments of digital sound facilitate the reproduction of
capitalist logics - including exchangeability, commesensurability, and
abundance/scarcity. The "data-based construction of the human con­
sumer" (Gopinath and Stanyek 2013, 133) articulated via musical plat­
forms finds, we suggest, an analogue in the acoustically tagged animal
subject of conservation acoustics, likewise available ”anytime, any­
where“ for statistical-information gathering (Gopinath and Stanyek
2014, 33). Read through World Ecology, the political economy of music
literature helps identify an emerging structural linkage: between de­
velopments in conservation focused acoustics on the one hand, and
developments in corporate audio surveillance, on the other. In the
process, a capitalist technoscience emerges as a site for grapsing the
drivers associated with elevated interests in measuring the sounds of
nature in new ways.
Our point of intervention here is thus with the question of science: a
“series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one’s manufac­
tured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power”
(Haraway 1988, 577). To discuss conservation acoustics from this
perspective, we pair a World Ecology reading with Donna Haraway’s
(1988) work on "Situated Knowledges." In this paper and elsewhere,
Haraway reminds us of the importance of listening to the stories scien­
tists tell about themselves. As affirmations of more negotiated, contin­
gent, and uncertain productions and reinventions of nature, stories of
science can reveal political openings that may not be visible from the
grand historical view. But "Situated Knowledges", and its central ques­
tion of "What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides
vision?" (587), is prescient for our project in more ways than one. Spe­
cifically, capitalism’s organization of nature via the intermediation of
digital sound suggests that Haraway’s concerns regarding vision require
a reframing with respect to sound. The ”God Trick“ can also be per­
formed through an earpiece. And yet, to complicate matters further, a
Harawaian approach to conservation acoustics also insists that we do
not dismiss its project as coopted science, but instead dwell within its
problematic for the profound questions it poses about the non-human
world. In the next section, we outline emerging scientific uptakes of
digital sound in connection to "cheap nature" and what Moore terms
"abstract social nature". Then, we move to our consideration of conser­
vation acoustics, combining an extensive review of the scientific liter­
ature with themes drawn from our interviews. The final section
concludes through exploring potential future research agendas.
2. Animal sound, digital ecology, abstract social nature
Over the last decade, environmental conservation has been trans­
formed by a sustained engagement with digital sensing technologies
(Adams 2018; 2019; Bakker and Ritts 2018; Buscher 2014; Gabrys 2016;
2019; van der Wal and Arts 2015). This “becoming computational” of
environments (Gabrys 2016) takes divergent forms, even as it routinely
exhibits programmatic interests and shared imperatives. Everywhere, it
seems, “sensing nature in order to save it” - to paraphrase Kathleen
McAfee (1999) - is materializing as a viable conservation strategy under
digital capitalism. To scrutinize these developments, scholars have
considered geo-visualization technologies, predictive algorithms, data­
bases, and internet infrastructures, and their growing support by NGOs,
governments, and capitalist firms (see also: Thatcher et al. 2016).
Within this rapidly growing body of scholarship, one finds little in­
quiry on the question of sound. This is a notable gap, because digital
approaches to recording sound are giving rise to a flurry of techno-social
innovations of relevance to conservation. Several major developments of
particular interest here include the adoption of standardized file formats
as media for the storage and circulation of scientific data; refinements in
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
audio compression capacities; the continued growth in cheap, portable
recording devices; the sudden ubiquity of large, transferable audio da­
tabases (Sterne 2012; Gopinath and Stanyek 2014; Drott 2018).
Concomitant with the rise of Open Science and eco-informatics, and the
exponential growth in computer power and capabilities at decreasing
costs perhaps most of all, acoustical innovations have transformed the
ways in which audible natures can be perceived, valued, and enacted.
Emboldened by technical developments, vast, transdisciplinary research
collaborations have emerged with agenda-setting propositions to
biology and ecology, rooted in the discernible changes in the sounds
generated (and used) by sound-sensitive organisms across multiple
scales (e.g., Duarte et al. 2021). Bioacoustics projects from around the
world are documenting how biotic acoustical changes appear to be
accelerating in conjunction with multiple eco-systemic changes -
including biodiversity loss, changing patterns of resilience, deforesta­
tion and the rise of novel anthropogenic stressors (Buxton et al. 2017).
This work is evidently allowing scientists to rapidly translate
observational data into new, sometimes experimental conservation
agendas. For example, Quiet(er) Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are
being used to protect whales in busy shipping areas and fisheries (Wil­
liams et al. 2015). Bio-acoustical deterrents are being used to protect
elephant populations in Africa by scaring them away from agricultural
areas (with correspondingly reduced elephant-farmer conflict) (King
et al. 2011, 2017). But bioacoustics can also be used to assess broader
patterns at ecosystem and even planetary scales. Hotter, drier weather -
linked to climate change - is disrupting the sound propagation dynamics
upon which different species rely to navigate and communicate (Luo
et al. 2013). Ambient temperatures influence the vocalization and
hearing processes of mammals, amphibians, fish, crustaceans and in­
sects. As temperatures change, certain species of cicadas, crickets, frogs
and fish are changing their vocalization patterns or even ceasing to
vocalize altogether. The long-term effects of climate changing oceans
may, another group of scientists speculates, result in “silent winters and
rock-and-roll summers,” as fish cease their choruses when confronted
with more frequent, intense winter storms (Siddagangaiah et al. 2021).
For many scientists we spoke to, the message is concerning: “climate
change is breaking [the] Earth’s beat” (Sueur et al. 2019: 1; see also
Krause 2012).
The scientific findings emerging through conservation acoustics are
innovative not only for the scale and scope of their insights, but also
because of the technical breakthroughs which enabled them. As a
multidimensional and continuous process, sound has long been chal­
lenging to measure from biological and ecological standpoints because it
is difficult to pinpoint the variables to compare across taxa and scale
(Tyack and Adamczak 2018). Sounds, one ecologist adds, “leave no
fossils, no isotopic signatures. For the most part, they’re here one
millisecond and gone the next“ (Ayres 2021). But over the last decade, it
has become progressively easier for certain social actors to produce and
access incredible amounts of digital sound, asserting a new means
through which audible nature can come to appear as an abundant sci­
entific material. And when appropriated as ”cheap nature“ - or ”work/
energy“ produced with minimal labor-power input - such material can
be assembled, arranged, and most importantly, valued in new ways
(Moore 2015, p. 193). The rise of conservation acoustics is thus to a
considerable degree a story of newer and better microphones, storage
technologies, datafication, signal processing techniques, and objectifi­
cation writ large: the techno-social processes which facilitate the
appropriation of nature into circulating, digital sounds.
Some further conceptual clarification is helpful here. Digital sounds,
as particular subsets of reality, can mean different things, but are rele­
vant for us mainly as numerical code (1 s and 0 s) that facilitate rapid
algorithmic processing. As representations of varied naturally occurring
sonic processes, digital sounds have become valued for the ways they
facilitate certain forms of scientific inquiry predicated on Big Data,
which is now structurally linked to capitalism’s organization of nature.
We elaborate on this idea below, with some examples that encompass
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Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
science but include related social venues (such as state-led environ­
mental management regimes). It is also important, however, to assert
that our engagements are not applicable to all kinds of digital sound.
Following Jonathan Sterne (2006, p. 107), we approach digital sound
“from its many exteriors,” e.g., as a composite of particular techno-
scientific practices, natural forces, and economic directives, whose lin­
eaments are as distinctive as the ’thing’ itself.
Following Moore (2017), we find that converging interests in con­
servation and digital sound can be usefully understood in terms of
“abstract social nature”. This is what results from the spatio-temporal
practices that identify and facilitate the appropriation of work/energy,
or in our case, the animate, energetic activities of audible natures (e.g.,
animals, ecologies) (Ibid, 2018, 256).5 “Abstract social nature” is pro­
duced through processes “aimed at simplifying, standardizing and
otherwise mapping the world in service to the accumulation of wealth as
abstract labor” (2017, 20). Audible natures can be resourced. The sub­
sequent processing of digital sounds generally involves "matching
recording segments to a template (often termed a "recognizer") derived
from training data and registered a hit when a similarity threshold is
reached" (Shonfield and Bayne, 2017, n. pag). For Moore, shifts in
capitalism are characterized by new ways of ordering and rationalizing
the processes unfolding as nature. He describes, for instance, how Earth
system science has sought to reduce the Earth to a vast “standing
reserve” or “ready resource supply center” (Luke 2009, 133). Such
techno-social practices of conservation science and technology are
increasingly relevant to particular forms of territoriality and gover­
nance, and also to logics of capital accumulation, as we show here.
“Abstract social nature” helps us resituate the ecological politics of
sound – a topic with growing interest in human geography (e.g., Matless
2005; Gallagher et al. 2016; Ritts 2017; MacFarlane 2020) – in relation
to new entanglements of science and capitalism. In “conservation
acoustics” specific presentations of nature are emerging under the
banner of “abstract social nature”: e.g., the measurable set of units of
unpaid work/energy performed by living beings.6 This is problematic
because it reduces the specificity of audible natures (and animal sounds)
to abstract statistical metrics – a familiar problem in the Western Sci­
ences, to be sure (Moore 2015). Here, the World Ecology approach
draws us away from a troubling convention, common to some uptakes of
sound studies, to locate the fulcrum of the resulting politics in sound’s
purported “agency” (e.g., Labelle 2018). Such appraisals offer scant
materials with which to analyze the power relations that always produce
and socially-embed sounds (including digital sounds) within the world.
We concur with Moore (2015: 37) when he asserts that, “The issue is
emphatically not one of the agency of Nature’ and the ’agency of
Humans’, …"rather, the issue is how human and extra-human natures
get bundled." Without discounting the notion that natural forces,
including sound, have causal powers, Moore rightly insists that we look
to the contested "bundling" of sound’s constitutive parts (e.g., human
and non-human natures) to build our analyses.
Read though World Ecology, conservation acoustics emerges as one
of the myriad science-capital-state complexes that actively co-produce
new historical natures under capitalism. Capitalism is not here
5
The distinction between the (more recognized) capitalist logic of "accu­
mulation by dispossession," versus Jason Moore’s "accumulation by appropri­
ation" thesis is important but beyond the scope of this paper. Moore’s approach
emphasizes "accumulation by appropriation"; on "accumulation by disposses­
sion", see Glassman (2006).
6
As Moore (2015, p. 17) explains: "I speak of work/energy rather than simply
work because we are dealing with work in a broadly biophysical sense.
comprising the activity and potential energy of rivers and soils, of oil and coal
deposits, of human-centered production and reproduction."
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
intervening within nature. Rather, it is operating as a way in which
diverse facets of nature are coming to do “work” (in the Marxian sense).7
These operations, moreover, embrace a wide swathe of social life, not
simply economic aspects. This is because the “hard” transformations of
capitalist production and circulation – the vast socio-technical transi­
tions that are contributing to the wholesale digitization of capitalism, for
example (Robinson 2018) – are always complemented by “soft” trans­
formations in symbolic practice and knowledge formation (Moore 2018,
p. 254; c.f., Arboleda 2017). Such a claim is deeply complementary to
the recursive, contextualist critique of science found in Haraway. It is to
this arena of “soft” techniques, and the ways they aim to discover new
sources of unpaid “work/energy”, that we turn in the next section.
3. Remaking conservation, from big tech to tiny trills
We need to take stock of some significant changes that have taken
place in the eco- and bioacoustical sciences over the past decade. This
paper pursues this line first by taking a synoptic view, and then by
considering developments in more detail as they relate to conservation
acoustics. As foundational acoustics texts like Neville H. Fletcher’s
Acoustic Systems in Biology (1991), Arthur Ewing’s Anthropod Bioacous­
tics (1989), and Peggy Hill’s Vibrational Communication in Animals
(2008) make clear, animal research programs have long utilized
computer-derived signal processing techniques, including sophisticated
algorithms.8 But the extent to which digital approaches now shape every
corner of the workflow, and have increasingly since the mid-2000s, is
nothing short of remarkable. As William Hartman writes, “modern
acoustics is so tightly coupled to digital signal processing that the two
fields have become inseparable” (quoted in Au and Lammers 2016, p.1).
According to several of our interviewees, such as Italian bioacoutiscian
Gianni Pavan, the switch from analog to digital recording devices was
the decisive development in this trend (Personal Communication; c.f.
Bruyninckx 2018). The high-fidelity recorders used by bioacousticians
in 1970s and 1980s - such as the celebrated Nagra-III and Uher 4000-S
recorders - were expensive, high power-consumers, bulky, and weighed
in excess of 20 lbs. This limited recording time and restricted access to a
range of field-recording sites. By 2008, a series of affordable and
portable acoustics technologies had emerged, with small- and mid-sized
firms like Wildlife Acoustics, Frontier Labs, and Bat Box offering a range
of tools to a range of user-types (scientists, citizens, government actors,
environmental activists). The rise of digital bioacoustics at the turn of
the 21st century was enabled by these new technologies, and this data-
focused subset of bio- and eco-acoustics (both of which have a much
longer history) is a central focus in this paper.
To consider how this digitalized bioacoustics has evolved over the
past two decades, we reviewed 2800 peer-reviewed journal papers
beginning in the post war period.9 This timeframe is important, since it
captures not only the period of bioacoustics’ formation (e.g., the 1950s
and 1960s), but also reveals a sharp activity increase beginning around
2010. Notably, this corresponds with growth in other digital conserva­
tion markets - such as camera traps, gliders, and remote sensing tools -
and which can likewise be linked to a paradigmatic rise in earth digi­
talization infrastructures (Bakker and Ritts 2018). Our journal review
revealed a sharp increase in publication rates (for both eco and
7
For Moore (2015), abstract social nature is closely related to socially
necessary labor time. Both "abstract social nature" and abstract social labor are
constitutive of capitalism’s generalization of commodity production and
exchange.
8
Some of this history is recounted in Bruyninckx (2018). See especially
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.
9
These papers were selected by using the following search terms in Web of
Science, cross-checked with Semantic Scholar: “bioacoustics,” “bio-acoustics,”
“ecoacoustics,” “eco-acoustics,” “soundscape,” and “soundscape ecology.” We
were grateful to have several RAs assist us with this task.
147
Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
bioacoustics) over the past decade, a trend consistent with the findings
of Xie et al. (2020), in their own review of eco and bioacoustics trends
fields (Fig. 1). While some of this growth can be attributed to the
emergence of new publishing outlets and the expanded international
reach of scientific databases, there is ample evidence that outlets long at
the forefront of conservation (applied and theoretical) debates are tak­
ing these topics more seriously. Significant findings in four top peer-
reviewed journals - Zootaxa, PlOS One, ArXiv, and Animal Behavior -
affirm the prominence of conservation acoustics agendas within main­
stream fora of conservation science.
In our meta-review, we also tracked the breadth of natures (e.g.,
vocalizing species) being considered under conservation acoustics.
Table 1 summarizes the 1,058 species that we found within the set of
2800 papers.10 This diversity is notable given the history of the field. As
Gibb et al. (2019p. 169) recently observed, technological costs and ac­
cess constraints had once largely confined acoustical monitoring to only
a handful of taxonomic groups - mostly cetaceans (e.g., whales and
dolphins), bats, and birds (Xie et al. 2020, 17). As Table 1 indicates,
scientists are coming to recognize that a wide (and indeed surprising)
range of species are able to make (or hear) sound. As Giovanni Pavan
told us: “We are discovering amazing things, that for example, fishes and
larvae are attracted by noise in the coral reef” (Personal
Communication).
Finally, our meta-review also documented the novel types of cate­
gories of bioacoustics research enabled by digital bioacoustics technol­
ogies which enable continuous (or long duration) recordings, in
relatively remote areas, at low cost, and often without direct human
presence. As observed by multiple interviewees, whereas bioacoustics
used to be applied largely to listen to individual species in order to re­
cord and document animal calls (largely birds, bats, and cetaceans), the
surge in bioacoustics activity now enables new, arguably higher-order
tasks: taxonomic clarification and differentiation; (semi-) automated
environmental monitoring; endangered species protection; and parsing
of vocal communication (Table 2).
As these findings also relate, “conversation acoustics” is marked by a
dynamic and continuous refinement of its “technics” (Moore 2017, p. 7):
automated data-acquisition, classification and sound processing tools
that operate without the intermediation of human listeners, for instance.
Such “technics” enable the detection of hitherto unrecorded audible
natures, aligned with new types of scientific interests and procedures.
Although many sciences are rapidly adjusting to the affordances of
digitalization, the conservation acoustics fields (eco- and bioacoustics)
are unique given the earlier limitations to recording, processing and
storage. Consider, for example, the growing utilization of convolutional
neural networks (CNNs), first developed for image recognition tasks.
With CNNs, scientists can classify sound clips with very high degrees of
accuracy (e.g., 97%) through automated visual readouts. Kahl et al.
(2019) remark that in 2015, none of the algorithms submitted to Bird­
CLEF – a workshop on big data challenges for bird call classification –
used neural networks. By in 2019, in contrast, all the submissions to
BirdCLEF featured CNN architectures. As a widening array of acoustico-
biological realities - the tiny trill of a Chipping Sparrow, the infrasonic
rumble of an earthworm - are becoming “senseable,” computational and
10
Our review of the literature was conducted by sequentially searching ani­
mal classes and plant clades; within each class/clade, a search was conducted
combining the formal species name with keywords ("ecoacoustics,” "acoustics"
and “bioacoustics”), and then combining the common name with the same
keywords. If the initial search returned more than three options, then the
common names of a family would be searched (e.g., the order Procellariiformes
contains albatross and petrel, so search "bioacoustics albatross" and
"bioacoustics petrel"; or "bioacoustics "king penguin""; "bioacoustics "emperor
penguin"", etc.). The papers were then reviewed, and species name added to the
database, along with relevant classificatory designations (e.g., phlyum, class or
clade, order, common name).
M. Ritts and K. Bakker Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155

Peer-reviewed bioacoustics articles, 1955 - 2021 (n = 2800)

250

200

150

100

50

Fig. 1. Charting the rise of bio-acoustics publications.

which researchers praise for reducing longstanding problems of

Table 1
“observer-bias” (Gibb et al. 2019), process thousands of digitally
Range of species in meta-review of peer-reviewed journal articles (n = 1058).
recorded sounds in minutes; or as digital recorders and omnidirectional
Kingdom Class/Clade Num. Examples (common names) precision microphones abet the continuous survey of spaces with min­
species
imal manual effort (Gregory et al. 2004). The endlessly exportable,
Arthropoda Branchiopoda 2 Clam shrimp, fairy shrimp exchangeable, divisible outputs (e.g., digital sounds) of these tools
Arthropoda Arachnida 1 Wolf spider
affirm the substance of “abstract social nature” as the production of “real
Arthropoda Insecta 13 Bumblebee, grasshopper
Arthropoda Malacostraca 18 Crayfish, krill, lobster abstractions” of space (flat), time (linear), and nature (external); co-
Arthropoda Myriapoda 1 Giant pill millipede ordinations which enable new forms of territoriality and governance
Chordata Agnatha 1 Lamprey via the geocoded measurement of animal acoustic activities across
Chordata Amphibia 18 Frogs, salamanders, toads multiple frequencies.
Chordata Aves 527 Crane, hummingbird, starling,
woodpecker
But what is the material basis for such concentrated activity in
Chordata Mammalia 279 Elephant, manatee, mole conservation acoustics? Our analysis finds two sources: Big Tech and the
Chordata Reptilia 44 Alligator, cobra, gecko, python contemporary environmental state. A range of small and big data firms
Chordata Actinopterygii 129 Catfish, electric eel, seahorse, are now actively investing in tools that support machine learning and
tuna
automated bioacoustics research (Welz 2019). Researchers in university
Chordata Chondrichthyes 12 Elephant fish, rabbitfish
Cnidaria Anthozoa 1 Coral life science departments are training acoustic classification models using
Echinodermata Asteroidea 1 Crown-of-thorns starfish data that has been provided to them by large Tech firms. Several people
Mollusca Cephalopoda 1 Octopus we spoke to were familiar with Google’s AudioSet (Sethi et al. 2020)
Plantae Magnoliopsida 9 Algae, evening primrose, which seeks to teach machines “to accurately perceive audio by building
tobacco, tomato
state-of-the-art machine learning models, generating large-scale data­
Plantae Pinopsida 1 Norway spruce
1058 sets of audio events, and defining the hierarchical relationships that
exist between sounds” (quoted in AudioSet 2020).11 With the tools
Google… has provided us with," Cornell University Center for Conser­
“actionable” (Gabrys 2019); they are also being stored, categorized and vation Bioacoustics lead researcher Holger Klinck tells us, "we are
cross-correlated to an unprecedented degree. Nature’s audible expres­ making real leads in our analytical capabilities to extract useful infor­
siveness is being mapped and measured in new ways. A parallel with the mation out of these long-term datasets” (Personal Communication).
intimate economies Drott (2018; 2019) observes in the digital streaming Through its “AI for Earth” project, Microsoft is seeking to “greatly
economy is worth considering. One of the reason’s Spotify listener data accelerate conservation decision-making” by applying machine learning
is valued by advertisers, Drott (2018) notes, is because of its capacity to to bioacoustics data “logjams” (Microsoft 2021).12 One of the earliest
capture notoriously hard to measure social phenomena: expressive so­ promoters of marine audio analytics (their funding of underwater
cial values (love, loss), particularized forms of community reciprocity, acoustics research via Ocean Networks Canada [ONC] extends at least a
the temporal dynamics of kin networks. With vocalizing animals, hard to decade), IBM Research has for several years sought to combine audio
measure ecological dynamics can likewise be formed by “listening to” classification expertise with the operation of its Smart Cities software (e.
(tracking, measuring) intimate activities that were unavailable for
measurement before (Teixeira et al. 2019; Sueur et al. 2019; Odom et al.,
2020). 11
For a description of the Google AudioSet project, see: https://research.goo
Coincident with such appropriations are new opportunities to do gle.com/audioset/ontology/wild_animals_1.html. Also of note is Google’s
work with lower capital costs than before. What Moore (2015) describes "Under the Canopy" acoustical data storytelling series. e.g. https://about.goo
as the mutually supportive regimes of “cheap nature” and “cheap labor” gle/stories/rainforest/.
converge in conservation bioacoustics as machine learning algorithms, 12
See: https://github.com/microsoft/Multi_Species_Bioacoustic_Classification

148
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
Table 2
Bioacoustics research: Categories and examples.
Category Activity
Taxonomy Differentiation of cryptic (sibling) species
Correcting errors in taxonomic
classifications
Environmental Population monitoring using bioacoustics
Monitoring indices
Replacing human wildlife surveys
Endangered Bioacoustics as acoustic deterrents
species
protection
Vocal Bioacoustics used to monitor behavioral
communication states warranting conservation actions (e.
g., use prey species’ alarm calls as a proxy
of predator abundance)
g. Purcell 2018).13 These examples are only some of most prominent in a
surge of activity Mack Hagood (2018) calls the “Silicon Sonic Turn.”
Big Tech’s growing commitments to conservation acoustics research
may well signal a growing corporate willingness to engage the biodi­
versity crisis. But these commitments also make sense from a more
instrumental-economic standpoint, and recall Moore’s (2017) point
about the enabling function of “symbolic” science to capitalism. There is
a long history of “assistive pretext” in corporate audio research (Mills
2011), wherein technologies ostensibly proposed for the disabled find
their “proper” utility in mainstream (and able-bodied) consumer mar­
kets. One researcher we spoke to suggested to us that by sharing in-
house algorithms with animal researchers, Google (or Alphabet) may
have found a “useful means” for circumventing (human) privacy con­
cerns for technologies ultimately developed for human purposes, such as
Google Home, effectively training voice recognition techniques on un­
witting animal subjects (Personal Communication). For Big Tech, con­
servation acoustics provides opportunities to experiment on sonic data
and with minimal legal oversight. Eric Drott (2018) has shown how the
(successful) exploitation of user data is a central to the economy of
multibillion dollar online music industry; a sector Drott elsewhere
characterizes in “cheap nature” terms (Drott 2019; c.f., Scherzinger
2019). It should not be surprising to find “cheap nature” strategies
proliferating across acoustical domains. The trend is consistent with one
of World Ecology’s guiding insights: a capitalism, characterized by “ever
more creative configurations of work/energy” (Moore 2017, p. 14),
finding expression in the “soft” transformations of science. Moreover, we
should be attentive to the range of symbolic venues for appropriating
new “frontiers” of naturally occurring processes – not only science and
state-led conservation, but various public fora too, like popular music
and environmentalism. Read as such, there is good reason to question
the celebratory reviews some public-facing conservation acoustics pro­
jects have received – such as the plaudits that greeted the nearly 3000
smartphone uploads of early morning bird recordings to the state-
13
See: https://www.smartindustry.com/articles/2019/hear-that-its-ibms
-acoustic-insights-program/
Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
Example Reference
Differentiating sounds made by rainfrogs enables Hutter, Carl R., and Juan M. Guayasamin. “Cryptic
identification of new species diversity concealed in the Andean cloud forests: two new
species of rainfrogs (Pristimantis) uncovered by molecular
and bioacoustic data.” Neotropical Biodiversity 1, no. 1
(2015): 36–59.
Reclassifying taxonomic classifications of piranha Raick, Xavier, Alessia Huby, Gregório Kurchevski,
species based on acoustic recordings Alexandre Lima Godinho, and Éric Parmentier. “Use of
bioacoustics in species identification: Piranhas from genus
Pygocentrus (Teleostei: Serrasalmidae) as a case
study.” Plos one 15, no. 10 (2020): e0241316.
Acoustic recordings paired with bioacoustic Buxton, Rachel T., Emma Brown, Lewis Sharman,
indices may be a useful method of monitoring Christine M. Gabriele, and Megan F. McKenna. “Using
shifts in songbird communities due to climate bioacoustics to examine shifts in songbird
change and other sources of anthropogenic phenology.” Ecology and evolution 6, no. 14 (2016):
disturbance 4697–4710.
Automated bioacoustic recorders are significantly Zwart, Mieke C., Andrew Baker, Philip JK McGowan, and
better at detecting nightjar birds than humans Mark J. Whittingham. “The use of automated bioacoustic
recorders to replace human wildlife surveys: an example
using nightjars.”PloS one9, no. 7 (2014): e102770.
Playback of buzzing bee sounds deters African King, Lucy E., Fredrick Lala, Hesron Nzumu, Emmanuel
elephants from farmers’ fields, reducing human- Mwambingu, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton. “Beehive fences
elephant conflict as a multidimensional conflict-mitigation tool for farmers
coexisting with elephants.” Conservation Biology 31, no. 4
(2017): 743–752.
In South Africa’s Kalahari desert, the decline of Thorley, Jack B., and Tim Clutton-Brock. “Kalahari vulture
the white-backed vulture, Gyps africanus, over declines, through the eyes of meerkats.” Ostrich 88, no. 2
17 years was estimated from the occurrence of (2017): 177–181.
alarm calls that sympatric meerkats give upon
sighting a vulture
funded Dawn Chorus website in May 2020 (Morss 2020).
According to our interviewees, various conservation benefits can be
attributed to new techno-social abilities to track, detect and manage
nature at scales and within spaces previously inaccessible. The self-same
capacity to represent, analyze and rapidly circulate nature as digital
sounds has also led to challenges in the conservation acoustics fields. A
recurrent point of interest in our interviews was the uptake of eco-
informatics theories, a trend evident in other digital conservation sci­
ences (Michener, 2015; Adams 2018; Bakker and Ritts 2018). A notable
point of tension here concerns the growing prominence of acoustical
“indices”, which attempt to compress the range and volume of data into
single measurable values.14 Indices are lauded in some circles as cost-
effective research tools, whose energy efficiency benefits can be corre­
lated with smaller datasets and less data sifting. But some scientists
openly worry about their underlying ecological assumptions (Gibb et al.
2019). For Holger Klinck, indices are over-simplifying, omitting the
relative contribution of different vocalizing species to a habitat’s integ­
rity. Sethi et al. (2020, 17049) find that indices often “behave unpre­
dictably when transferred to new environments.” They can omit key
structural information about sounds, reducing analytic insight to gen­
eral observations (Eldridge and Kiefer 2018). Yet even as their benefits
for conservation planning remain unclear (Turner et al. 2018), one finds
a growing array of indices calculation tools in bio-acoustics software
packages.
Indices are revealing of how conservation acoustics has developed
under conditions of “abstract social nature”. Their automated filtering of
“necessary” from “unnecessary” sound reflects economistic principles of
efficiency and cost-effectiveness (Sterne 2012). As symbolic knowledge
14
Indices extend from the controversial scientific claim that competition for
"acoustic space" between sympatric signaling animals drives the evolution of
signal divergence, or "acoustic niche partitioning" (Pijanowski et al. 2011). For
example, the Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI), attempts to code
the measure biological sounds (as in the form of "biophony") as a proxy for
species diversity (Farina and Gage 2017), or distribution (Towsey et al. 2014b;
Sueur et al. 2014).
149
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
expressions, they affirm data – superabundant, demanding to be valo­
rized – as the central commodity feature of digital capitalism (e.g.,
Zuboff 2019). And yet, despite the time-saving benefits of indices,
conservation acoustics is drowning in data abundance. In conservation
acoustics, this familiar scientific problem is being driven to a consider­
able extent by a recognition that human spatial–temporal perceptual
processing frames are inadequate to the range of suddenly audible life.
As Farina explains: “Animals communicate within milliseconds, but to
accomplish completely a physiological cycle of animals and under­
standing what happens, you need one year or more than one year. So,
the problem is that when investigating the few seconds, you find a huge
amount of information“ (Personal Communication). Here, Farina is
observing a trade-off between high-resolution analysis (reducing the
ability to undertake pattern recognition) and aggregation (reducing the
ability to identify subtle transformation): ”We have the technology, we
have the software, but we don’t have the time to analyze the data”
(Personal Communication). For Farina, one significant cost of the
overweening focus on data and correlation-seeking is the diminishment
of engagement in direct observation and theory building (Personal
Communication; see also: Farina et al. 2021). This issue of an episte­
mology more disposed to the parsing of patterns than to discerning
underlying causes reflects an underlying economism also observable in
marked discplinary interests in cost-benefit methodologies, commercial
applications and ecosystem services (e.g., Levenhagen et al. 2021), not
to mention “high through-put” sensing technologies“ (Gibb et al. 2019.
p. 169).15
The second source of investment in conservation acoustics is from
the environmental state, whose policies must align and contend with
capitalist dynamics (Robertson and Wainwright 2013). Often in tandem
with university research teams, the last several years has seen the
elaboration of numerous state conservation acoustics infrastructure
projects, wherein individual sensors (e.g., microphones) support
spatially diffusive systems of data collection (DataOne 2020; National
Ecology Observatory Network, 2020). New audio surveillance capacities
link state interests in spatial administration, territoriality and environ­
mental legitimacy through the medium of sound. One of several
national-level examples we found, the Australian Acoustic Observatory
(A2O) operates hundreds of continuously operating sensors in
continent-scale acoustic sensor network threaded through a patchwork
of different ecosystems. In this scheme, billed by one journal as the first
“Google maps for sound” (Eco Voice 2019), terabytes of incoming data
are gathered from the Australian sub-continent, stored with the
Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, and made “freely avail­
able” to researchers, citizen scientists, and the general public via cloud
computing access (Acoustic Observatory, Background, p. 1). Heralded
here is a “geo-epistemology” (Rankin 2016) – or for Moore (2017),
“geopower” – that expands the state’s capacities for asserting territorial
intelligence, with new powers for shaping and/or directing the cognitive
expectations of other potential users.16 In states like Canada and
Australia, there is an evident economic interest behind these in­
vestments; with the datafication of the “nation’s soundscape” occurring
at a time of intensifying tension over natural resource procurement and
15
Farina et al. (2021) are not suggesting that researchers abandon the search
for rapid assessment tools. Rather, they insist that science needs to be able to be
respond to rapidly changing circumstances of conservation. As Tyack offered,
"it’s absolutely essential for bioacoustics to move to the broader scales even if
the ability to devise fine-point measurements is reduced" (Personal Communi­
cation). Indices foreground a collective tension regarding the determination of
what Jennifer Gabrys and Helen Pritchard (2018) call "just good enough data" -
e.g., the knowledge necessary to support measured interventions.
16
To be sure, linkages between state-supported conservation and biosciences
of sound are not new. The epistemological coordinates cohered in the post-war
period, and sonically focused avian studies describe a 100-year history with
even deeper roots in scientific naturalism (see: Bruyninckx 2018).
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Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
its ecological impacts (for another example, see: Ritts 2017).
Much has been written about the ways in which conventional envi­
ronmental regulatory structures are ill-equipped to adequately discuss
today’s environmental threats (Sullivan 2016; Ritts and Bakker 2019;
Buscher and Fletcher 2020). Kurt Fristrup, director of the US National
Parks Service “Quiet Parks” initiative, reflected on this idea to us: “‘My
generation of scientists had been... ineffective in communicating, in
adjusting its communication style to track both the opportunities and
the challenges to the sort of shift public communication we need”
(Personal Communication). As with other venues of environmental
governance, conservation acoustics exhibits marked changes in the so­
ciality of science: more animals, more spaces, more data, more sounds –
with the proposition that more pluralistic collaborations will result (e.g.,
Hausheer 2018). This recalls a “conscriptive” moment in the politics of
ensonified conservation (Bruyninckx 2018). Through the sharing of
digital sound, it has become increasingly easy to include citizen scien­
tists, local actors, as well as different taxa, in study designs. Birders with
smartphones can download bioacoustics apps like Warblr, ChirpOMatic,
Song Sleuth, or BirdGenie and send the data to central authorities (Moye
2017). Researchers can explore the “benefits” of archived acoustic
datasets collected over previous decades, such as from the National
History Museum (UK), Xeno-Canto (Netherlands); BioAcoustica (UK),
NOAA (USA), or Fonoteca (Mexico) (Riede 2018; for a rejoinder, see:
Gibb et al. 2019, 178). In Canada, Erin Bayne tells us, state environ­
mental agencies are encouraging companies to automated recording
units to not only self-report bioacoustical data for environmental
compliance purposes, but to create “open frameworks” that can support
state-led habitat modelling and climate change projections too (Personal
Communication).
Several of the people we spoke to were conservation managers, and
specifically interested in work that can support “novel mechanisms for
[applied] environmental conservation” (Fristrup, Personal Communi­
cation). Through its celebrated Elephant Listening Project (ELP) re­
searchers at Cornell University have been using sound to manage forest
elephants in Central Africa for over three decades. As Holger Klinck, a
contributor to the project tells us, the ability to do remote acoustic
detection of gunshots in the Congo Basin allows researchers to inform
local authorities when and where poaching is happening, leading to new
recommendations on which areas to monitor (Personal Communica­
tion). Without dismissing the noted ecological benefits of this long­
standing project (e.g., Payne 1998), it raises some troubling geopolitical
questions. The very characteristics that make conservation acoustics
data useful to both distant scientists and cash-strapped local national
governments - cheap, remotely obtained, applicable to a range of species
and landscape types - are also making it useful to local poachers. Rising
concerns scientists have over “data poaching” (Lennox et al. 2020)
should be linked to the new market values effectively being placed on
data that aims to seamlessly extract from complex social conditions. In
Central Africa (as in other locations), scientists are discovering that
acoustical tagging technologies are being exploited to pin-point animal
location: information which can be “hacked” and sold to a third party
(Lindenmayer and Scheele 2017).
A related problem concerns the growing use of bio and eco acoustics
tools by energy multinationals, who are populating industrial develop­
ment proceedings with dubious new forms of “fast science” (Stengers
2018; cf. Dunlap and Fairhead 2014). Susan Fuller, for instance, notes
that the ability to produce rapid terabytes of sound has exposed acous­
tical animal behaviors to the calculative interests of industrial energy
proponents: “What concerns me about this conversation is that you have
the scientists, and you have the practitioner, and often they’re different,
right? We have a lot of consultants that will now head out and put out
these acoustics’ sensors, camera traps – whatever tech that’s low cost –
and not have a really good idea about experimental design: how to set
up, what additional data to collect, is this even the right time?“ (Personal
Communication). Fuller makes plain the challenge of maintaining
robust processes of scientific review amidst the obfuscating powers of
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
industry-led science. States that claim to support state-led conservation
efforts run the risk of compromising good research by effectively
endorsing data regimes that do not account for the concerns of their own
regulatory agencies. Fuller continues, ”So now, we’re giving them the
ammunition to be able to go in and say, and if you Google some of these
cases – the black throated finch, for example, they surveyed for one
week, didn’t find it, therefore it’s not there – despite it being a nationally
listed species – and conclude “therefore your development can go
ahead” (Personal Communication).
Can conservation acoustics contribute to “modes of stewardship
based on diverse, reflexive awareness of the always-entangled nature of
humans and their environments” (Lorimer 2015: 2)? Or is it simply a
vehicle for the production of capitalist value, in line with other “in­
novations” in conservation practice and knowledge (Buscher 2014;
Collard and Dempsey, 2017; Johnson and Goldstein, 2015)? Big Tech
and the (presently formed) environmental state present clear barriers to
radical forms of conservation planning and practice. While cognizant of
these issues, many researchers we spoke with were nevertheless opti­
mistic about the possibilities contained in their research. For Almo
Farina, the continuous monitoring procedures enabled under conser­
vation acoustics result in “higher likelihoods” of detecting rarer or less
vocally active species (Personal Communication; Klingbeil and Willig
2015). Like many of our interlocutors, Farina believes that the ability to
analyze new details about the changing physiology, behavior, and
community dynamics of animals - through calling-frequencies, rates,
and periodicities - will carry huge conservation benefits. One example he
cites for us is noise. As a known anthropogenic pollutant, anthropogenic
noise is growing in extent and intensity across many US National Parks
Buxton et al. (2017), for instance, found that anthropogenic noise had
doubled recorded levels of “background sound” in 63% of U.S. protected
areas). Like other researchers, Farina has found that noise fundamen­
tally impacts conservation efforts by altering how animals process in­
formation in particular environments (Gage and Farina 2015; c.f.
Shannon et al. 2014). The characteristic sounds are not always anthro­
pogenic; or within audible human hearing range (e.g., 20 Hz − 20 kHz).
Farina’s colleague Gianni Pavan tells us that ability to rapidly generate
spectrograms - the strength (or “loudness”) of a signal over time at the
frequencies present in a waveform - has greatly aided researchers’
abilities to chart behavioral responses across electro-magnetic, ultra­
sonic and low-frequency (e.g., vibrational) ranges (Personal Communi­
cation; Brumm 2004; Francis and Barber, 2013; Peterson et al 2017). For
these and author scientists, the regime we are calling conservation
acoustics thus points to the need to work with introduce concepts in
conservation planning, such as “soundscapes”, that can more adequately
account for behavioral changes in relation to changing acoustical pres­
ences (Buxton et al. 2017; Shannon et al. 2014; Cox et al. 2018).17
Another hopeful theme our interlocutors emphasized was a
newfound capacity to identify how minute acoustical changes can pro­
liferate across broad ecosystem dynamics. A set of studies led by CJ
McClure et al. (2013, 2017) reveal how even the most mundane aspects
of protected area design can have consequential effects on noise impact,
with cascading ecosystem effects. For instance, McClure et al. (2013)
selected “test” habitats where they established a string of speakers,
spaced at even intervals. Broadcasting sound through only half of the
speakers allowed them to find strong and compelling impacts on a
species level: a passerine bird used to a certain kind of berry might avoid
the noisier section of road resulting in actual vegetation changes where
berries were not picked. This “phantom road” experiment demonstrated
that traffic noise can degrade the quality of a stopover site, affecting
migrating birds’ ability to manage body metabolism. As Jesse Barber, a
co-author on one of the papers, enthused to us, McClure et al.’s findings
17
Interest in the effect of human produced sounds have on terrestrial species
is not new. See, for example. Slabbekoorn and Peet’s (2003) study on changing
frequencies of urban birdsong.).
151
Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
open new pathways for thinking about how conservation planners
distribute biological “winners and losers” across noisy environments
(Personal Communication). For Erin Bayne, these findings resonate with
important insights into industry practices of using gas cannons, blasts,
and other impulse sounds to scare birds – activities long held to be
benign. Such practices are now being reappraised for the significant
long-term behavioral impacts they likely carry (Personal Communica­
tion; Bayne et al. 2008; Shonfield and Bayne 2017).
Conservation acoustics points to the need for new conservation
strategies that can deal with anthropogenic sound in both major and
minor quantities, across a range of scales and spaces. It invites new
questions into the evident dynamic shifts now discernable in very
discrete animal sounds. “There are many hundreds of species you can
encounter in a tropical rainforest, but if you go there and you listen to it
you would never know they’re there because the vocalizations they are
making are happening on an ultrasonic range,” explains Holger Klinck
(Personal Communication). “So, there is all this biodiversity you cannot
assess by just being there and listening.” For example, scientists in the
UK have sought to understand the changing distribution of endangered
New Forest Cicadas, which sing above the human hearing range at
fourteen or fifteen kilohertz but is loud enough to allow smartphone
technologies to detect and record it (Hill et al. 2018). Ecologies may
appear as healthy to human listeners given the loudness of their signals,
but closer inspection within select frequencies can reveal all sorts of
negative trends. Explains Klinck: “If you have five invasive species in
there which are producing a lot of sound, which might give you the
impression that, “Ooo there’s a lot of sound there its pretty good,” but
really there is a lot of invasive there and it is not that great.” It is quite
challenging to weigh the relative value of these impacts“ (Personal
Communication).
One set of important conservation acoustics efforts has involved the
tracking of “defaunation”: the often hard-to-detect decline of organisms
in habitats that appear to be intact, but are actually degrading (Teixeira
et al. 2019). Before conventional monitoring methods can detect this
trend, “early warning signals” of declining ecosystem health, apparent in
frequency distribution, calling rate and signal attenuation, can be
sourced from audio recordings (Krause and Farina 2016; Gylenhall
2020; AFP 2020). The proposition of “acoustic fossils” (Sugai and Llusia
2019, p. 150), e.g., recorded sounds that act as “evidence of extinct
fauna in a near future” - gives such efforts a clear urgency. A growing
thrust in conservation acoustics has been the development of
management-ready concepts – “soundscape”, “listening area”, “active
space” - that could be used to protect biophysical conditions of sound
production, periodicity, transmission, and attenuation. For many people
we spoke to, the emergence of such concepts is a sign of the growing
willingness of scientists to engage in more active forms of policymaking
discussion (Personal Communication, Fristrup, Fuller, Pavan)
Because scientists can now “eavesdrop” at scale on the non-human
world, day and night, their routinely find themselves with an
augmented ability to specify the spatial and temporal that should define
the practice of conservation (Teixeira et al. 2019). Farina notes that:
“The majority of our research has been done by chance, I place a
recorder here, in other place, and we’ve need a better research project.
Not one attracted by the beauty of a place or remoteness of a place but by
a model, and that is what I think is happening now” (Personal
Communication). “What I’ve enjoyed the most about it is that digital
record has given us,” notes Erin Bayne, “is an opportunity to ask ques­
tions we really couldn’t answer before, with humans, simply because
people have to sleep and eat and move on, whereas with an ARU they
can stand there and work 24/7 if they need to” (Personal Communica­
tion). For Gianni Pavan, the ability to conduct continuous recording
using “bio-digital” devices (e.g., sensors affixed to particular animals or
population groups) could make it harder for states and governments to
ignore the plight of particular species.
Herein lies an inflection point: Many of the same technological shifts
that have allowed advertising firms to better track the locations of
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
would-be music customers (Drott 2018) are also paving the way for
needed forms of dynamic conservation planning. Conservation acoustics
is resounding at a time when climate change-induced stresses are
shifting the seasonality and timing of many animal migrations (Farina
and Gage 2017). According to Peter Tyack, greater consideration for
“dynamic element of conservation planning” has become necessary, as
“we really need to change our perspective when you think about the
amount of effort it takes to make the equivalent of a national park with a
fixed boundary, when the animals may have shifted next year” (Personal
Communication). Adds Pavan: “The fact that sound doesn’t pay any
attention to borders… has been well known in the marine world for
some time now, and it’s just entering our conversations on land” (Per­
sonal Communication). Pavan sees the utilization of fluid and adaptive
spatial–temporal management regimes, as are already being elaborated
in “Mobile Marine Protected Areas” (Maxwell et al., 2019), as both
welcome and necessary in terrestrial contexts as well. But one question
he leaves unanswered is: how do we ensure the other kinds of tracking
enabled by this digital surveillant capacity are held in check?
4. Discussion
In our analysis, which drew from interviews, literature reviews, and
meta-review of scholarly literature on bioacoustics, conservation
acoustics experiences a fundamental tension between fostering innova­
tive forms of conservation and scientific-perceptual acuity, on the one
hand; and operating as a tacit site for the appropriation of nature (of
both methods and data) by private actors, on the other. By reading
conservation acoustics through World Ecology (Moore 2015; 2016;
2017), it is possible to discern meaningful changes in the content and
conduct of conservation more generally. Moore’s concepts of “abstract
social nature” and “work/energy” help us grasp conservation acoustics
as part of significant contemporary formation of power-knowledge:
digital technologies and associated techno-social innovations that
enhance capitalism’s capacity to appropriate new, previously uncom­
modified nature frontiers.18 Under conservation acoustics, sound is
being articulated across new webs of meaning connecting diverse ecol­
ogies, technologies, spaces, conservation agencies, private companies,
and state actors. According to this argument, conservation acoustics
provides unassailable evidence of the “ever more creative configurations
of work/energy (Moore 2017, p. 14) that characterize a digital capi­
talism finding expression in the “soft” transformations of science.
But more must be added to this account. According to many of the
scientists we spoke to, conservation acoustics is also driving an “inten­
sification” of our understanding of different animal’s acoustical cultures
(Lorimer et al. 2019: 10). Diverse efforts to recognize the novel tem­
poralities and spatialities that shape animal life – especially within
habitats where direct observation is difficult (rain forests, oceans) and/
or are populated with cryptic species – are driving new understandings
of the constitutive relationships between organisms and their perceptual
spacetimes (Shaw et al., 2013). The incredible analytical possibilities
emerging in conservation acoustics suggest that any dismissal of its
project on abstract theoretical grounds is both unwarranted and reckless
from an ecological standpoint. What we have tried to do, in response, is
heed the Harawaian injunction of “staying with the trouble”: insisting on
the urgency of the ecological questions that conservation acoustics
pursues, while remarking on the structural forces which significantly
inform its trajectory, and which may come to impede its conservation
objectives. The story is not simply about how to conserve audible na­
tures, but how to relate to nature in more fundamental ways too. For
18
Certainly, some of what we discussed also resonates with critiques of "Na­
ture 2.0′′ (Büscher 2014) and "conservation by algorithm" (Adams 2017). The
rise of conservation acoustics is closely linked to strategies of capital accumu­
lation that implicate hardware (e.g., digital recording devices), software, and
data itself.
152
Geoforum 124 (2021) 144–155
Moore, the logic of “cheapening” that typifies the contemporary world is
significant not only for political economic reasons, but ethical–political
ones: in relation to a vast diminution in the ways non-human life is to be
known, related to, and audited as a co-present force in the world.
This paper has been a first pass attempt to make sense of a rapidly
proliferating set of fields we have engaged as “conservation acoustics”.
In our period of continued geopolitical disruption, one which has seen a
range of scientific research activities move online, it is likely that in­
terest in this area will continue to widen in scope and appeal. We can
identify several agendas which might build on our efforts. The first
pertains to the neo-colonial dimensions of conservation acoustics. Many
of the projects described here involve US and European-based academics
working across Africa, Latin America and North American. Traversing
their production of large integrated sensory networks is the universal­
izing logic of Western Science: the “excision of the political from its
operations of truth making” (Ochoa-Gautier 2016: 120).19 Research is
needed into the question of how Indigenous community practices,
imbued with different valuations of nature and sociality (see, for
example, Kimmerer 2013; Porath 2008), are being implicated, appro­
priated, or negotiated via conservation acoustics. Questions of Indige­
nous data sovereignty—including acoustical data—are also pressing
here; as considerable amounts of data in the conservation acoustics
regime is presently being extracted from Indigenous territories and
through means that disregard traditional appraisals of protocol, consent
and community interest (Kukutai and Taylor 2016).
A second agenda involves conservation acoustics’ military relation­
ships (Duffy et al. 2019). Political ecologists have long been interested in
how conservation projects can be leveraged to continue military cam­
paigns in other guises. An example drawing from our study area invovles
the “low power wide-area networks” (LPWAN) now featuring in some
National Parks in Central Africa.20 Like acoustic observatories, these
novel sensing technologies expose new territories and bodies to audio
detection systems, and reveal the persistent traffic between conservation
efforts and military efforts to comprehensively map battlespace (Sand­
brook 2015). In these schemes, the bodies of enemy combatants come
under the same sonic gaze as surveilled animals, raising questions about
the risks posed to actors’ privacies in contexts of predictive technologies.
A third area where this conversation might develop is in animal
geographies. Conservation acoustics is relevant to questions of ethology
(Barua and Sinha 2019), ethics (Gillespie 2016), and non-human work
(Collard 2020). Animal geographers could offer commentary on
emerging bioacoustical efforts to elaborate “organism centered
perspective[s] to landscape (and soundscape)’” (Farina et al., 2021),
specifically by unpacking species-specific constructions of ontology,
identity and community. Most of all, the subfield’s disposition towards a
“heterogeneity of ideas, practices, methodologies and associations”
(Buller, 2014: 310) proposes a range of tools for grappling with the
worrying tendency we find, one of “conserved” animal species onto­
logically fixed by science in relation to statistical predictors themselves
bound to already-formed datasets and computational routines.
It is instructive to close with Haraway’s (1988) “Situated Knowl­
edges” essay. Haraway developed this landmark critique of scientific
19
The exclusionary white male status quo of digital tech and the earth/
ecological sciences more generally is affirmed in the sectors we discuss here
(Dutt 2020; Lum 2017). Only 2 of our 15 interviewees were female, and all but
one identified as white. This reflects the fact that practitioners of conservation
acoustics are not nearly as diverse as the human communities where conser­
vation acoustics projects materialize.
20
For examples of these proto-military technologies: https://lora-alliance.or
g/in-the-news/smart-parks-protects-endangered-species-lorawanr. See also"
https://www.smartparks.org; https://www.irnas.eu/animal-conservation-
with-lorawan-turtles-fish-and-more/; https://www.avanza.se/placera/pressme
ddelanden/2019/08/22/semtech-corp-semtechs-lora-devices-preserve-centur
ies-of-art-and-cultural-history.html
M. Ritts and K. Bakker
representation through visual metaphors (viewpoints, eyes, and seeing,
etc.). Our study has exposed a technoscience ever more responsive to
sonic cues, but which in many ways recalls the universalising, mascu­
linist, militarist “gaze” Haraway posited in vision over thirty years ago.
As a counterpoint to vision’s disembodied gaze, Haraway posited that
knowledges are always situated in an intersectional sense: gendered,
placed, and embodied. As one of our most celebrated interviewees, Katy
Payne, suggests, the act of listening bioacoustically can also affirm these
features. Indeed, Payne attributes her breakthrough findings in the study
of infrasonic elephant communication to her ability, as a trained musi­
cian as well as a scientist, to commit deep attention to animals, in place,
over extended periods of time (Personal Communication, see also: Payne
1998). Bioacoustics, according to Payne, is a deeply psychological,
embodied form of “modest witnessing” (Haraway 1997); qualities which
heighten (rather than detract from) the ability of scientists to document
and quantify the living world. Digital data often contains a promise of
disembodied experience, in which we learn by staring at screens rather
than by sensing the world around us. This implies an ambivalent view on
our “conversation’” (Haraway 1988, 589) with what Haraway calls “the
world as coding trickster” (ibid, 596).
A technoscientific paradigm premised on data-streaming sensors on
networked animal subjects and ecologies is not an altogether hopeful
one, from Haraway’s critical feminist standpoint. Yet conservation
acoustics also offers capacious engagements with sound, and these may
(as some of our interviewees pointed out) reorient “focus away from not
only anthropocentric but also “earcentric” models of sonic perception”
and lead to new collective appreciations of nature (Roosth 2018, 110; cf.
Gallagher et al. 2016). This idea affirms both Moore and Haraway’s
belief that scientific revolutions always bring about new political on­
tologies, including some which may affirm radical conservation possi­
bilities. From this perspective, the prospect of a more radical
conservation acoustics hinges on the refusal of capitalism’s violent ab­
stractions and also on the “ability to partially translate knowledges
among very different—and power-differentiated—communities” (1988,
580).
Acknowledgement
Max Ritts (lead author) wishes to thank VIVA PLAN (www.viva-plan.
eu), a FORMAS funded research project investigating sustainability
transition in Scandinavia. VIVA PLAN provided Max Ritts with indirect
funding support for the writing of this paper. Together, we wish to thank
Adele Therias, Bram Buscher, Bill Adams, Kyle Devine and the Oslo
School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH) Seminar Series, where an
earlier draft of this paper received inspired feedback. We are also
grateful to the organizers of the excellent "Digital Ecologies" conference
(University of Cambridge) for a chance to share findings there.
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