Soundscapes of an Earthly Community

Soundscapes of an Earthly Community is a spatial sound performance, which responds to the call of African philosopher Achille Mbeme to reenvision our more-than-human relations bound not by universality but by the in-common. As an escape route from the existential crisis produced by necrocapitalist extraction—where technological advancement and ecological devastation are mutually reinforcing—a new earthly community must liberate all animate beings by making room for the other within the assemblage. In making room Soundscapes of an Earthly Community attempts to break with reductionist binaries—binaries that neatly separate nature and culture, human and machine, mind and body, internal and external—to advance into the porous borderlands between biological, geological, and technological life in search of their in-common sonic character.

Inspired by Bernie Krause’s soundscape ecology, Soundscapes of an Earthly Community explores biophony, geophony, anthrophony, and technophony as intersecting rather than fixed sonic domains. A surround-sound system distributes generative audio from distinct RAVE models trained on biological, geophysical, and human-made recordings, with AI functioning as a technophonic mediator. Microphones capture sounds from the audience, environment, and speakers and return them to the models, creating evolving feedback loops through which human, non-human, geological, and technological agencies produce a shared soundscape.

The development of the Soundscapes of an Earthly Community was supported by the Hexagram network, the Milieux Institute at Concordia University, and UKAI Projects.