Networked through Sound: Listening to 20th Century Wildlife Sound Archives

Networked through Sound is a three-year research project, which investigates the histories and contemporary relevance of a network of wildlife sound archives initiated in the mid 20th century in Europe and South Africa.

About

The first known sound recording of an animal was produced in 1889 by the German broadcaster and wildlife sound recordist Ludwig Koch, when he recorded a caged Common Shama thrush. It wasn’t, however, until the 1930s that animal sound recording started to flourish, with the development of recording technologies and techniques that facilitated proximity to wild animals.

As animal recordings and interest in them started to proliferate, wildlife sound archives emerged as new sites of specialist scientific data sets, primarily as repositories of recordings for bioacoustics research, which is the study of animal sounds, and as reference libraries for the identification of species by scientific taxonomists and wildlife enthusiasts.

These archives and their recordings are of contemporary relevance, from their commercial application in Apps, films, and computer games, to their ongoing use in ecological monitoring for environmental conservation. This research project investigates the emergence of a network of seven wildlife sound archives initiated in the mid 20th century across Europe and South Africa.

The primary objective of the project is to understand how this network of wildlife sound archives, and the sound recordings they are composed of, are produced and consumed across different social and cultural contexts.

Key facts

• Start date: 01/02/25
• End date: 31/01/28
• Funding amount and funder: £175,952AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council)
  • €451,583 DFG (German Research Foundation)
    • Total (with conversion from euros to pounds) = £553,189

Aims

The Networked through Sound project explores:

1. The ethical and political contexts in which the archival network has been produced
2. The circulation of sound recordings and technologies between the network of archives
3. The historic and contemporary objectives of the archival network
4. The utility of wildlife sound recordings to address contemporary environmental issues
5. The generation of knowledge about the natural world through sound recording.

Project team

• Professor Sandra Jasper (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)