Botanical Musicalities: Listening with Plant-Human Encounter

Abstract

This dissertation accounts for some of the many musics, sounds, and silences that animate encounters among plants and Humans. Working across musicology and histories of botany, I interrogate the cliché of plants as silent lifeforms by considering how Humans negotiate questions of anthropocentrism and nonhuman agency during the process of making plants more audible for Human ears. I argue that attuning to the sonic lives of plants illuminates how musical and sonic practices serve the project of generating knowledge about the more-than-human world, and the constituent formation of identity amidst socio-cultural hierarches of Human and nonhuman beings. Each chapter spotlights different techniques for making plants audible and musical, in addition to addressing a variety of aesthetic arguments about music as a “universal” mode of communicating with more-than-human life. In so doing, I examine how Humans draw plants into our musical worlds by transforming botanical life into sensitive listeners, active performance partners, or material musical instruments in various contexts throughout the modern era. Such contexts range from the representation of floral scent in nineteenth-century art song known as mélodie (Chapter 2), electroacoustic music from the mid-twentieth century onward (Chapters 1 and 4), and online communities of passionate plant caretakers (Chapter 3). In examining the usefulness of techniques like singing or bio-sonification, my dissertation argues for a revised notion of “musicality” that includes not just Human or animal ways of sounding, but plant ones as well. In so doing, I argue that asking after the unheard influences of nonhuman life in shaping ideas/discourses about music and sound reorients our ears towards the centrality of multispecies relationships in shaping our acoustic environments.