Community Listening in Isle Royale National Park, a sonic ethnography a work in progress The path to Community Listening began

with the graduate paper entitled, Toward Sonic Ethnography which asks if an ethnography can exist purely in sound. The paper considers the confluence of elements that seep across the disciplines of acoustic ecology, audio documentary, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and contemporary electroacoustic music composition. I analyze the work of anthropologist Steven Feld, audio documentarist Tony Schwartz, and composer/ecologist R. Murray Schafer and The World Soundscape project with two goals in mind. To explore how recording, interpreting, and representing culture intertwines across disciplines as a way to establish a model for sonic ethnography; and to show that sound has been a successful tool in transmitting scholarly information while also being aesthetically engaging. The latter goal is a response to Jonathan Sternes statement that, Sound Studies work is [predominantly] written and spoken because it is about sound. The central question of Community Listening began in the frozen hush of Denali National Park in Alaska where I was conducting fieldwork for my orchestral piece Winter. On the tundra in negative 40-degree weather, I could hear nothing between my breathing. During these moments of pause I listened to myself listen, and realized that sounds change physically as they travel through spaces while they reciprocally shape and are shaped by webs of relationships between people and things 1 across socio-cultural contexts. Within this space, I wondered what I could learn both as an individual listener and as a researcher listening to how other people listen. To answer this question I conducted fieldwork in Isle Royale National Park, an isolated archipelago located within the northern sector of Lake Superior. This research informs my ethnography of listening, entitled, Community Listening in Isle Royale National Park. The work traces how I became part of a dialogue among a team of wolf biologists and park-explorers who share a particular deep listening relationship. The scientists involved in this project are the primary investigators in the five-decade long wolf/moose project, the longest continuous wildlife study in the world. The way these researchers determine wolf reproductive success is to listen for the sounds of group howling during the summer months when excitement at den sites erupts during pup feeding time. When this type of howling takes place, the wolf/moose operation is just a two-person team consisting of Rolf and Candy Peterson. On a secluded island with no electricity or means of technologically listening for howls, the Peterson's ears, or antennas as they put it, listen for clues of wolf reproduction by tapping into a community listening network of park visitors and employees who are scattered across the island listening. This relationship provides the foundation for my multi-media sonic ethnography. Please listen to the following trailer: https://soundcloud.com/grace_st/community-listening-trailer This excerpts poetic opening of place is meant to link the listeners to the island environment and contextualize the content to come. This opening is composed of field recordings that I made in 2011 while I was the Artist-In-Residence in the park. We hear the high-frequency sounds of tiny invertebrates in tidal pools, underwater sounds of Lake Superior, fog horns, bell buoys, and the beeps of Rolf's wolf radio collar receiver. These recordings are mixed with selections from a string quartet that I wrote for the park which was composed from spectral information of the fog horn recordings. To understand the diverse perspective of this network I conducted interviews with park visitors and employees. In addition, I gave several small sound recorders to visitors and asked them to keep audio diaries of their experience listening in the park. Using a digital audio workstation and a selection of this sound data, I composed the next section of the excerpt, a sonic representation of the community listening network. Using the technology I was able to poetically portray the polyvocality of the network in sound. Meanwhile, to maintain narrative continuity, a layer of environmental recordings continues, transitioning into a brief

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1

This idea has grown largely from concepts explored in Barry Truaxs book, Acoustic Communication.

introduction of how the Petersons wolf/moose study benefits from the network. There is a considerable amount of noise in this recorded interview because I reverted to using my lo-fi, unobtrusive camera-sized compact sound recorder for interview tasks. I packed up my pro sound gear midway through fieldwork because it was acting as physical and cultural barrier between myself and the Peterson's. They seemed to be lumping me into the media category of journalists who were flocking to the island at the time to report on the low wolf numbers. When I switched to the small lo-fi recorder I noticed a significant difference in the Peterson's attitude towards me and decided that I would much rather deal with lo-fi sound quality in exchange for a comfortable and communicative environment. In fact, I have come to like these lo-fi recordings because they remind the listener of the recordist in the field due to audible disturbances and artifacts. My goal for this excerpt is to create a narrative frame to guide listeners through which allows for optimal room for self-perusal and discovery. There are many issues and topics that make up this fieldwork context. Issues of noise, silence, chance, the relationship between science and the public, National Park policy and politics, species reintroduction, the romanticization and dramatization of the wolf, the socio-aesthetics of place, togetherness of campsite communities, and the spirituality of the wilderness experience. This listening network is directly tied to the ecological well-being of the park, which is currently at risk of major change because the wolves, who play a vital role, are on the brink of blinking-out due to global climate change. The sonic ethnography that emerges weaves together several different types of sound data collected during fieldwork, exemplified in the excerpt, which includes, soundscape recordings of the place, interviews with the wolf researchers, interviews with park visitors and employees, audio diaries, an audio essay derived from field notes, and archival recordings. My soundtrack composed for cello, celesta, and electronics contextualizes this material into a cohesive work. The final composition will exist in two formats, a 25-minute radio work, and an online web environment that mirrors the listening network as an interactive form. I intend for this work to be made available to the public through alternative forms of research transmission, such as public radio, and through several online peer-reviewed journals such as Sensate: A Journal for Experiment in Critical Media Practice.