Geosonics: Bodies, Instruments, Interfaces

This dissertation examines, from a media-cultural and sound studies perspective, how we make the earth audible; and how we conceive of listening as an embodied experience and a technocultural act in relation to an audible (or at least audifiable) planet. In the introduction I approach sound, mediation, and materiality through the concept of transduction, which refers to the material and metaphorical conversion of sound in and across cultural, technical and geological environments. I develop an alternative set of phenomenological and media-critical terms (e.g., enearthment, enlistenment and infrastruction) to describe the co-constitution of human embodiment and geology in media infrastructures. The first and second chapters focus on techniques of audio seismology and audio stretching (respectively) to understand how scientists, technicians and artists convert earth-scale vibrations into human-scale aesthetic artifacts. The third chapter (on cyborg art) and fourth chapter (on the aesthetics of sleep) emphasize how human embodiments are complexly embedded in technological and planetary infrastructures. Each chapter probes the aesthetic, political and ecological assumptions that frame the transductive processes I analyze. The dissertation develops original concepts and analyses relevant to current, theoretically informed work in critical media studies, sound studies, and environmental media studies. The overall aim of the dissertation is to use sound and listening to unsettle how we think of materiality at human and geological scales; and to argue for the centrality of transduction as a critical tool for rethinking the complex relationships between earth, media, and experience in the 21st century.