Soundscapes, Biosonification, Ruby Singh

This paper listens with Vancouver-based composer Ruby Singh’s Polyphonic Garden Suite II (2023) to make a double argument: first, Singh’s ambient electronic field recordings intervene in the tradition of the Western acoustic environmental humanities that resounds with fantasies of depopulated and deracialized soundscapes; and second, Singh’s experiments in sound offer another model for that environmental humanist dream of attuning to, and communing with, the more-than-human. Rather than framing biosonification as a process that grants us access to the more-than-human, I think through biosonification as human imposition and mediation, in a way that keeps in earshot irreducibility rather than transparency.