Sonic Archives

The Archive Beyond the Page

The word archive still triggers the image of bound papers, catalog cards, and photographs stored in climate-controlled rooms. Even when digitized, the archive is imagined as a visual-textual construct: something to be read. This bias is not accidental. The colonial archive was designed to privilege sight and script — the literocentric modes of perception most compatible with the surveillance and inscription technologies of empire.

But in the tropics, knowledge has long been carried in other media. The forest hums, rivers murmur, insects drone, birds trade phrases in complex choruses. A storm announces itself not with a shape but with a timbre. Here, the archive is also sonic: an accumulation of vibrations, echoes, and resonances that index the life of a territory.

Science recognizes this reality only partially, and often only when mediated by technology. In bioacoustics, for example, sound becomes "data" once captured, filtered, and visualized as spectrograms. Removed from the web of relations in which it was produced, it is stripped to frequency, duration, and amplitude. What remains is useful for species detection, but not for understanding how those sounds function as memory, governance, or cosmology inside a web or a weaving of meanings.

Epistemologies of Listening

Listening can be an epistemology in its own right — not merely a sensory input, but a structured way of knowing. Across tropical regions, communities have developed elaborate listening practices that collapse the boundary between environmental observation and social relation.

In the upper Amazon, Tukano and Shipibo fishers navigate blackwater rivers by the acoustic "texture" of currents hitting submerged roots. In Borneo (Sarawak and Kalimantan), Penan and other forest walkers map space through echo, gauging canopy density and the proximity of game from the bounce of their own footsteps. Among Andean highlanders (Quechua and Aymara), sound calendars mark the agricultural year: the first call of a certain frog announces planting season, while the silence of cicadas foretells frost.

These are not "folk" variants of acoustic monitoring; they are epistemologies with their own protocols, validation methods, and thresholds for action. A species call is not simply a presence marker. It is a relational event — an invitation, a warning, a territorial negotiation. Listening here is not passive reception. It is participation in an ongoing conversation between beings.

Extinction as Silence, Invasion as Noise

Ecological collapse is often heard before it is seen. The sudden absence of a bird from the dawn chorus, the thinning of the insect hum at dusk, the loss of low-frequency whale calls from a bay — these are silences that mark not just biodiversity loss, but the disappearance of entire relational networks.

Conversely, ecological invasion often arrives as noise: the constant drone of a newly introduced crop pest, the motorized hum of illegal logging camps, the broadband roar of mining machinery that masks animal calls over kilometers. In such cases, noise is not just a nuisance. It is a form of ecological displacement.

This is where the concept of acoustic sovereignty becomes urgent: the right of a territory to maintain the integrity of its soundscape. Just as land rights and water rights are recognized as forms of environmental governance, so too should the governance of sound be understood as integral to ecological survival. The erosion of a soundscape is an erosion of memory, because once a sound disappears, so does the set of relations, obligations, and actions it sustained.

The Colonial Ear

The colonial archive did not ignore sound; it captured it. From the late 19th century onward, ethnomusicologists, missionaries, and wildlife recordists travelled the tropics with phonographs, magnetic tape, and later, digital recorders. They sought to preserve "vanishing" songs, languages, and animal calls — a preservation that almost always involved their relocation to northern vaults.

Once there, these recordings were subjected to a new regime of meaning. Indigenous songs became "specimens" cataloged by genre or language family. Animal calls were indexed by species, date, and location, stripped of the weather, ceremonial context, or human activity that might have shaped them. Visualizations —waveforms, spectrograms, Western musical notation— translated the sound into forms legible to scientific and academic audiences, but alien to the worlds that produced them.

This is the colonial ear: a listening practice that extracts sound from its territory and recodes it within an external epistemic system. It is an operation of both capture and transformation, turning sound into an inert object rather than a living relation.

Toward Decolonial Sonic Methodologies

If the colonial ear flattens and appropriates, a decolonial ear must refuse both the inevitability and the neutrality of such practices. This refusal is not an anti-technology stance; it is an insistence on listening with accountability.

1. Co-created soundwalks: Fieldwork in which local knowledge holders lead the route and determine what is to be heard, interpreted, and recorded — and what must remain unrecorded. Here, listening is structured by the protocols of the host community, not by the demands of a research agenda.

2. Layered sonic metadata: Beyond species ID and timestamp, recordings can carry relational descriptors: the sound’s role (call, omen, marker), its cosmological significance, its conditions of activation, and the permissions required for its circulation.

3. Acoustic opacity: The deliberate maintenance of silence in archives — the possibility that some recordings are not for public access, or even for permanent storage. This is not a loss; it is a mode of protecting the integrity of sonic relations.

These methods bridge bioacoustics, ethnography, and political ecology without collapsing them into a single discipline. They preserve the technical value of sound recordings while resisting their assimilation into a universalizing archive.

Hearing What Was Never Meant to Be Read

Listening in the tropics is not simply a technical act. It is a political stance and an ethical practice. To listen well is to enter into an economy of obligations — to respond to what one hears not with extraction, but with care, restraint, or solidarity.

Sound is not just another kind of data. It is an archive that lives in air and water, in vibrations that can cross species boundaries and temporal scales. And unlike the visual-textual archive, it can refuse capture: it can vanish in the act of making itself known.

To attend to the sonic archive, then, is to accept that some knowledge will never be "read" in the conventional sense. It will be carried in resonance, in echoes that fade, in silences that signal both loss and protection. This is an archive that governs itself and invites us to listen only on its terms.

  This chronicle is echoed in the blog post "Libraries of Echoes, Archives of Silences," where the same topic is explored from a librarian's point of view.