“Like Roosters on Steroids”: Sounding out Sonic NIMBYism in Central California

What is the role of music and sound in the unfolding environmental and social catastrophe that Bruno Latour aptly characterizes as a “fusion of ecology and eschatology?”^[1] Recent ecologically minded scholarship has offered a remarkably consistent answer: music cultivates awareness of climate change,^[2] and affords resistance to the ecocidal mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism that at once displace communities and destroy environments.^[3] If “what settler colonialism, and its extensions into contemporary petrocapitalism, does is a severing of relations,” as Heather Davis and Zoe Todd suggest in their critical reflection on the Anthropocene’s foundational gestures,^[4] then the acoustic’s capacity to place bodies in sympathetic vibration, more generally, might provide a privileged mechanism for repairing such frayed connections among the more-than-human world.^[5] Indeed, as Michael Silvers suggests, “the ethnomusicological study of the nonhuman” can “help us study music and crisis, acknowledge music’s effects on the nonhuman, and recognize the multispecies coconstructedness of our world, a world in which music is entangled” (2020:215).^[6] Music, to summarize, is a unilaterally beneficial force: “Sound,” Jeff Todd Titon concludes, “allows us to construct a world worth wanting and keeping.”^[7]

Attention to the sonic dimensions of life at the Gibbon Conservation Center, however, tells a different story. The Center, as it is colloquially termed, is located on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles County and of the United States’ largest spaces dedicated to the conservation of these primates that swung through the tropical forest canopies of South and Southeast Asia before deforestation, urban development, and the palm oil industry decimated their habitats and positioned all but one of the twenty recognized gibbon species as severely endangered on the IUCN red list of threatened species.^[8] Also known as the “lesser apes,” gibbons have attracted neither the popular attention nor the scientific interest afforded the great ape species such as orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees.^[9] What is unique to gibbons, however, is their vocalizations, which are sung as families (cohering around a sex- and species-specific duet between monogamously mated gibbon pairs) each day. Consisting of loud and complex “duets” typically sung by monogamously mated gibbon pairs, this daily gibbon chorus is audible from at least a mile away from the Center, beginning every day before sunrise and extending into the late morning.

Life at the Center is thus suffused with the sounds of those animals perpetually (re)negotiating their social relationships and territorial boundaries. Led by the Center’s director, a Hungarian woman named Gabriella (Gabi) Skollar (Figure 1), the three women responsible for the gibbons’ daily care monitor their health, prepare and distribute their eight daily meals, maintain the grounds, clean and repair enclosures, write grants, and maintain a social media presence publicizing the weekend tours that provide a major source of financial support. Living permanently in tiny houses and campers on the property, committed to lives that regularly arrive at both physical and emotional extremes, Gabi and her staff adopt a level of social precarity on par with the gibbons’ own environmental vulnerability.

As I have discussed at length in a recent article in Ethnomusicology,^[10] a consequence of contemporary environmental conservation’s investment in captive breeding programs is that the Center’s daily gibbon chorus quite literally needs to take place, again and again, in order to ensure the survival of the species it makes audible. And in this essay, I ask: what happens when its compulsory (re)sounding must take place in a world where there is increasingly less space for gibbons and their songs? Attending to sound’s entanglement in the future of an endangered species, I propose the concept of “sonic NIMBYism” to account for a process in which some noisy bodies are heard as belonging and others in need of elimination.

Encountering sonic NIMBYism

First, some backstory. In 2020, at the same time as the rest of the world was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, life at the Center was unfolding under the specter of a much more personal crisis: the facility was threatened with eviction. Gabi Skollar, the Center’s director, had assumed leadership after its founder and her mentor passed away from an undiagnosed heart condition; in the absence of a will, ownership of the Center’s property reverted to unsympathetic family members who promptly began charging a monthly rent. Then, after eight years of this arrangement, the Center was informed that their lease would not be renewed. Despite the early pandemic’s skyrocketing real estate prices and withdrawal of regular support from granting agencies, the Center hastily began preparing for relocation and managed to crowdfund nearly $300,000, enough for a downpayment on a property in the Parkhill neighborhood of Santa Margarita in California’s Central Coast. The staff’s enthusiasm was palpable; they were particularly looking forward to leaving behind the intensely dry Southern California climate that necessitated a perpetually malfunctioning misting system, extreme temperatures, the high-density housing developments that grew ever closer, and the relentless Southern California brushfires that kept the Center in a permanent state of evacuation readiness. “While it has taken a lot of searching,” as they put it in an email to their mailing list, “the perfect property has finally been found.”^[11]

The Center’s fundraising materials, following a common practice in public facing conservation outreach,^[12] foregrounded gibbon song as an object of aesthetic, epistemological, and emotional value. And just as their crowdfunding campaign moved into high gear, a documentary film about the Center was released that likewise emphasized the appeal of the Center’s soundscape; viewers learn, for example, that the Center’s founder had been inspired to devote his life to gibbons after hearing a recording of gibbon song as a child.^[13] But the neighbors of the Center’s new property, introduced to the plight of gibbons through these publicity materials, heard in those vocalizations something quite different. On April 17, 2021, as the Center’s closing day approached, several dozen members of the Parkhill community gathered to protest its imminent arrival. The signs visible in a shaky smartphone video shared by the local news affiliate KSBY 6 sum up this community’s sentiment (Figure 2).^[14] “KEEP PARKHILL PEACEFULL [sic]” is written in capital letters, surrounded by drawings of hearts and peace signs; another is particularly direct: “GIBBONS GO AWAY!!” And this signage directs concern not only to the nearby presence of an animal facility in general, but more specifically the volume of the gibbons’ vocalizations—“PARKHILL FOR PEACE AND QUIET” reads a sign from which a toy gibbon is hung in effigy.

This episode is far from the first time in which gibbon vocalizations have been caught up in attempts to control the production of sound in public spaces. In his project “Listening to the Zoo,” for example, anthropologist Tim Rice describes zookeepers’ attempts at pacifying angry neighbors by locking gibbons in their sleeping boxes.^[15] But attention to this protest helps clarify what is stake when the acoustic becomes entangled with reactionary politics: “Not in my front yard,” one of the signs declares (under the statement “APE = Biohazard,” with smaller text beneath: “STOP the LIES”). This phrase, more often encountered as the variant “not in my back yard” (NIMBY, “nim-bee”), was coined by sociologist Michael Dear to describe “the protectionist attitudes of and oppositional tactics adopted by community groups facing an unwelcome development in their neighborhood.”^[16] NIMBYist engagements with sound are famously present across a range of cases, from critiques of noise pollution in ocean environments to Islamophobic noise ordinances sanctioning the call to prayer; NIMBYism is just as much audible in environmental discourses that use terms like “silence” to enact an ontological distinction between “natural” and “anthropogenic” sounds. And I’ve even gone as far as to identify a form of NIMBYism animating the field of ethnomusicology’s epistemological underpinnings, specifically in the context of the sound-dampening partition walls we use at in-person conferences to prevent the sounds of our musical examples from interrupting neighboring presentations.^[17] But as I develop it here, however, what I call “sonic NIMBYism” names more than the widespread practices of sound control that construct soundscapes as sites of political and/or environmental conflict.

What particularly interests me about sonic NIMBYism, and what I attend to in this essay, is how it explicitly invokes the acoustic as a mechanism with which to negotiate the continuing reproduction of human (and more-than-human) difference. If “sound [does indeed] enable humans to construct a world worth wanting and keeping,” as Titon has suggested,^[18] then attention to sonic NIMBYism provides an opportunity to interrogate the specific consequences of the mechanisms deployed in the construction that world. “Care is never neutral,” as Maria Puig de Bellacasa stresses.^[19] “However well intentioned toward the things at stake,” she writes, “however interesting the kinds of knowledge it enables, care is a consequential practice that does relationalities as much as undoes them.”^[20] We know that sound is political, and sonic NIMBYism goes farther to celebrate sound’s tendencies towards the necropolitical, Achille Mbembe’s term for the processes that render particular subject’s existences as a threat to the natural order and therefore normalize the acts of violence their elimination comes to demand. As I have suggested in my work on captive gibbon breeding programs, the concept of noise pollution has, from the very beginning in the writings of R. Murray Schafer, served as a pretext with which to index the undesirability of the sound’s source and ultimately cast its maker as a malignant pollutant whose continued existence constitutes an existential threat. The crucial irony here is that sonic NIMBYism appeals to the nature and behavior of sound as a mechanism with which to achieve such attenuation. It invokes the acoustic in order to suppress the acoustic. And as I will show, sonic NIMBYism’s exclusionary political project underscores both the socially conservative community of Parkhill Road and the ecologically conservative environmentalism movement. Drawing on scholars such as Audra Mitchell, who argues persuasively that the logic of the contemporary environmental conservation movement ironically mobilizes the toxic orientations towards the larger world responsible for our current experience of socio-ecological catastrophe (authoritarianism, exploitation, capitalism),^[21] this essay traces how precisely the sonic mechanics glorified in conservation discourse and ecomusicology can act as instruments of repression— conflating the experience of change with crisis, and of comfort with control.

“Like Roosters on Steroids”

The backlash to the perceived nuisance of gibbon vocalizations that culminated in the April 2021 protest played out predominantly online. Soon after the Center’s relocation plans were announced, one resident voiced her opposition in an opinion piece published on the website of the New Times San Luis Obispo, the region’s local newspaper:

Imagine that a new neighbor moves in with an obnoxious rooster that crows night and day without stop. Now imagine that your neighbor moves in with 40 obnoxious roosters with the intent to breed more of them. Well folks, it turns out there is an animal louder than a rooster and it’s called a gibbon. . . . They are the loudest animals on planet Earth! They greet the sun each day and begin to howl. This continues throughout the day and night. . . . These animals are like roosters on steroids.^[22]

In this op-ed and other expressions of the community’s concern, the volume of the Center’s soundscape serves as an inflection point around which other accusations are leveled. The Center is described as an “exotic animal roadside attraction,” the gibbon enclosures as “glorified bird cages.” In a formal response to the concerns aired by the Parkhill residents, Gabi published a piece in the New Times expressing her desire to have “an honest conversation” with her prospective neighbors:

Though [gibbons] are loud, . . . they are not the only loud sounds you would hear in Santa Margarita. It is true that some gibbon calls read at about 100 decibels at the source. Consider, though, that a dog's bark can range anywhere between 85 and 122 decibels. Pigs squeal at 100 decibels. Peacocks can reach 115. An old chainsaw, 120.^[23]

Noise pollution, as Gabi’s reply makes clear, is a purely subjective judgement. Gabi recognizes that invocations of acoustic volume serve purely political ends, the same logic that explains how in The Soundscape Schafer is able to praise the extreme volume of gibbon vocalizations (110 decibels) in the same text decrying the volume of industrialization without a whiff of cognitive dissonance.^[24] “Man has always tried to destroy his enemies with terrible noises,” as Schafer writes, “and it is disconcerting to realize that the ferocious acoustical environment produced by modern civilian life derives from the same eschatological urge.”^[25] Schafer’s justification rests in something he calls “sacred noise.” The sonic equivalent of the “state of exception” (Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s legal justification for the Third Reich), “to have Sacred Noise,” Schafer writes, “is not merely to make the biggest noise; rather, it is a matter of having the authority to make it without censure.”^[26] Writing of the Industrial Revolution, Schafer laments that “now the industrialists held power and they were granted dispensation to make Noise by means of the steam engine and the blast furnace.”^[27] Sacred Noise is nothing but authority—an authority that Schafer does not attempt to abolish in The Soundscape as much as wrest for his own eugenic ends.^[28]

Scare quotes and sonic subjectivity

While Gabi’s rhetorical move invoked the inherent subjectivity of Noise with a capital “N” in order to obviate its utility as a critique of the Center, her antagonists embraced precisely its ontological slipperiness. Online responses to her plea immediately proliferated; the same day it was published, a user commented that “the real issue is the noise that the apes generate…Ms. Skollar may prefer to describe the noise as ‘songs’ or ‘singing’, but like the heavy metal rock coming through my wall from my neighbor’s place, it is not something that most of us want to listen to” (Figure 3). Then, the next day, another poster built on this construction of gibbon vocalizations as belonging to the same category as genres of human music often deemed unwelcome, offensive, and/or threatening:^[29] “I know! Let’s play loud heavy metal music to the gibbons while they ‘sing’. Slayer and Megadeth with gibbons screeching along with the songs” (Figure 4).

And although the original conflation of gibbon song, noise pollution, and heavy metal appears to be wholly facetious, this latter poster embraces the acoustic’s capacity to drown out competition. Positioning gibbon conservation’s ecological conservatism in conflict with a distinctly social form of conservativism, they suggest that “We can record it and play it during Joe Biden speeches about climate change and peaceful immigration and social justice”. Note that the poster has adopted the username Silence Dogood—a pseudonym famously employed by a young Benjamin Franklin in 1722 to express his opinions anonymously in a local news outlet. At once advocating for the attenuation of gibbon vocalizations and grounding the author’s reactionary political position in hagiographic reference to a triumphalist reading of American history, this choice of username is a particularly apt way to situate their claims within a long history of American moral panics over invasion (whether human or other). And indeed, in Silence Dogood’s subsequent post, the question of gibbon survival on California land becomes entangled in a hyperbolic litany of right-wing tropes laden with heteropatriarchal entitlement and transphobia (Figure 5; CW: hate speech). As it begins, “Soon in California you will be able to cohabitate, enter into the sacrament of marriage, plan a gender-neutral family and protest against organized religion with your gibbon.” And although this statement, which quickly devolves into hate speech, was rebutted by other posters and eventually received a high ratio of dislikes to likes (6 likes and 21 dislikes), these claims apparently did not trigger the New Times’ comment policy, specifically that “comments that are irrelevant or incendiary will be deleted”^[30]—the post remains publicly available online.

In statements that advocate for achieving silence by drowning out unwanted sounds, in claims that question the validity of gibbon vocalizations by placing words like “song” and “singing” in scare quotes, the concept of volume is undergoing a subtle, yet crucial, slippage from describing a problem to prescribing the solution to it. Volume, in the maximalist sense of “abundance,” is a prime value of environmental conservation—whether expressed through the primary method of enumerating biodiversity Rafi Youatt terms “counting species,”^[31] or in comments by prominent conservation advocates such as E. O. Wilson who contend that the “luxuriance of biodiversity”^[32] is a function of the volume of species present (while simultaneously invoking military metaphors). Conversely, the Parkhill residents’ invocation of volume in the context of undesirability is more in line with its treatment in the field of acoustic ecology, in which noise pollution is mobilized as a crisis of excess.^[33] Yet practices of sonic NIMBYism conflate the two. By laying the blame with amplitude, sonic NIMBYism supplies a pretext with which to articulate social anxieties in quantitative terms, specifically expressed here through the figure of the decibel.

Sonic segregation and the musical aesthetics of fascism

A particularly ironic development is that even as the sonic NIMBYism of this comment thread invokes the acoustic in order to frustrate the Center’s conservation goals, its rationale is perfectly in line with the underlying logos of what historian of science Banu Subramaniam terms “invasion biology”: the science of invasive species intended to protect local ecosystems from the external threats that are termed invasive species. In the world of environmental conservation, as Subramaniam shows, the same terms so often invoked to audit human worth—“native,” “foreign,” “exotic,” “purity,” and “contamination” —circulate uncritically. Gibbon “species [are] not native to our area,” as one resident justifies her opposition to the Center’s relocation, for example;”^[34] “They are sensitive and require a tropical climate. . . . These creatures need access to the forest canopy.” Such claims imply that gibbons should not exist in California at all, no matter how much “the mutual entwinements of colonialism, capitalism and ecocide”^[35] that define our current moment challenge the viability of in situ conservation. Subramaniam’s larger project importantly intervenes in an assumption that maps environmentalism and capitalism/colonialism/white supremacist heteropatriarchy onto opposing political poles; these xenophobic concepts demonstrate how the natural sciences are rife with what she understands to be the epistemological ghosts of eugenic thinking and ecofascism and it becomes clear that “the political right and left have both inherited and indeed embraced the colonial imaginary.”^[36]

Acoustic ecologist and environmental advocate Bernie Krause, for example, hears in soundscapes untainted by human interference the substantiation of his “acoustic niche theory”:

Unlike the vocalizations that occur . . . in stressed or compromised habitats, natural selection has caused the animal voices that occur in many undisturbed regions to appear ‘organized.’ The combined biological sounds in many habitats do not happen arbitrarily; each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth—to blend or contrast—much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets, and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.^[37]

Yet Krause’s appeal to the organological structure of the Western symphony orchestra is meant to explain why “animal voices . . . have evolved so that they can stay off the acoustic turf of others.”^[38] And the answer is precisely because each species’ vocalizations constitutes a challenge to the propagation of their neighbors.’ “Whatever the objective of a signal” he insists, “whether it’s mating, protecting territory . . . —it must be audible and free from interference if it is to function successfully;”^[39] the capacity to communicate is, apparently, a zero-sum game. By. naturalizing such a model of enforced segregation,^[40] Krause consequently writes the principles of sonic NIMBYism directly into evolutionary biology.

That Krause’s sonic ecology is couched in explicitly musical terms—“a great animal orchestra,” as he titles his book^[41]—testifies to the significance afforded to the musical in environmentalist appeals. Rachel Mundy made precisely this point regarding earlier debates over music’s evolutionary origins: “At stake in these assessments was the right to personhood, for the debate about animal musicality was a debate about who was, and was not, a person.”^[42] More recently, zoomusicologist Emily Doolittle, for example, “hope[s] that increased attention to the songs created by individuals of other species will lead us to greater respect of and caring for the non-human beings with which we share the earth,”^[43] and François-Bernard Mâche (the scholar who coined the term “zoomusicology”) suggests that “just as one does not eat a pet, it would become difficult for a musician to treat a bird as prey as soon as one recognizes in him a sort of more or less gifted colleague.”^[44] But even as the question of non-human musicality becomes entangled with the possibilities of achieving multispecies justice, recognition, even corporeal survival, a very particular kind of musicality is foregrounded. Consider, for example, Christina Dunbar-Hester’s argument that humpback whale song and its environmental overtones resonated so strongly with a 1970s Euro-American audience due to the way in which nascent understandings of cetacean intelligence and brain size racially coded those animals as white and deserving of saving.^[45] As Alice Rudge and I have suggested, gibbons themselves are dismissed throughout the zoomusicological literature due to the perceived genetic basis of their vocalizations.^[46] Instead, the platforming of birds and whales as exemplary models of posthuman musical subjects reproduces a distinctly Eurocentric epistemology of music, an exceptionalism that privileges complexity, innovation, and the capacity to transcend the mundane world of biological needs.

Thus the Parkhill community’s invocation of musical aesthetics as a mechanism of gibbon exclusion is perfectly in line with the treatment of gibbons in environmentally minded music studies more generally. And Silence Dogood, furthermore, might be surprised to know that precisely the procedure they facetiously invoke—playing heavy metal music to primates—even has a precedent among evolutionary psychiatrists probing the more-than-human dimensions of musicality and potential species differences in music perception and cognition. For example, the Los Angeles Times summarizes the results of one study that observed tamarin monkeys, perhaps counterintuitively, calming down when listening to excerpts of songs by popular heavy metal artists in an article titled “Metallica: Not Just for Metalheads Anymore, Monkeys Are Fans Too.’”^[47] Rather than gesturing to the possibility of a universalized music operating across perceived species boundaries, however, that study’s conclusions quickly become conscripted into that ongoing imperialist project of deploying musical sensibilities as a determinant of inherent worth: the article reports that “there appeared to be little explanation as to why the primates enjoyed the heavy-metal music. We’re tempted to offer some guesses pertaining to the comparative intelligence of metalheads, but we don’t want to insult any of our valued readers (or, for that matter, monkeys).”^[48]

Are gibbon vocalizations truly musical, or are the scare quotes around “song” and “singing” in the Parkhill comments justified? This episode helps us understand that musicality operates not as much an ontological category as a political one: animal vocalizations are often welcomed into the exclusive circle of the musical precisely when they are able to satisfy, if not fully glorify, the conditions for participation within modern life as a neoliberal subject. As Alexander Weheliye astutely points out, "the “entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism”^[49]; musicality here becomes less about some essential quality of a potential subject and more about their capacity to labor productively within the unevenly constituted “politico-economic system of the world” that Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes “as something like a water management system, a web of aqueducts that spans the globe, channeling, instead of water, advantages and disadvantages from one place to another.”^[50] Currently inundated with reports of lawsuits demanding recognition of non-human personhood, I often wonder how long it will be until Sandra the orangutan^[51] or another similar non-human person is given a credit score and thus the capacity to assume debt.

Debates over the nature and definition of music(ality), then, coalesce here around maintaining sensations of privilege—the Parkhill community is less concerned with whether gibbon song is technically music or not and more with its potential to challenge their personal experiences of comfort. “Residents of Parkhill Road make many compromises and adjustments to reside in the beauty and country quiet that is an attraction of this area of Santa Margarita and desire to keep what they have invested in as their retirement residence,” as one community member acknowledges; “a place that is a pleasure to come home to, not to reside next to a zoo of screaming gibbons, increased traffic, trash and dust.”^[52] Thus the defining line of the conflict plays out less between the socially conservative and the environmentally conservative, the musical and unmusical, or the loud and the quiet, and more between those institutions that benefit from racial capitalism and those that challenge its enduring, oppressive presence––even as the survival of endangered species in the Anthropocene has come to rely upon, rather than disrupt, the property claims to land codified in Euro-American real estate law that ontologize precisely the domination of the more-than-human world at the root of our environmental crisis.

Conclusion: Sonic NIMBYism and the politics of volume

Sonic NIMBYism is on full display in a meme that was circulated by the Parkhill community leading up to their April 2021 protest (Figure 6). “Help!” the image reads. “The loudest animal on the planet is about to become my neighbor. It wakes up at dawn and crows louder than any rooster and continues to crow all. day. long. [sic]” The meme’s visual elements practically invite a game of “what’s wrong with this image?”—whether the misspelled “noice,” the egregious sin in gibbon conservation of calling gibbons monkeys (which they are not), or the fact that the unflattering image of a gibbon with fangs extended (which the anonymous creator may have chosen due to its connotation of aggression, but actually only occurs while gibbons are singing) was taken without attribution from a National Geographic article likening gibbon vocal mechanics to those of human opera singers.^[53]

I want to conclude by focusing on the meme’s central logic, that appears just above the local planning department’s publicly listed phone number.: “Let’s make more noise than these monkeys and tell the [San Luis Obispo] planning department how we feel.” “And they did!” Gabi told me shortly afterward.^[54] Following up in a later interview, she clarified that during a preliminary meeting with the planning department, city officials “politely mentioned” that they had already received complaints. “They got a bunch of phone calls and letters and everything— like somebody kept calling the fire department to complain about the sound, but we were not even there yet!”^[55] And the campaign did succeed in interrupting the Center’s move: in consultation with the board of directors, Gabi elected to give up on the relocation plan. The Center dropped out of escrow and convinced their landlords to sell them their original property, a temporary measure as they continue to search for a more suitable, permanent location.

The irony that underpins sonic NIMBYism is particularly audible in this case: at the same time as they expressing a desire to be insulated from the effects of loud noises, the meme’s creator proposes that the Parkhill residents maintain their comfort by exploiting precisely what they claim to have issue with: volume. Deploying the acoustic purely as a mechanism of displacement and territorialization, then, sonic NIMBYism constructs precisely what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe as a “wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it”^[56] as a means of resisting against change. Thus the Parkhill community’s practice of sonic NIMBYism collapses the intricate sonic and social affordances of gibbon song, together with the complex social and environmental entanglements that characterize the plight of an endangered species in the twenty-first century, into a singular competition for amplitude. The only form of political action possible under sonic NIMBYism is simply to turn up the volume.

1. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter (Polity Press, 2017), 218.

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2. E.g., Aaron S. Allen and Jeff Todd Titon, Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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3. E.g., John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change (University of Illinois Press, 2021).

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4. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies 16, no. 4 (2017): 770.

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5. For example, the World Soundscape Project’s professed mission is to “find solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is in harmony.” Barry Truax et al. “World Soundscape Project.” In The Canadian Encyclopedia, edited by James Marsh (2006). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/world-soundscape-project. And as biologist David George Haskell suggests in The Songs of Trees, “Although tree trunks seemingly stand as detached individuals,” he writes, “their lives subvert this atomist view. We’re all—trees, humans, insects, bacteria, birds—pluralities. Life is embodied network.” David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Penguin Press, 2017): viii.

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6. Michael B. Silvers, “Attending to the Nightingale: On a Multispecies Ethnomusicology” Ethnomusicology 60, no. 2 (2020): 215.

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7. Jeff Todd Titon, Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020): 237.

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8. ⁸ See https://www.iucnredlist.org.

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9. On the gendered and racialized dimensions of early primatology and its reception in the West, see Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989).

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10. Tyler Yamin, “Tuning Species: Gibbon Conservation and the Acoustemological Politics of Vitality” Ethnomusicology 69, no. 2 (2025), 145–176.

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11. Email to subscribers, 9 March 2021.

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12. See, for example, the video advertisement for this gibbon conservation crowdfunding campaign for field research, whose original soundtrack features orchestral strings imitating gibbon vocalizations. “Help Protect the Skywalker Gibbon,” https://www.gofundme.com/f/skywalkergibbonresearch.

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13. Alex Azmi, dir., “The Center: Gibbons and Guardians” (CS Film Productions, 2021).

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14. Screenshots taken from the following video: KSBY Staff, “Community Members Protest Proposed Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Margarita,” KSBY News, 17 April 2021. https://www.ksby.com/news/local-news/community-members-protest-proposed-gibbon-conservation-center-in-santa-margarita.

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15. Tim Rice, “Listeing to the Zoo.” https://soundcloud.com/user-102738989/listening-to-the-zoo-audio-guide.

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16. Michael Dear, “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome.” Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 3 (1992): 288.

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17. Tyler Yamin, “Listening through Partitions: Ethnomusicology’s Immunological Paradigm,” Sound Studies 10, no. 1, 138–144.

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18. Titon, Toward a Sound Ecology, 237.

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19. Maria Puig de Bellacasa. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. (University of Minnesota Press, 2017): 6.

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20. Ibid.: 64–65.

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21. Audra Mitchell, Revenant Ecologies: Defying the Violence of Extinction and Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

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22. Laura Hobbs, “Roosters on Steroids,” New Times San Luis Obispo, 15 April 2021. https://www.newtimesslo.com/sanluisobispo/roosters-on-steroids/Content?oid=10923490.

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23. Gabriella Skollar, “An Honest Conversation: The Gibbon Conservation Center's Response to ‘Roosters on Steroids,’” New Times San Luis Obispo, 22 April 2021. https://www.newtimesslo.com/sanluisobispo/an-honest-conversation/Content?oid=10949256.

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24. Raymond Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World (McClelland and Stewart, 1993 [1977]): 39.

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25. Schafer, The Soundscape, 28.

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26. Ibid.: 76.

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27. Ibid.

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28. See Yamin, Tuning Species.

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29. See, for example, Allie Martin, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC (Oxford University Press, 2025).

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30. See, for example, https://web.archive.org/web/20210928023147/https://www.newtimesslo.com/sanluisobispo/i-am-a-patriot/Content?oid=10548142

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31. ³¹ Rafi Youatt, Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

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32. ³² Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (Knopf, 2002): 20.

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33. “Today the world suffers from an overpopulation of sounds” writes R. Murray Schafer; “there is so much acoustic information that little of it can emerge with clarity.” The Soundscape, 71.

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34. Hobbs, “Roosters on Steroids.”

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35. Heather Davis, “Blue, Bling: On Extractivism” Afterall 48 (2019): 15.

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36. Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014): 117

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37. Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Little, Brown, and Company, 2012): 97.

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38. Ibid.: 98.

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39. Ibid.: 97.

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40. Krause’s insistence on maintaining the separation of auditory categories extends to the relationship between the sounds of humanity and the sounds of nature, which he describes elsewhere as combining as well as “like oil and water.” The Great Animal Orchestra, 176.

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41. ibid.

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42. Rachel Mundy, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018): 15.

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43. Emily Doolittle, “Animal Sounds or Animal Songs?” Journal of Music, 9 July 2017. https://journalofmusic.com/focus/animal-sounds-or-animal-songs.

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44. François-Bernard Mâche, Musique au singulier (Odile Jacob, 2001): 280.

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45. Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Save the (White) Whales: Whalesong, the Cetacean Sensorium, and Exceptional Brains,” Resonance 3, no. 4 (2022): 433–42.

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46. Tyler Yamin and Alice Rudge, “’Sounds Like’ Music? On the Musicality of Species and the Species of Musicality” Environmental Humanities

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47. Mark Millan, “Metallica: Not Just for Metalheads Anymore, Monkeys Are Fans Too, A New Study Says,” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 2009. https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/la-unleashed/story/2009-09-03/metallica-not-just-for-metalheads-anymore-monkeys-are-fans-too-a-new-study-says.

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48. Ibid.

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49. Alexander Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke University Press, 2014): 77.

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50. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2022): 20.

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51. Betsy Reed, “Orangutan Sandra Granted Personhood Settles into New Florida Home” The Guardian, 7 November 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/07/sandra-orangutan-florida-argentina-buenos-aires.

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52. LeBoeuf, “Gibbon Center Move Questioned.”

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53. ⁵⁴ Tasha Eichenseher, “Gibbons and Opera Singers Use the Same Voice Tools,” National Geographic. 24 August 2012. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/120823-gibbon-song-opera-singer-helium-science-environment.

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54. Personal communication, 23 May 2021.

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55. ⁵⁶ Interview, Gabriella Skollar, 6 January 2022.

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56. ⁵⁷ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 311.

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    *Tyler Yamin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at Bucknell University. An ethnomusicologist broadly interested the intersections of music, sound, and survival, his scholarship has appeared in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Sound Studies, and Environmental Humanities and his 2019 article in Ethnomusicology was recognized with the inaugural Best Article Prize from what is now the International Council for Music and Dance Traditions.