Confluence by Treva Legassie

An annotated bibliography, a convergence of tributaries, a manner of storytelling — for the project Sounding the Land: Soundwalking as transformative practice in the era of the climate crisis.

Thinking with places has made me comfortable with getting lost; a practice we are often encouraged to avoid for safety, for efficiency, to move from one point to another in the quickest and clearest way possible. Getting lost introduces us to other worlds that have been there all along. It teaches us to listen differently, to learn, to know, and to remain with not knowing.

What follows is an ever-changing archive of a research process. Composing an annotated bibliography is usually an academic exercise, often a starting point. Here, annotation becomes a practice of relation. It brings forth a feminist politics of citation—one that understands citing, referencing, and annotating as ways of contouring knowledge and making relations felt. To annotate is to reflect, to linger, to relate.

Following research-creation’s process-led techniques, this ‘annotated bibliography’ constellates academic references, notes from the field, sounds, and images that move through, in, and from my SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship: Sounding the Land: Soundwalking as Transformative Practice in the Era of the Climate Crisis. This is not a fixed archive, but a shifting constellation.

Sounwalking

Soundwalks are invitations. They invite attentive listening while moving through a particular space […] Practice listening without trying to grasp, take, control, know. - from As the mouth speaks, Treva Legassie. A geolocated soundwalk through Biidaasige Park (formerly the Port Lands), Toronto.

In “Soundwalking” Hildegard Westerkamp introduces the concept of soundwalking through a history and some written exercises meant to promote intense listening to our surrounding environments. When soundwalking one must not be distracted from “intense listening” in order to “rediscover and reactivate their sense of hearing” (18). Westerkamp traces this practice back to the “Sunday walk,” an urban activity meant to re-forge connections with nature—contrasted with the “Sunday drive,” which distances the body and prioritizes visual experience. Her soundwalk through Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver moves across shifting sonic scenes: from parking lot to fountain, to Knife Edge by Henry Moore (where listeners are encouraged to interact and compose), through the conservatory, into the Sunken Garden where city sounds recede, and finally toward the creek.

These soundwalking exercises explore listening as orientation—using the ear for wayfinding, attending to the melodies of voices when asking for directions, and observing how environments shape acoustics, especially through wind. Sound becomes both guide and material. In another time and space I found myself leading a soundwalk for art and design students through Grange Park, here Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms also conjures interaction, play and the chance to compose our own sonic scene.

Westerkamp, Hildegard. “Soundwalking” Sound Heritage 3, no. 4 (1974): 18-27, updated in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, edited by Angus Carlyle, 49-54. Paris: Double Entendre, 2007. 

From where we listen

In their text “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study,” AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd propose a method for listening and attuning that counters the dislocation and abstraction of Western and colonial environmental case studies which abstract and try to apply universal stories from the study of particular places (rendering places as “data-sheds” for scholars). They take up an onto-epistemological approach (that links knowing and being rather than the Western separation of ontology and epistemology), that reflects on Land and place as sets of relationships between human non-humans that co-constitute one another requiring historians maintain ethical and reciprocal relationships with Land and place. Environmental kin study requires practices of attunement. For Kanngieser “attunement is predicated on cultivating a close and generous attention.” They continue, “the shift from case studies to kin studies requires those writing histories of place to consider the ongoing, co constitutive, rooted, and flexible nature of place and our relationships to it” (387). Situating oneself is essential, as Kanngieser urges, white and non-indigenous scholars, must be aware of how we move through unceded sovereign lands to mitigate harm. Listening becomes an essential practice in “kin study” as for Kanngieser listening—as a “practice of sensing, attunement and noticing”—is a laborious, humbling, and self-reflective process that “requires the listener to become aware of their own limitations and assumptions about place and land” (390).

“Attunement means to bring into tune, to find resonances or moments of intersection” (390).

Developing an attunement practice as a “guest, a trespasser, and a colonizer” necessitates asking for permission continuously. When listening we are inside our own bodies, experiencing our breath, discomfort, disposition as our “presence is doing something” to where we are (390). Kanngieser notes, “Attunement makes me aware of when to give thanks and leave, which is one of the most crucial lessons a researcher can learn” (390).

Kanngieser, AM and Zoe Todd. “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study.” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020): 385-393.

I put on my headphones, turned up the volume and am met with the violent low-end rumbles caused by high winds, when air pressure pushes the microphone diaphragm to its physical limits. Sound is distorted, wind noise pushes back, evades capture and prevents me from making any field recordings.

Wind made it impossible for me to record the soundscape. I stayed and quietly observed a family of swans from a distance. I hadn’t seen them here before in such large numbers. As they slowly traversed down the new meandering river mouth I heard, for the first time, the trumpeting sound of one of the swans calling back to the rest of the group. It was wonderful. I felt no loss at the fact that this fleeting moment wasn’t captured on my zoom recorder. This sound was never meant for me, and certainly not meant for me to take away from this place as a sharable, usable .mp3 file.

Notes from the field, Biidaasige Park, December 3, 2025.

Urban-natural listening

In her chapter “Listening to Traffic with Guts and Antennae,” Andra McCartney unpacks some responses to, and conceptions of, traffic noise. She suggests that roads and their margins “are ecotones or landscapes of tension where intersecting habitats of plants, animals, cars, bicycles, motorbikes, trucks, trailers, recreational vehicles, pedestrians […] are ordered by laneways, held and released by traffic signals, covered with dust, gravel, tarmac, and suffused with the whines, roars, thrums, and tickings of passing vehicles, as well as their spectacle, smells and toxic emissions” (233). She references Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk noting that the “drone of distant traffic” McCartney hears in the work “forms a fulcrum between interfering city and intimate nature with its doorway to imagination” (234). Traffic sound is often pushed back by field recordists to reveal more nature sounds. Soundwalking can bring traffic noise to the fore, causing us to realize what we normally filter out (236). McCartney shares reflections from listeners on how they engage with traffic sounds, and even use it as a tool for mediation (following rhythms or transforming traffic into something else like wave sounds). McCartney concludes “if we listen, attention to the daily sonic experience of traffic can aid in thinking about how mobility is valued in different situations, and, in deeper ways, how traffic moves all of us” (240).

Zoe Todd suggests the need for “careful, plural, hyperlocal histories to counter the overwhelmingly white, Eurocentric understandings of global warming that erase the devastation facing minoritized communities.” “While the case study operates to sever place and people from their intimate entanglements, the kin study repositions those stories, making both writer and consumer of such histories attentive to the complexities of place” (391). A kin study requires “Land-centered literacies” that run counter to Western research practices and historical narration and instead turn “to other forms of writing, reading songs and poems and conversations, listening to the earth, and taking these as seriously as archives, articles, and books” (392). Thinking with and from place is essential in climate crisis: acknowledging the interconnection of thinking and being and relations between human and more-than-human beings in order to compose stories that attune to place.

McCartney, Andra. “Listening to Traffic with Guts and Antennae.” In Sound, Media, Ecology, edited by Milena Droumeva and Randolph Jordan, 233-241. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Kanngieser, Anja and Zoe Todd. “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study.” History and Theory 59, no. 3 (2020): 385-393.

Disrupting listening

In his book Listening After Nature, Mark Peter Wright describes, quote, “a field recording is only ever a partial document. It is a slice of one possible truth remade by the ears of another, elsewhere,” end quote. Field recordings, the ones we do take, are never neutral or complete. The field of acoustic ecology in Canada is experiencing an emergent critical wave of scholarship calling into question the field’s history of silencing Indigenous presence, or relegating Indigenous presence to a past tense, as well as a lack of embodied perspectives on sound (framing field recordings as neutral, objective captures of a place), and contending with the material and environmental impacts of recording technologies themselves, such as the microphone’s connections to natural resource extraction.

“Go out and listen to as many sounds created by wind as possible. Listen for low-pitched and high-pitched ones, for those which continually change their pitch and also their loudness. What kinds of structures produce what kinds of sounds when touched by wind? What effects do the various kinds of sounds have on you?

If it is fascinating to listen to the acoustic interplay between wind and object it becomes even more exciting to listen to that between wind and other sounds. What happens to an existing sound when it is caught, thrown about and carried away by the wind?”

- Hildegard Westerkamp, Soundwalking the Wind, 1974.