This article provides a landing page for participants attending the International Symposium of CENSE: Beyond Listening: Re-Sounding Rights of Nature, 15-17 October 2026, Gdansk, Poland (original call). This will also be of interest to readers who follow my academic and composition work.
This post contains the original abstract, a link to the poster (PDF), a link to an illustrative composition, and references. I might update this in advance of the conference.
Abstract
Field recording begins with extraction. No matter my intentions, each such act imposes my will on a more-than-human world. Given this conundrum, how can such artistic practices challenge the ideologies of the Anthropocene that see the human as apart from – and superior to – the rest of Nature?
A potential remedy is found in the Rights of Nature movement. The emotive appeal of granting the non-human “standing” [Stone 1972] is plain, but critical writers [Warnock 2012, Sachs 2024] have raised legal and other objections. How can the rights of one lifeform be judged against another, considering relationships of predation, parasitism, and symbiosis? How is a tree empowered by having a human speak for it in court? Indeed, this continue a tradition of stewardship embedded in Abrahamic religions. Despite the desire for these proposals to combat extractive principles, the practical implementations operate within existing epistemologies. And though some Indigenous / First Nations peoples have adopted rights of Nature principles as a practical buffer against environmental harm, “the radical character of Indigenous ontologies is not fully reflected in the concept of legal personality” [Tănăsescu 2020, 453].
An alternative would begin by acknowledging the position of Nature before the human in a relational matrix, what Arne Naess termed a “biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations” [1973, 151]. Nature has no rights, has no responsibilities, owns nothing. It is not constrained by human epistemologies. Nature is instead a wild field of potentialities which reveals itself to us in subtle phenomenal gestures. Our duty of care requires putting Nature first as the figurative (and literal) ground on which we stand to resist hegemonic forces.
But how might this rather Utopian proposal help everyday artistic practice? “Caged Birds (Augmentation)” a four-channel composition derived from a local dawn chorus. The modifications made to this recording are designed to echo how humans have transformed those avian species who survive our urban environs. The title is a play on John Cage, but also a reminder that a recording is a sound that is no longer at liberty.
Poster
Download a screen resolution version of the poster.
Listening
The composition “Caged Birds (Augmentation)” is available on SoundCloud. You can ignore any prompts for creating an account.
Essential reading
In some ways this presentation is only a preamble to a major work that was published earlier this year. I encourage you to read Parmar 2026 below (link provided).
References
Berry, Thomas. 2001. “The origin, differentiation, and role of rights.” available
Casey, Edward S. 1996. “How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena,” Senses of Place, eds. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 14-52.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. London: Garland Publishing.
Heidegger, Martin. 2001. “Building dwelling thinking,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 141-160.
Kauffman, Craig M. and Pamela L. Martin. 2017. “Can rights of nature make development more sustainable? Why some Ecuadorian lawsuits succeed and others fail,” World Development 92, 130–142.
Naess, Arne. 1973. “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: a summary,” Inquiry 16.1, 95-100.
Parmar, Robin. 2018. “Sounding the Anthropocene: concepts of nature in Schafer’s The Soundscape,” Proceedings of The Global Composition, 4-7 October 2018, ed. Sabine Breitsameter and Cansu Karakiz. Darmstadt, Germany: Fachbereich Media and Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, 152-161.
Parmar, Robin. 2026. “Before Listening: Ambience as Aletheia,” Journal of Sound Studies 29, np. New version available.
Purdy, Jedediah. 2015. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. London: Harvard University Press.
Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sachs, Noam H. 2024. “A wrong turn with the rights of nature movement,” The Georgetown Environmental Law Review 36:39, 39-84.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1994 (1977). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.
Stone, Christopher D. 1972. “Should trees have standing? Towards legal rights for natural objects,” Southern California Law Review 45.450, 450-501.
Tănăsescu, Mihnea. 2020. “Rights of nature, legal personality, and indigenous philosophies,” Transnational Environmental Law 9.3, 429-453.
Warnock, Mary. 2012. “Should trees have standing?,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 3, 56–67.
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