Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening by Rachel Mundy (review)

Rachel Mundy, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2018. 264 pp.

Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening is a study in the sonic relationships we form with nonhuman sounding actors and how we can reconsider issues of musical difference when we include nonhuman musicking and musicality alongside that of the humanity. Rachel Mundy has selected a series of fascinating case studies to examine the compelling narrative of how animal voices and bodies have been historically used by the sciences and the humanities, including the field of ethno/musicology, to measure, articulate, and construct perceived musical difference. Through this process she is also asking readers to rethink extant narratives of humanism and consider alternative histories. That is, a value-based system of musical difference that sets human musicking apart from all other forms of animal musicking and places value upon certain forms of nonhuman musicking over others. Placing the sciences in dialogue with the arts and humanities, Mundy's study stands out in its breadth of subject matter, stretching from Darwin to digital birdsong field guides to argue that these practices of musical taxonomy continue to influence how we categorize, evaluate, and listen to musical sounds according to species, races, and cultures.

Although Animal Studies is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex relationships between humans and other animals, including Margo DeMello's Animals and Society (2012), Kari Weil's Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (2012), and Lori Gruen's Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals (2015) followed by the collection Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Gruen 2018), among others, the scholarship in the field has rarely drawn on the aurality of these multifaced relationships to understand how nonhuman animals figure in our lives and we in theirs in cultural practices of making music. Textual and visual analysis grounds many of the existing critical approaches to the study of animals and their representation, including John Berger's foundational chapter, "Why Look at Animals," in About Looking (1980). But what can the inclusion of sound, music, and listening contribute to the studies of animals and their representation and how these representational politics have been used to support and perpetuate systems of human difference. This is where Mundy's Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening productively joins the conversation in exciting and insightful ways.

Mundy is ultimately asking her readers two key questions: Why listen to animals? How do we listen to and value the musicality of different animal species? The rich and detailed treatment given to her discussion of the visual and auditory technologies of representing birdsong is particularly valuable because it extends beyond the mechanics of remediating field recordings by also considering how we listen differently to these contrasting modes of representing the same bird song, thus indicating how the technologies of representation have historically shaped how we listen to the "other." These human perceived intimacies with the nonhuman animal are mediated through listening, recording, and circulation technologies that amplify nonhuman soundings that are not conventionally heard as musical or as performances. In her chapter "Collecting Silence: The Sonic Specimen," Mundy writes, "Specimens became a way to know who fit and who didn't, a map of nature that extended from animal skins to anthropological artifacts" (42). These specimen collections in natural history collections also contained the music of humans and other animals. In these spaces of study and display (primarily visual), they were organized, institutionalized, and ascribed value based on sonic categorization system where specimens were "arranged to display racial and cultural development" (42) in "silent" exhibits: muted specimens that were "the musical analogue of the stuffed bird skins and preserved beetles arrayed in the natural history museum's specimen drawers" (43). The narratives of these displays were human-organized understandings of natural history and knowledge; when nonhuman specimens of music and sound were included—most often birdsong—the politics of inclusion were shaped by...