Deep (Space) Listening: Posthuman Moonbounce in Pauline Oliveros's Echoes from the Moon

Introduction

Looking up at the night's sky, as the old saw goes, one wonders if we're truly alone in the universe. How might the detection of and even communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence affect our understanding of ourselves as humans? What would such a discovery say about the posthuman understood as the human's cultural, technological, and biological decentering?¹

In 1987, composer, performer, and technologist Pauline Oliveros presented the first realization of Echoes from the Moon, a multiform work that uses radio transmissions to allow performers and audience members to broadcast their voices and other sounds to the moon and subsequently hear reflections of those signals received back on Earth. Oliveros traveled to New Lebanon, Maine, to work with Dave Olean, an amateur (ham) radio operator who during the 1960s had participated in one of the first twoway Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communications using ham radio. EME communication, a practice also referred to as moonbounce, was first developed through war efforts to communicate and spy across large geographical distances prior to the development of communication satellites. In addition to other military purposes, moonbounce has been formative in the development of radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Ham radio astronomers have used resources such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a facility notorious for its long-standing involvement in SETI, for moonbounce experiments not unlike Oliveros's Echoes from the Moon.² And in a recent project based on a proposal from the 1970s that we can usefully think of Earth from the perspective of an observing exoplanet (short for "extrasolar planet"), a current SETI researcher has been listening to radio waves reflected from the moon as one of our own technological signs of life.³ Moonbounce both creates and observes, in this case, one of our own "alien" technosignatures.

Echoes from the Moon is a far cry from so-called active SETI, or messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), even though moonbounce may result in broadcasts that reach other stars. In their initial home-studio moonbounce, Oliveros and Olean configured an array of twenty-four large directional Yagi-Uda antennae, each consisting of a series of thin metal bars arranged in parallel and supported by a perpendicular crossbar rod. These antennae, which had inputs and outputs connected to Olean's audio setup, were together capable of both sending and receiving radio signals. To alternate between these states, Olean had configured a footswitch to change the antennae from radio broadcasting to receiving mode. This allowed Oliveros to transmit a sound to the moon and then tap the switch to hear its Earth-bound echo. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, the roughly half million–mile trip (768,800 kilometers) to the moon and back takes about two and a half seconds to complete. This, then, was her delay line—an effect that was central to Oliveros's musical practice since the 1960s and to which we'll return below. Here the delayed sound accompanied a slight downward pitch-shift due to the Doppler effect (imagine a car horn's descent as the vehicle whizzes past) caused by the moon's movement relative to Earth.⁴ In her first "duet" with the moon, Oliveros used a tin whistle, a conch shell, and, her primary instrument, the accordion. Yet before these instrumental sounds began their respective round-trip journeys to the moon, Oliveros's role was, in her words, that of a "vocal astronaut." Indeed, the first utterance Oliveros sent to the moon was simply "hello."⁵ But whom was she greeting?

Echoes from the Moon and other forms of EME involve extraplanetary communication and share SETI's emphasis on listening across space and time. Oliveros notes that she arrived at the idea for Echoes from the Moon after watching Apollo 11's first lunar landing in 1969, one of the most widely viewed media events in history. If extraterrestrials were to intercept radio waves from Earth, such a broadcast—like Adolf Hitler's 1936 Summer Olympics speech—would have an increased...