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Description
This project looks to understand how music and sound are employed by people as aids to negotiate unstable terrain. It explores the complex interaction between listening, creating sound, and the natural world. A premise of this research is that sound is a repository of useful information: it allows people to understand and move through many different surroundings. But sound is also affective. People become accustomed to certain soundworlds and learn to react reflexively to them; in circumstances of conflict, sound also encodes trauma. For both of these reasons, it is important to study sites of sonic encounter and change, where different groups come into contact with one another and form coalitions to support environmental outcomes. Parque Nacional Cumbres del Ajusco, the national park south of Mexico City that forms the site of this
proposed study, is one such site. While an area visited by tourists and wildlife enthusiasts, it is accessible through a highly insecure urban zone of Mexico City. Residents of Santo Tomas Ajusco and San Nicolas Totolapan, on its outskirts, become accustomed both to the sounds of urbanity and those of the forest. They also learn to discern sounds of resource exploitation, especially those which are a source of danger. The objective of Sounding Out Survival is to uncover the ways that land defenders and reforesters develop repertoires of techniques of listening and sounding – what are referred to here as “sound practices” – to aid them as they negotiate uncertain terrain. Here the notion of “sounding out” is key, denoting a form of experimental and adaptive exploration with sound. Sounding Out Survival will use ethnography, broken down
into semi-structured interviews (c.50) and multi-sited participant observation. This project will also be developed alongside the community, adapting methods from so-called Participatory Action Research (PAR).
Summary of project results
This project aimed to use the methodological tools of the study of music and sound to better understand climate and environmental crisis, and move towards practical responses to this global problem. It was carried out in a setting marked by severe clandestine deforestation: the forests of Ajusco south of Mexico City.
A lot of research in the sub-field of ‘ecomusicology’ explores musical constructions and representations of the natural world, or representations of non-human animals. Many researchers have also explored musical traditions through which people create connectedness or ‘relationality’ with non-human animals and the plant world. But much less research from within musicology engages lived experiences at the frontlines of environmental loss. This is an important omission, given that climate and environmental crisis is the defining issue of our time. From another perspective, the presentation of climate crisis in the news is genuinely visual-centric. Think about, for example, news coverage of climate change which has often prominently displayed pictures of forest fires.
This project aimed to establish people’s aural experiences of deforestation as a topic of study for those studying music and sound. It also approached the topic of environmental loss from a new perspective. Although images relating to climate change are terrifying and arresting, it is useful to engage with other senses. We can listen to forest loss by hearing silences left behind in destroyed habitats, and by listening out for the sounds of chainsaws cutting down trees, and trucks transporting timber. The people who live surrounded by forest loss in Ajusco learn to listen to these sounds, either in order to avoid unwelcome run-ins with clandestine loggers or, in the case of forest guards and police, to locate loggers and stop or interrupt their activities. Many of the people living in this area, especially those from elder generations, have also learned to listen to forests in close detail, especially as it aids movement through this terrain. Finally, music and song can have a close connection to landscape, and uncovering music made about forests can both help us to document environmental change and understand how these changes have been experienced by local residents. This project therefore aimed to contribute to the understanding of the human experience of environmental crisis, and strengthen our ability to respond to it.
This project carried out ethnographic research with local residents in Ajusco, especially with land defenders, forest guards, and community reforesting groups. Fifty-seven semi-structured interviews were carried out with residents of the target area, participants in community reforestation activities, and forest guards. Participant observation was also carried out over seven months in the research “field”, and an information-sharing panel was also organized in Mexico City. A series of community sound walks were carried out which intended to facilitate members of the community to explore and trace shared ‘maps’ of their surroundings. Sound walks allowed community members to trace routes through their surroundings, and reflect upon them. These routes were written down, notes were taken about conversations during these sound walks, and the soundscapes of these routes were recorded, alongside participants’ comments about the ways that they experienced these soundscapes, and the ways that these soundscapes had changed over time. Finally, research was carried out in a series of archives, especially the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo General de Indias, Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, and the Fonoteca Nacional de México. This research helped to produce an aural history of the site of study. It uncovered a number of songs written about the site studied, and uncovered textual accounts of historical acoustic and musical practices in this region. Both of these sources of data help us to understand acoustic transformations linked to deforestation.
On the basis of this combination of methods, four articles were submitted to peer-reviewed journals. The project supported the writing and submission of a funding application for a larger-scale project in the wider forest area. Further, several information-sharing events were organized in Mexico City, to feed back the results to the local and academic communities. This included an event for the academic community, held in the Fonoteca Nacional de México, and an exhibition and showcase in Santo Tomás Ajusco, Tlalpan, Mexico City, in which some of the musical history of the region of study that was documented in archives could be performed for the benefit of local residents. This event was intended to use music to raise awareness of local environmental issues, and to aid in the documentation and enriching of local musical histories.
The project has made a series of breakthroughs that are important in the academic community, and which are described in several submissions of work for publication. It has documented changes in local patterns of listening in a context on the frontlines of environmental loss. This contributes to understanding of how the climate and environmental crisis is affecting people’s everyday experiences. It has analyzed these listening patterns, and placed them in the context of social change and urbanization. It explored the ways that song about the area of study connect to patterns of expanding land enclosure and expanding tourism, both of which are unrecognized drivers of forest loss. Its engagement with popular song that is culturally connected to travel on foot through small-scale pathways in the forest also helps us to understand how forest loss and urbanization is linked to changes in the ways that local residents move around. Finally, it has explored how community reforesting groups in this context use music and sound within their practice.
The project also achieved results more specifically in the local area. During the final exhibition and showcase, in some cases, songs about the forests and history of Ajusco could be performed that had never sounded in this area. In other cases, local musicians chose to compose original compositions that reflected on local patterns of forest loss. The exhibition and showcase was also organized in collaboration with a local community reforesting group. It therefore helped to promote the activities of this group. Anecdotal evidence shows that this event has had an impact locally, by bringing musicians and community organizers into dialogue and allowing them to form new ties. Some of the songs uncovered using archival research were also played during other public events organized by local community activists, with the work of the PI acknowledged. Finally, in one case a local ensemble had lost all of their recordings of one of their albums, and the PI was able to locate this recording in a nearby archive. All of these small-scale things add up and help to support local cultural links to the natural environment.