The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950

The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950, hosted by the Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin and Cardiff University, will recover and investigate representations of natural sound in a period that is frequently considered to have been central in constructing contemporary environmental ideologies and in developing institutions for conservation. The project will also interrogate the complexity of how natural sound and natural silence are constructed in other historical periods and how that continues to shape contemporary attitudes to the sound of nature. In the process, it will create a transferable methodology for thinking about how comparatively ephemeral phenomena shape our understanding of the environment in the past, present and future.

Sound is both an evanescent and an omnipresent phenomenon. As a historical artefact, especially in the time before the widespread diffusion of phonographic recording technologies, the sound of nature is most often preserved in writing. Furthermore, its affective and emotional impact can perhaps best be understood through textual analysis and archival sources. Through research that spans two centuries and moves across several national contexts in Europe, the project will argue that the perception and written representation of sounds in natural settings played a crucial role in developing and fostering environmental awareness and a conservation discourse. By examining the ways in which sounds were recorded and presented in writing and how they triggered specific sets of emotions in readers in the time before and in the early days of phonographic recording, we offer innovative ways to understand human relationships with nature and perceptions of change in the long run-up to understanding our own epoch as the Anthropocene.

Building upon research concerned with the continuities and discontinuities between Romanticism, early conservationism, and modern ecological thinking, the project will develop an interdisciplinary methodology which connects concepts and approaches taken from literary history, the history of science, sound studies, and the environmental humanities, and which will contribute to the establishment of an environmental history of sound. The project will expand our understanding not only of how the sound of nature is understood and presented in an era marked by radical environmental transformation but also its role in developing an early awareness of environmental change.

The project will be organised into three work packages looking respectively at the analysis of the role of sound in the establishment of nature conservation, the impact of literary representations of sound on the rise of an environmental awareness, and the development of an interdisciplinary methodology exploring the historical role of sound in constructing conceptions of the natural environment from a multiplicity of perspectives.