Sound and new media arts appear to be both historical and contemporary means to invest in the notion of more-than-human. Although the concept was formulated in the late 1990s (Abram 1996), certain related practices in art works exploring machine or animal agency have existed since the 1960s, especially in new media arts using sound, video, and electronic and computational technologies.

Machine listening takes place through sonification. Sound is treated as data by a computer that listens by deconstructing and reconstructing sound. To better explore the aesthetic, relational and ontological aspects of machine listening, this article reflects upon the Fourier analysis, which is vital for machine learning algorithms. It then outlines the listening modes articulated by French composer Pierre Schaeffer and updates them for the new material conditions of contemporary listening. It proposes that a new mode, identified while working with sonification, be added to Schaeffer’s classic array. It explores non-human listening among machines that listen with other concerns beyond the human need to interpret content. Thus, this article makes a particular strategic move: it centres around machine listening, which enables computers to perform analyses of a soundscape, and resynthesis, a mode of sonification that treats sound as data, to reintroduce the ‘sound object’ nature of resynthesised sounds. It looks at sonification through discourse analysis and media archaeology, and gives importance to experiments in art that privilege sensorial and affective dimensions often ignored by scientific approaches. It proposes that thinking about machine listening through sonification can assist in developing sensibilities that are more responsive to the present sonic ecologies between human and non-human listeners.

This article presents the concept of a ‘haptic aurality’ in soundscape composition, an aesthetic and perceptual model derived from visual art theory, media studies and phenomenology that extends the haptic beyond its common association to vibroacoustic phenomena in the sonic arts. Included in this framework are both the standard haptic arguments, from psychology and engineering, including notions of kinaesthesia and proprioception, and varied definitions of the haptic as a not necessarily tactile mode of knowing touch that involves synaesthesia, transmodal perception and philosophical notions of sensory dedifferentiation. In adapting this survey of sometimes contradictory accounts of the haptic as parameters for compositional analysis and application, the article simultaneously creates novel engagements between soundscape composition and acousmatic practice.

Seth Kim Cohen’s notion of non-cochlear sound art explores the idea of more-than-music, reframing sonic listening, shifting away from the aesthetic and towards the conceptual, reducing ‘the value of sonic pleasure in favor of a broader set of philosophical, social, political, and historical concerns’. While this notion holds academic and artistic merit, it does not acknowledge similar explorations in sound art within disabled and d/Deaf communities and developments within disability aesthetics. Works within the disability arts that fit into Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art were created prior to the publication of his 2009 text In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art and have continued to develop since. This article discusses Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound and asks the reader to view it alongside discussions of disability aesthetics and sound art works by Hard of Hearing (HoH) and d/Deaf artists. In doing so, it illustrates how disability art and aesthetics are inherently conceptual and sociopolitical and have not only been forgotten in discussion of non-cochlear sound art, but have also carved their own path.

This article critiques the anthropocentric tendencies in machine listening practices and narratives, developing alternative concepts and methods to explore the more-than-human potential of these technologies through the framework of sonic fiction. Situating machine listening within the contemporary soundscape of dataveillance, the research examines post-anthropocentric threads that emerge at the intersection of datafication, subjectivation and animalisation. Theory and practice interweave in the composition of a music piece, The Spiral, enabling generative feedback between concept, sensation and technique. Specifically, the research investigates the figure of a mollusc bio-sensor between science fact and fable, as the (im)possible locus of musicality. This emergent methodology also offers new insights for other sound art and music practices aiming to pluralise what listening might be.

Biomimicry shifts focus away from anthropocentric design approaches and encourages practitioners to develop a sensitivity to the interconnectedness of natural systems and their resultant potentiality as musical forms. Embracing the concepts of biomimicry necessitates a perspectival transformation from human authorship towards a reciprocal partnership with nature that stresses sustainable technological innovation in artistic expression. The need to solve design challenges in harmony with a broader ecological context means that biomimicry represents a new form of environmentally attuned sonic practice that is both communicative and interpretative of systems operating outside everyday human experience. This research employs the biomimetic process to unravel and respond to issues related to the development of form and structure at the locus of compositional practice. Furthermore, it utilises these insights to generate new knowledge through the activities of this practice and the novel insights apprehended through the triangulation of science, nature and music. Finally, it uses biomimicry to impact the compositional trajectory practically, extending beyond metaphor or representation, and offers a glimpse into realms that are more than music, more than human.

The article takes Boethius’s theory of musical harmony as a starting point, in particular studying the collective dimension embedded in this concept. The dynamics of contact and interdetermination, between humans and other-than-human, are explored and understood as factors co-involved in the possibility of common living. The role of the notions of ecology and economy in rereading the concept of harmony provided by Boethius’s theory is also reviewed. The text then explores a site-specific work that experiments with these issues through the creation of an acousmatic patch that is superimposed onto a broken ecology, showing how this serves as an agent for a reharmonisation of a drought-ravaged river. The article concludes by addressing the implications that a territorially situated musical approach might represent for recovery of the broken link between humans and the other-than-human.