Translating ‘our' world through sound: Domestication, anthropomorphism, incantation

With a focus on sound as an elemental component of expression and communication, this chapter analyses how early and contemporary human beings have translated ‘our’ world by examining the materiality and semiotization of vocalization from inarticulate expression to comprehensible sound. Moving through ‘thresholds of semiosis’ from human perception of birdsong to speech and from ancestral chant to a modern-day electronic rendering of choral voices, I examine how the limits of anthropomorphism have shaped human translations of the world around us. Noting the parallels between domestication and anthropomorphism, I re-envisage foreignization as an act of affective and aesthetic labour on the part of the artist/translator. Disambiguating prior accounts of the materiality of a textual object in terms of its aesthetic form in contrast with its embodied encounter, I propose a multi-layered frame of reference for analysing the experience of translation. I then utilize this model to interpret the sonic artwork Earthquake Mass Re-Imagined: 2022 by ecoartist Kathy Hinde. I argue that experiential translation has a significant role to play in tuning our senses to perceive, as far as the limits of our technologically enhanced antennae allow, the auditory, but also visual, olfactory, kinaesthetic and physiological signs necessary to read this world, of which we are a part.