Echoes from the Earth: hearing devices, listening exercises, and the work of ecological mediation

Abstract Since the habitability of the planet depends on countless organisms, entities, and processes that escape human perception, one of the main challenges of ecological thinking is to render these invisible dynamics perceptible and to disclose the dense network of interdependencies connecting human and non-human worlds. Among the various ways of approaching this task, this article focuses on listening, understood as both a mode of perception and a form of understanding oriented toward what lies beyond the human. Drawing on selected examples of contemporary sound art projects and narrative works, the article examines: (i) the devices that shift the threshold between the audible and the inaudible; (ii) the conditions under which sound can become an intelligible “voice”; and (iii) how the ethical and ecological potential of listening is mobilized within critical and cultural theory. Engaging with recent critical debates that emphasize the capacity of performative and sound art—often in contrast to linguistic and narrative forms—to bring biotic and abiotic components of the Earth system into the field of human perception without immediately projecting human meanings onto them, the article argues that immersive listening practices, while powerful in expanding perceptual awareness, remain insufficient on their own to address questions of ecological ethics and politics. Rather than opposing sensory immediacy to representation, it demonstrates that ecological listening is always mediated and that its critical and political relevance depends not on the affordances of a single medium nor on the intensity of sensory experience alone, but on the articulation of different media—sound, narrative, and discursive forms—through which issues of perception, representation, and advocacy can be jointly negotiated.