A balance that you can hear: deep ecology, serious listening and the soundscape recordings of David Dunn

The phonographic recordings of the American composer David Dunn combine conservationist advocacy with philosophical speculations on the relationship between ecology and music informed by the systems philosophy of Gregory Bateson, and the avant-garde experimentalism of composer John Cage. His album Why Do Whales and Children Sing? A Guide to Listening in Nature (1999) risks reducing the natural world to easily consumable sound bites, and thereby contributing to the commodification of nature that Dunn opposes. He counters this risk with a self-reflexive critique of his own methodology; that is, he actively encourages his listeners to question the very act of listening to nature sound recordings. Dunn wants his listeners to be intellectually active and informed, and therefore to be more than merely passive consumers of his work. Serious listening is a way of finding interrelationships of what Gregory Bateson called mind in the natural world.