From phonations to sound environments: how can life sciences and humanities reach an understanding to address territorial changes through sound?

Abstract

In the French countryside, the succession of silent springs associated with the erosion of rural biodiversity has brought sound-related issues to the forefront as an essential approach enabling researchers (in life and territorial sciences) to characterize the state of landscapes and ecosystems in a context of global change. Anthropologists, for their part, can show how local communities perceive their territories through their immediate sound environments, at a time when profound transformations are affecting both their societies and their environment. In this article, we revisit a multidisciplinary research programme entitled Sonates (Ecouter les SONs de la NATurE pour comprendre les changements environnementaux – funded by the LabEx DynamiTe, 2018–2022). This project brought together anthropology, geography, ecology, and ecoacoustics, and was conducted in a CNRS Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research Area south of Toulouse (ZA Pygar), in the Bas-Comminges region, a field site studied by our team for more than twenty years. Through investigations conducted in our field sites combining acoustic recordings and sensory ethnography (participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and commented walks), we seek to understand how the environment is heard by local communities and how sounds contribute to the construction of local diagnoses of environmental change. We explore the coexistence, within a single territory, of different types of ecological knowledge (local, expert, scientific, etc.), and thus potential variations in the perception of sounds. This article also provides an opportunity to reflect on questions of convergence or discrepancy between the definitions of sounds adopted by the different researchers involved in the project (for example, what is anthrophony, and should it be considered a component of soundscapes or a form of pollution to be removed from recordings?), as well as on the methodological and conceptual issues raised by these questions, which allow us to further develop our shared understanding of sounds.