I am not a board games person, yet I always seem to find myself surrounded by them. Such was the case one August evening in 2023, during a round of the bird-watching-inspired game, Wingspan. Released in 2019 by Stonemaier Games, designer Elizabeth Hargrave’s creation is credited with a dramatic shift in the board game industry. The game received an unparalleled number of awards, including the prestigious 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres (Connoisseur Game of the Year), and an unheard of seven categories of the Golden Geek Awards, including Best Board Game of the Year and Best Family Board Game of the Year. In addition to causing shifts in typical board game topic, artistry, and demographic, Wingspan has led many board game fans to engage with the natural world in new ways, even inspiring many to become avid birders.
Following the game’s rise to popularity, developer Marcus Nerger released an app, Wingsongwhich allows players to scan each of the beautifully illustrated cards and play a recording of the associated bird’s song. On the evening in question, the unexpected occurred when I scanned the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) card and received a message that read:
Playback of this birds[sic] song is restricted.
Of course, I had to know more. Although the board game was originally designed using information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird.org website, Wingsong derives its recordings from another free database, xeno-canto.org. A quick search of the website revealed the following statement:
Some species are under extreme pressure due to trapping or harassment. The open availability of high-quality recordings of these species can make the problems even worse. For this reason, streaming and downloading of these recordings is disabled. Recordists are still free to share them on xeno-canto, but they will have to approve access to these recordings.
Though Xeno-Canto does not give specific details about each recording, the Wingspan card offers a clue in italics at the bottom: “Habitat for these birds was a topic in logging fights in the Pacific Northwest region of the US.”
The unexpected incursion of such politics into a board game is startling, especially given the limited information in the initial message. As such, the restriction of Spotted Owl recordings on Xeno Canto, and by extension Wingsong, suggests complicated issues relating to the ownership and distribution of sound, censorship, and conservation.
Spotted Owl Recordings
The status of the Spotted Owl was a major issue of public debate in Oregon of the 1980s and 90s, where I grew up. As Dr. Rocky Gutiérrez, the “godfather” of Spotted Owl research, wrote in an article for The Journal of Raptor Research, “Conservation conflicts are always between people – not between people and animals” (2020, 338). In this case, concerns about the impacts of logging in old-growth forests, thought to be the primary habitat of the Spotted Owl, pitted loggers and the timber industry against conservationists. On both sides, national entities like the Sierra Club and the Western Timber Association helped turn a regional management issue into one with implications for forest protection, wildlife conservation, and economic development across the nation. Forty years later, it is still a hot button issue for scientists, industry, and the government, now with added complications of fire control, climate change, and competing species like the Barred Owl (Strix varia).
Xeno-Canto uses a Creative Commons license, meaning that users can access and apply to a wide variety of projects without explicit permission of the recordist, but it also offers tools for contacting other users. I wrote to two recordists who uploaded Spotted Owl calls to Xeno Canto: Lance Benner and Richard Webster, both recording in southern areas where the Spotted Owl’s conservation status is slightly less dire than in Oregon. Benner is a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, whose recordings have been used in scientific research projects, at nature centers, in phone apps, and notably, in a Canadian TV show. Benner told me via email that he agrees with Xeno-Canto’s restriction on the Spotted Owl recordings to the public, writing
I used to play spotted owl recordings when leading owl trips but I don’t any more now that the birds have been classified as “sensitive.” There have also been multiple attempts to add the California Spotted Owls to the endangered species list, so if I find them, I’m not sharing the information the way I used to….
Webster, on the other hand, offered a slightly different perspective:
There are enough recordings in the public domain that restricting XC’s recordings probably will not make a difference. However, some populations of Spotted Owl are threatened, and abuse is quite possible…
As Webster points out, numerous recordings of Spotted Owls are readily available, including via The Cornell Lab of Ornitology’s Voices of North American Owls and other audio field guides. The concern with such recordings, Gutiérrez told me over Zoom, is that anti-Spotted Owl activists might use the recordings to “call in” Spotted Owls – essentially a form of audio catfishing historically used in activities like duck hunting. In the case of Spotted Owls, the concern is that activists might deliberately harm the birds. However, it can also be a dangerous practice when used by birders who simply want to get a closer look: birds may abandon their nests, leaving chicks vulnerable and unprotected.
From a sound studies perspective, “calling in” underscores questions of avian personhood. Rachel Mundy contends that audio field guides are structured by people in ways that highlight animal musicianship. Yet when we consider the practice of “calling in,” it becomes clear that birdsong recordings are not only designed for human ears, but also avian ones.
Spotted Owl Spotted in Medford, OR by the Bureau of Land Management, CC BY 2.0 DEED
Nonetheless, while birds are considered intelligent enough to recognize a call from their own species, they are not believed to be able to identify the difference between a recording and a live performance. The bird’s sensorium is short-circuited by the audio recording, tricking it into thinking a mate is nearby. Not only does this recall the interspecies history of the RCA Victor label His Master’s Voice, it highlights distinctly human anxieties about the role of recording and its ability to dissimulate. Restricting access to such recordings, then, revives deep-seated ethical questions that require a nuanced application.
Whether or not Spotted Owls are able to differentiate between a recorded call or the call of a live mate it is likely to be of decreasing concern, however: Gutiérrez suggests that Northern Spotted Owl populations are so small that anyone attempting to call one in would be unlikely to actually find one.
Immersion, Conservation, Reflection
App developer Marcus Nerger conceptualizes Wingsong as part of an immersive augmented reality experience, one that situates the game player in a more realistic soundworld. In the world of board games, parallels might be drawn to audio playlists used in tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, or to the immersive soundscape design used in video games.
Via Zoom, Nerger and I discussed the importance of sound in bird identification, which is arguably more significant than vision given birds’ general fearfulness of humans, branch cover, and the physical distance bird and observer – a separation underscored by the pervasive use of technologies like binoculars. Wingsong is not simply immersive because it connects the player to the real bird species, but because the experience of birding relies as much on hearing as it does on sight.
However, the Spotted Owl restriction message provides a provocative interruption to the immersive bird song experience provided by Wingsong. It is a jarring contrast to the benign experience of listening to recorded bird song, reminding the player of both the artifice of game play and the consequences of environmental actions. It suggests that the birds in the game are not hyper realistic Pokémon to be simply collected, but rather living animals embedded in environmental and political histories. The lack of information provided in the “restricted” message leaves the player wanting more – and subsequently, with a bit of searching, unearthing the mechanics behind the app, the politics of bird song recording, and finally, the specific histories of the species contained there, the ghost in the machine irrevocably unveiled.
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Featured Image: by author
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Julianne Graper (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work focuses on human-animal relationality through sound in Austin, TX and elsewhere. Graper’s writing can be found inSound Studies; MUSICultures; forthcoming in The European Journal of American Studies and in the edited collections Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (2023); Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID (2023); and Songs of Social Protest (2018). Her translation of Alejandro Vera’s The Sweet Penance of Music (2020) received the Robert M. Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society.
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Part of this surge in scholarly attention and artistic projects is premised on the idea that sound and sound recordings are important additions to cultural heritage in documenting histories and personal evidence, and yet, they are often viewed as supplementary adjuncts to more physical or visual archival artefacts. This subjugation to the primacy of the visual extends to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but this is beginning to change as scholars across these fields increasingly argue that sound (with its attendant listening) is an especially critical medium for cultivating different modes of attention, forging affective relations, producing alternative knowledges, revealing hidden narratives, and attuning to neglected pasts.
Two digital sound archival projects created in response to the pandemic, The Pandemic SensoryArchive and#StayHomeSounds, are especially instructive in thinking about sound as a key medium for engaging with the monumental a/effects of the present and as important contributions to cultural history. Like other pandemic digital sound archival projects, these two projects sought to document the present for the future – creating a “past” in real time, based on the underlying assumption that sound – as a material-discursive apparatus – can offer particularly generative possibilities in this context. The methods, scope, and presentation design employed by these two web-based archival platforms generates a sense of intimacy, proximity, andcollectivity in otherwise surreal, secluded, uncertain, detached, and disconnected situations, much like in radio and podcasting though in this case with different infrastructure and interactivity.
In these online, mediated spaces where worlds intensely collide and conflate, and users become flattened out and disembodied, new configurations of intimacy, subjectivities, and world-building emerge through alternative forms of affective archival engagement. This was (and still is) particularly important and complex during COVID-19, which is marked not only by a series of indefinite lockdowns and uneven distribution of intervention measures, but an affective logic whereby life is completely reconfigured and capacities within the world are diminished and redistributed. Part of making mass sound archives usable relies on the medium for circulation, the presentation for users, and what user participation empowers for these living histories, as Fabiola Hanna makes clear. These two projects generate what Hanna identifies as a particular orientation in digital humanities projects through a politics of listening that necessitates an active mode of participation that is not simply one-directional but a two-way engagement.
The Archive of Intimacy, later renamed The Pandemic Sensory Archive (PSA), wascreated by professors William Tullett (Associate Professor in Sensory History, Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.) and Hannah McCann (Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia) with the goal of exploring the senses through a digital platform and to act as an open data bank of contributions from the public. Their open call for contributions asks for a response that considers two questions: What smells, sights, sounds, touch, and/or tastes do you associate with the pandemic? Has your experiences of the senses (smell/sight/hearing/touching/taste) changed at all as a result of the pandemic? Contributors are then asked to drop a pin on the map (though this is not a typical Google Maps rendition of a specific locale, but a sort of simplified graphic representation of sensory input/output waves) and follow the prompts to anonymously submit. The digital map is divided among the five senses and features the entries that contain a title and brief response, such as:
Quiet where there should not be quiet: “Being in my flat in the centre of town on my own with nobody else around on a Saturday. Everything weirdly, eerily, quiet.”
Birdsong: “Hearing birdsong in the garden having not noticed it before, no longer drowned out.”
You’re on mute! “Did the conversation in meetings become less robust as we all sit there on mute, politely waiting for our turn to speak?”
Less sound, more sound: “Blissfully quiet at night as curfew curtails the normal constant traffic roars, far more voices in the early morning and through the day as people‘exercise together’ to socialize in the park”
Complimenting this map, which may seem limited in scope but allows users to engage without having to sift through an overwhelming amount of content, is the Sound category page, where four interviews are embedded with “sensory experts on sound during the Covid-19 pandemic,” including Shoshana Rosenberg, Andrew Mitchell, Martin Stewart, and Stephen Sullivan. One interview considers how the pandemic clarified the immensely relational dimension of artistic sound practice and that the lack of access to intimacy during lockdown instigated a radical reformatting and questioning of what it means, more broadly and now, to be intimate and close in creating sound art. For them, what the pandemic spelled out is that intimacy is fragile and valuable, and that this delicate balance and fluctuating ratio has come to the fore during this time.
The initial designation for the platform, “the archive of intimacy,” is worth meditating on to consider the particular forms of intimacy in this context, perhaps through Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics” – a concept that captures the affective and collective dimensions of intimacy among strangers. The notion lends itself to understanding the mediated social intimacy in these spaces and the different affective experiences they invite in varying capacities through sound.The connection between imagined publics and community through sound has, of course, been conceptualized by scholars who do historical work on radio and podcast studies, but it can also be extended to these digital, affective, pandemic sound archives. Evidenced in the submission prompts and interview data, the emphasis on the distinct shifts and palpable changes resulting from this new situation, and its accompanying affective logic, can be read as a strategy for cultivating intimacy and connection because attending to these changes may render their intensities as less alarming.
“Listening” by Flickr User Silvia Siri, April 4, 2020CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
Through the descriptions and dialogues of these new affective environments grounded in sound, some users might feel a sense of camaraderie, connection, and affinity to these novel experiences and how it relates or compares to one’s own (or the sense of not being so alone), especially in the personalized, diaristic, idiosyncratic tone in the short text extracts and longer interview forms. According to Tizian Zumthurm and Stefan Krebs (2022), digital spaces enable this type of “self-affirmation: by contributing and following the contributions of others, users are assured that they are not alone in whatever they experienced” (492). They also point out that as a result crowdsourced archives, particularly related to traumatic events, have a curative function.
Although the PSA may not be what likely comes to mind when thinking about a digital sound archive, presumably composed exclusively of musical or field recordings, it provides an entry point into a confluence of concerns to grapple with some of the key questions and issues related to sound, intimacy, and affect during the pandemic. In particular, diversity in form – between short excerpts and lengthier conversations, creates different engagement options for users based on preference and capacity (quick snapshots of the sonic changes in daily life or deeper explorations concerning sonic worlds), and across sensory inputs. Moreover, interviews add an oral history aspect to the project, which some scholars argue is more empowering and intimate than other modes of telling or sharing history. As a historically feminist practice, oral history has the potential to expose ignored topics and present diversified perspectives on traumatic pasts (like the 1918 pandemic) which is also especially important considering the research areas and professional backgrounds among the interview experts.
#StayHomeSounds is part of a larger project led by UK-based sound artist Stuart Fowkes, who created Cities and Memories in 2014, which Milena Droumeva describes as a “one-of-a-kind sonic portal dedicated to the exploration of place, sound and memory” (147). The website boasts being the largest sound project in the world with over 5000 sound recordings from over 1000 different contributors across 100 territories worldwide. It encompasses field recordings, sound art, and sound mapping, and each location features two sounds: the original field recording of that place and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere, something else. The listener can explore sites through their actual sounds or the reimagined versions, flipping between the two different sound worlds. #StayHomeSounds is one of the latest ongoing sub-projects on the site and it is a collection of recordings during the pandemic from all over the world mostly done using cell phone recordings.
Bari lockdown sound recorded by Roberto Lippolis.
Although there is a wide range of quality and content, #StayHomeSounds offers a glimpse into the everyday sonic realities of quarantine life that cut across geography, life, and circumstances. The immensely mundane soundscapes and sheer multitude of recordings across cities and regions allows us to listen comparatively and try to notice the striking sonic cultures of different places even in lockdown. Those submitting sounds are required to provide a reflective text, and an elective representative image, to accompany their recording which details the changes in the soundscape as well as any a/effects that change has produced on other aspects of life.
An entry from Vancouver reads “Their chorus runs day and night and is a most pleasant soundtrack to both fall asleep with and wake up to. In this clip the background birds have joined in to add their avian melody to the amphibian bass line.”
Another from the Greek island of Crete, “after a heavy rain last night, the chirping of the birds woke me up this morning. It was such a powerful sound, like waking up from a sweet dream or a bad nightmare. I think that due to quarantine measures the nature’s sounds are more clear than even before.”
Athens, Greece lockdown sound recorded by Stamatis Mitrou.
In New Orleans, “I’m thankful for my quiet spot out here on the edges of town, but I worry about how the city can recover and for all those sick, out of work, or unable to stay home.”
New Orleans lockdown sounds recorded by Elizabeth Joan Kelly.
The objectives of the project, as described by Fowkes in the online text, are largely affective or affectively oriented, that is, to establish a sense of connection in the present, “how it feels at this unique moment,” by being able to discover new relations to place, to others, and to our sentient selves, through these sonic recordings and texts. In an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Fowkes said, “(You can) see what other people are hearing around the world and also read their stories and see that actually people are feeling similarly… hopefully that helps to make us feel a little bit more connected.” The breadth of contributions in terms of different locations and number of entries helps build this sense of connection, increasing the possibility of similar experiences to be seen and heard.
Lockdown sound from Lagos, Nigeria recorded by Ibukun Sunday.
By attending to personal struggles, observations, and speculations in relation to sound, these two digital sound archival projects gesture towards the intersections of intimacy, memory, and world-building, and alleviate and mediate some of the dominant and pervading affects that marked lockdown and remote life. In undertaking this project, I found pleasure in the informality of the responses and both the fresh insights and shared resonances, creating an experience that was jointly intimate (feeling seen and validated) and expansive (an opening to alternative experiences). In cultivating openness and a space for difference, and making the reflections and recordings publicly available, so that we can listen together but apart, the projects cultivate new forms of intimacy, empathy, collectivity, and nostalgia.
Dhaka, Bangladesh lockdown sound recorded by youKnowWho.
But, of course, the potential affective experience with the entries and recordings is not a given, much like with any critical scholarly intervention or artwork that attempts to raise awareness (in this case, to both the grave and minute effects of the pandemic) and resist dominant narratives (that the pandemic is under-control, over, or effects only one’s respiratory system), there is no guarantee that the intended experience will transpire in every engagement, but the possibility to do so – to cultivate intimacy and world-building at a time of profound uncertainty and physical distance – is nonetheless still valuable. Much like the diversity in responses, undoubtedly there are varying degrees and types of resonances, perceptions, and impacts within each visit.
Using an open access, crowdsourced approach, the PSA and #soundsathome construct participatory, community archives, creating and remediating documents and recordings for collective access and engagement on behalf of a global community that underwent monumental change, disruption, and loss. Calling explicit attention to palpable sensory shifts and disruptions is a central way to track, record, and make sense of the immense changes in this historical moment, and to illuminate the inequalities in environments and experiences that have been exacerbated by the (lack of) responses by governments and policy. The very existence of these projects and their participation through listening marks a resistance to the discourses of a “return to normalcy” or that we are on the other end of the pandemic. Because affects live in the body and are not often considered as objects of knowledge, the ongoing presence, use, and discussion of these two projects amplifies the a/effects, and a resistance to the affective logic of the pandemic, that they seek to produce. By considering COVID as an unprecedented, deeply affective, traumatic event, these online spaces operate to archive this moment in time and its myriad sonic dimensions, bringing these affective worlds into dialogue through an intimate exchange and assemblage between different bodies, experiences, and locations.
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Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Tkaronto (Toronto) whose work draws on sound studies, feminist theory, critical disability studies, and cultural theory to examine sonic social relations and materiality through entanglements of resistance and care within contemporary artworks and creative practices. As a cultural worker and active member in the arts community, Emily has worked at diverse film, visual arts, and digital media organizations, institutions, and research networks within Canada and abroad, including Archive/Counter-Archive, PUBLIC Journal, VUCAVU, Festival Scope (Paris), the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
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Sounding Out! 
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