Vegetal Imaginaries: Sounding and Sensing Plant Life and a “Re-Enchantment” of the More-than-human World

Abstract

This thesis explores how sound and music provide ways of knowing and modes of enacting relationships with plant life. Based on a year of ethnographic and archival research, I examine the practices of two distinct but related populations: people who use electronic tools and instruments to sonify plant life and artists and healers whose numinous experiences of receiving plant messages shape their sonic, healing, and artistic practices. I ask how sensual and sonic experiences with plant life shape participants’ ethical conceptions of interspecies and intrahuman relationships. I examine how conceptions of communicative, psychic, and energetic plants enable imaginaries of unmediated connection to plants and act as modes of “re-enchantment” (Partridge 2004). I argue that my research participants’ sonic and sensual engagements with plant life are communicative encounters that inform their idea of what it means to be human and shape their conceptions of ethical relations between humans and plants. Further, at best, such practices bring humans into relationships of care and attention with the vegetal and, at worst, reinscribe extractive relationships with the more-than-human world.