Last year Sarah Hopfinger, Stuart MacRae and I received RSE Research Workshop funding to organize a series of talks, discussion, and a concert entitled “Art-Making in the Anthropocene”. Our initial plans for three days of in-person events were scuppered by covid, but we eventually figured out an online format that is just as exciting. For more information about the talks and concert (to be performed by Katherine Wren and Nordic Viola) and for free tickets, please check out our website.
I’m pleased to share my most recent zoomusicology article, “‘Hearken to the Hermit Thrush: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening,” which was published as part of the special research topic “Songs and Signs: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Inheritance in Human and Nonhuman Animals” in Frontiers in Psychology. In this article I discuss my own approach to zoomusicological inquiry, and use the example of how the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) has been understood and discussed over the past 200 years to illustrate why interdisciplinary perspectives are essential for better understanding of animal songs. The full text is available for free here.
