The Reach of a Whistle

Archaeology, which for centuries has been turning over pavements in search of foundations, has compelled us—almost forced us—to construct a narrative of what we are, how we functioned, and how we related to one another. In fact, those first notes of civilization we unearth from archaeological sites should be understood as one possible approximation: the history we have taken as valid, unique, and linear is actually the result of speculation. It is a kind of universal and secret consensus—the one that grants humanist or scientific thought the power to legitimize the story—that prevents us from realizing that we have been looking at the past through the frameworks and logics of the present.

Now, let us remove linear time—or at least that of seconds, days, and minutes—and erase from our equation the concept of civilization itself. Let us, for a moment, imagine what would happen around us.

Once there, our minds would be filled with sensations: visually (everything would likely be vegetal), olfactorily (everything would smell of wet earth), and sonically (thousands of animals and creaks would fill the air). Most of us would construct a romanticized scene, of a land in which only the boldest minds would dare to populate with dinosaurs. Without a doubt, the fall of the meteorite is one of the few events in which the collapse was not of human responsibility.

After crossing that moment of hyper-romanticized nature, it is time to situate this text and begin to draw some possible conclusion.

The Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or our essentially colonizing and devouring structure, has led us to subject everything around us to potential extinction—we are a kind of reverse King Midas.

When we discussed the selection and themes that our exhibition or listening space would address, we often ended up making a mental list of the various crises we are facing: climate, social, humanitarian. But in this exercise of enumeration, we left out the poetic dimension that unconsciously arises from the existence of a sound archive like Freesound. Sound—beyond its capture through recording—is one of the most volatile, ephemeral, and perishable elements we encounter.

It is in that point of disappearance or volatility where a key concept of our proposal lies: sound, and its safeguarding, as something essential within what is called Intangible Heritage—a kind of catch-all for all those knowledges and situations that are constantly threatened by potential extinction.

We could have spoken about this from the very beginning and said: we are going to curate a selection of endangered sounds from the Freesound platform. But that wouldn’t be entirely honest or real, because the concept of extinction itself normalizes imminent disappearance—we are already too accustomed to that word.

Our idea is that through the acoustic devices we propose, one can access a selection of sounds that speak of things to be archived, of sonorities to be safeguarded, of acoustic situations that, although not unique and sometimes quotidian, are directly affected by their imminent fade-out—but without resorting to catastrophism, as that would erase both poetry and awareness.

We will draw upon the strategies of scientific thinking, posing some examples in the form of questions that help clarify what kinds of sounds—or what acoustics—vibrate at this poetic-conceptual frequency.

Will the sound of rain, in a few decades, become just a memory—or something rare?

Ultimately, we want to curate a list of Sounds to Be Protected, inviting different cultural agents and thinkers to explore the Freesound archive and rescue from it some rara avis they consider should be part of this peculiar setlist—one traversed by intangible heritage, sometimes born of unlearning, and sometimes a consequence of the multiple crises humanity endures.