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Urban Intonation: Listening to the Rats of New York City
Brian House (artist), Amherst College, Art and the History of Art, 220 South Pleasant Street,
Amherst, MA 01002, U.S.A. Email:
ORCID: 0000-0002-0597-1987
© ISAST. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Manuscript received 14 December 2022.
Abstract
From urbanization to biomedical science, rats can be found in the foundations of modernity.
Communicating ultrasonically above the ~20 kHz limit of human hearing, rats are also well-
adapted for the human-built environment and its anthropogenic noise. For the sound installation
Urban Intonation, the author recorded rats on the streets of New York City with an ultrasonic
microphone and resampled and remixed the audio for playback over a human public address
system, repositioning the voices of rats in order for us to reconsider our relationship to our oft-
reviled nonhuman cohabitants.
I’ll play you a sound I recorded at the northwest corner of Columbus Park in Manhattan. The clip
is from a Thursday afternoon in early summer, and if you’ve ever been to New York (or any big
city) what you’ll hear is unremarkable. The background hum of traffic. The brakes of a truck and
its engine revving up again. Some indistinguishable shouting, what could be someone sweeping
outside of a storefront, and, since it is after all a park, the call of birds. The urban soundscape is
chaotic, which is not necessarily a bad thing; where there are experiences to be had, connections
to be made, truths yet to be discovered, there is noise.
But let’s listen to the recording a second time. This time, the audio has been run through some
digital signal processing. It’s come out lower in pitch—twenty-four times lower. Everything you
could hear before has become inaudible. What you hear instead is everything that was previously
too high to perceive. Sounds so high-pitched that in the city they reverberate above the din of
humans and our machinery. What do they sound like? Undeniably, they are voices, and they are
engaged all manner of social dynamics. There are cries of joy and excitement, and there are
shouts of warning, admonishment, and displeasure. Percussive chatter mixes with plaintive
questioning, and most relatable of all are the occasional bouts of laughter. The voices are not,
however, human. As familiar as the expressions may seem, the nature of the creatures making
them is not easily placed, which makes them uncanny, and makes us uneasy.
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Leonardo Just Accepted MS.
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What you hear are rats. These are not the squeaks that rats make when they are angry and want
humans to leave them alone (the lowest sounds they can make). Among themselves, rats speak at
another—ultrasonic—register. Tuning in to these conversations gives us a chance to hear rats as
they are, free from the heavy cultural associations they carry. And in so doing, we might
subsequently reconsider the ways in which we are entangled with our urban cohabitants.
This premise is the basis for a work of sound art, Urban Intonation (2017), and this paper
describes the work’s conceptual and material underpinnings. By situating it within a network of
critical, technical, and aesthetic concerns, I speak to art’s capacity to hold us in a complex
encounter, one that resists the boundaries that have plagued our relationship to the nonhuman
world. And as it turns out, this work is not only about how we perceive rats, but the realization
that rats have been listening to us all along.
✧
It’s not by chance that we’ve encountered rats in Columbus Park. Once known as Mulberry
Bend, this was the heart of Five Points, a 19th-century tenement neighborhood and notorious
slum. The area was made famous by Jacob Riis’s pioneering work of photojournalism, How the
Other Half Lives [1]. In it, Riis’s descriptions of the squalid living conditions of immigrant
families are peppered with references to the ubiquitous rats, including a horrific (and hopefully
apocryphal) episode in which they devour a sleeping child. This site, now surrounded by
Chinatown, remains a hotbed of burrows, and it is emblematic of New York’s close association
with rats and the oft-cited but exaggerated statistic that the city has an equal number of human
and murine inhabitants [2].
The Brown rat—known to science as rattus norvegicus—showed up in New York just as the port
city was emerging as a center of commerce in the 18th century; they have accompanied
capitalism from the beginning. Having originated somewhere on the Mongolian steppe, trade
routes first brought them to Europe as they fed on goods traveling the Silk Road [3]. After
displacing their smaller cousins—the black rat of Black Death fame—in urban centers
throughout Europe, they stowed away on ships to North America. Weighing up to two pounds
and growing to twenty inches, the New York City rat has since made itself at home, living in
colonies of up to fifty animals that prefer to stay local and defend their territories [4]. Stories of
human-rat interaction are legion, and they can be lighthearted, such as when the video of “pizza
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Fig. 1. Rat burrow in the Lower East Side (© Brian House)
rat” carrying a slice down the subway stairs went viral on social media [5]. But there are racist
and classist undercurrents when voracious and fecund rats are linked with impoverished and
immigrant neighborhoods. Or as theorist and poet Fred Moten puts it, “The black, the woman,
the stranger all move at the place where animality and criminality intersect” [6]. The rat—dirty,
cunning, invasive—is an avatar for the anxieties of the privileged classes.
The reality is that the rat has simply found an ecological niche surviving off human garbage,
which in New York is left curbside for easy access. They therefore especially thrive in areas
neglected by city services, taking advantage of inequities built into our capitalist society. In the
documentary Rat Film, it’s stated succinctly: “There’s never been a rat problem. It’s always been
a people problem” [7]. Or according to author Robert Sullivan, who has written extensively on
urban rats, “The No. 1 way to take care of rats is to help other people: have a well-financed
health department, well-financed sanitation department. It is the perfect barometer to see how
your city works” [8]. Instead, New York City’s anti-rat efforts have been described as a “war” at
least since the O’Dwyer administration in the 1940s; Mayor Giuliani appointed a rat “czar,” and
city officials have repeatedly referred to the rat “epidemic” and the “crusade” to end it, perhaps
as a smokescreen to avoid addressing systemic injustice among humans [9].
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In practice, municipal interspecies relations take on the tone of biopolitics, which for Michel
Foucault is the application of “diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and
the control of populations” [10]. A training guide published by Center for Disease Control in
1956 begins with an epigraph in this spirit: “Controlling rat populations, not individual rats, is
the key to a successful rodent-control program in a community” [11]. Such language, especially
to describe extermination, is characteristic of the modern era, arising along with contemporary
statistical modeling in World War II and the computers that made it possible. Rats’ connection to
information science goes the other way as well; Claude Shannon, who developed the foundations
of digital logic in the 1940s, made one of the first demonstrations of machine learning not with
an artificial human brain but with a mechanical rat in a maze [12].
Shannon’s setup reflected the already established role of the brown rat in the science on which
modern ideas of the body depend. With its white fur and red eyes, an albino strain of rattus
norvegicus—all of which descend from a common ancestor—is synonymous with laboratory
research. Whether for psychological experimentation, anatomical investigations, pharmaceutical
development, genetic manipulation, or behavioral studies, these rats have served as “animal
models”—that is, proxies for humans through which we might better understand our diseases
without putting people at risk. Or as the National Institutes of Health puts it, “Rats … are
mammals that share many processes with humans and are appropriate for use to answer many
research questions” [13]. The comprehensive PubMed database for biomedical research contains
over one million publications that reference experimentation on rats because of this affinity [14 ].
To a significant extent, therefore, what science knows about humans is what it knows about rats.
And yet that rats remain distinctly nonhuman is critical to their role as models; exempt from the
Animal Welfare Act, tens of millions are killed in the laboratory every year [15].
To understand a lab rat’s reaction to the experiments to which it has been subjected, researchers
often turn to sound. For example, one such paper is titled “Shock-induced ultrasonic vocalization
in young adult rats: a model for testing putative anti-anxiety drugs” [16]. It’s well-established
that repetitive calls around 22 kHz signify that the animal is in distress, a frequency that is
inaudible to the human ear and as such avoids triggering human empathy. Sounds around 50
kHz, in contrast, are associated with positive social behaviors such as play and mating. But
beyond these basic categories, which are useful for running experiments, the literature on rat
sounds is surprisingly sparse. However, one study from Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Burgdorf
from the late 1990s stands out. They tickled their rats, “cautiously advancing and empirically
cultivating the theoretical possibility that there is some kind of an ancestral relationship between
the playful chirps of juvenile rats and infantile human laughter” [17]. Panksepp and Burgdorf
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note that researchers “take pains to deny that we can ever know whether animals have any
emotional feelings.” Nonetheless, they continue that “The emergence of a ‘critical
anthropomorphism’ may be essential for dealing with certain types of primitive psychobiological
processes we share with the other animals” [18].
We make the cat eat cat food out of a dish, as if it were human [19]. But it is the rat who literally
devours the human food thrown out in the trash. The same animal through which we’ve
understood our physiology cohabitates with us in our cities; the urban rat is neither domesticated
nor living off in the wilderness. It burrows through the symbolic divide we’ve established
between ourselves and animals, and if we find them disgusting, it is because they violate—and
so reveal—the structure on which our anthropocentrism depends [20]. But as sound theorist
Brandon Labelle writes, “the auditory provides an escape route [from] the representational
metaphysics of modernity” [21]. It offers the opportunity, as Moten would have it, to hear
“difference materialized not as an other voice, but as the other that always inhabits the voice”
[22]. That is, to listen to a rat on its own terms might allow us to “become rat” [23] for a
moment, as Panksepp and Burgdorf did, and rather than hear ourselves in their voices, to hear the
rat within our own.
✧
In Columbus Park, I watch as a large rat, maybe a pound and a half, snatches a half-eaten bagel
from an overflowing “rat-proof” garbage can and drags it away under the bushes. I scramble to
follow, hurdling low park fences, peering between the feet of old men reading newspapers, and
shimmying between the branches of an old sprawling tree. I see the rat disappear into a burrow at
the base of the trunk, and I stake out the hole. Though rats are most active just before sunrise and
after sunset, several times a face appears at the entrance over the next hour, so it seems like an
ideal location for recording.
When it comes to recording ultrasonic frequencies, it should be noted that the term is
anthropocentric; these are sounds above 20 kHz, a frequency that is significant only because it is
the generally accepted limit of exceptional adult human hearing (for most people, the threshold is
much lower). That said, traditional microphones are made with this limit in mind, quickly rolling
off when they reach the ultrasonic range. But rats can hear up to 90 kHz, and they are capable of
making noise nearly as high [24]. As such, laboratories use USV (Ultra-Sonic Vocalization)
“detectors,” which process audio downward in real-time to make rat sound audible. This
technology does little to preserve the acoustic details in the voices, however. As one researcher
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puts it, “The effect is sort of like a Geiger counter” [25]. Instead, I used a MEMS (Micro Electro-
Mechanical Systems) “mic-on-a-chip,” a relatively recent technology geared toward the mobile
electronics industry that, in addition to being tiny, has a flat frequency response up to around 100
kHz. I controlled this with a Raspberry Pi, a small, customizable, and inexpensive Linux-based
computer, which ran a custom shell script to save audio to an SD card in one-hour chunks. This
setup can be powered with a consumer power bank to run for a few days without recharging.
I put everything inside a rat trap. You’ve seen this model of trap, thousands of times, in cities
everywhere. You probably haven’t given it a second look, because at best it’s an innocuous, if
inelegant, part of urban infrastructure, and at worst it contains poison or even a carcass. The
black, plastic trap is a signifier of the urban unconscious, and so ignored, it’s the perfect
container for expensive electronics if you’re planning on leaving them out on the street for
extended periods of time. In other words, I use rat traps to avoid the humans, not the rats (who
seem unbothered by them). While the microphone is omnidirectional, meaning I’ll get ambient
sound from all sides, I place it near the entrance to a burrow; perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s when
rats encounter each other that they are most likely to make noise.
✧
Recording a soundscape, even an ultrasonic one, situates this practice within the tradition of
soundscape ecology articulated by R. Murray Schafer and his students in the late 1970s, and
which has many adherents today. It is a discipline toward which I am somewhat ambivalent. On
the one hand, it promotes the value of acoustemology, that is, the idea that “sounding and the
sensual, bodily, experiencing of sound is a special kind of knowing, or put differently how sonic
sensibility is basic to experiential truth” especially conducive to conveying our dynamic
ecological relationships [26]. But on the other hand, soundscape ecologists often insist on the
need to “conserve natural soundscapes,” a rhetoric which re-inscribes a nature/culture divide
[27]. Though well-intentioned, such a practice encapsulates nature as something that happens
“over there” [28]. I wanted to record rats precisely because their “natural world” is the one we
live in, too. Nevertheless, this realization came after my own experience in the wilderness, and
the ways in which it informed my investigation have been critical.
In 2015, I was the sound recordist of the National Geographic-funded Okavango Wilderness
Project. The Okavango Delta is an inland flood plain, which eventually dissipates into the
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Fig. 2. Rat trap with recording gear (© Brian House)
Kalahari desert and is one of the most ecologically diverse environments on the planet. I
recorded hippos fighting, the calls of lions, elephant charges, and even the terrifying rumble of a
buffalo herd. But what I found most compelling was the long recordings of the soundscapes.
These recordings made clear how different species make sound at different pitch registers that
coherently layer to fill the whole spectrum. This is what the acoustic ecologist Bernie Krause
calls the “niche hypothesis,” that is, how “Birds, insects, and mammals each form their own
temporal, frequency, and spatial niches” in the soundscape [29]. As it turns out, this biophony is
not a cacophony, but an organized acoustics that reflects interspecies awareness.
Frequency niches are readily observable in spectrograms, which are visualizations of acoustic
data that show energy levels in different parts of the frequency spectrum over time. In my
recordings from the Okavango, the acoustic strata of animals are easily separable by the eye as
well as by the ear. Paying attention to the soundscape as the whole, rather than just the behavior
of individual species, reveals the capacity for animals to self-organize not only among their own
kind, but in relation to others. As Krause puts it, animals evolved to “be able to hear and process
the particular sounds that were relevant to their well-being” [30]. Krause notes that the healthier
the environment, the more clearly partitioned the sounds. Likewise, environments that may seem
to be flourishing can nonetheless be observed and heard to have been disturbed when there are
empty or unstructured niches.
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Krause’s observation resonates with the philosophical concept of transindividuation as
articulated in the work of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler explains that “The I,
as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to we, … [in which] a plurality of I’s
acknowledge each other’s existence” [31]. In this case, the soundscape is not just a population of
animal voices; it is the ensemble through which they have mutually come to be. To the extent
that communication reflects an animal’s subjectivity, this implies some sort of identification not
only with other individuals of the same kind but with those from other species as well.
Yet while acoustics illustrate this process among species in areas where there are few humans,
when there’s enough of us around, we tend to claim the whole soundscape for ourselves. This is
indicative of the ingrained anthropocentrism of modern life. It’s not that humans can’t be
excellent listeners; musicians, for example, simultaneously play their individual parts and lose
themselves in collective expression. But we saturate our urban soundscapes with technical
ensembles of our own creation—buses, stereos, pneumatic drills. A spectrogram recorded in a
busy part of Manhattan finds human voices competing with the whir of ubiquitous motors that
produce broadband fuzz up to around 25 kHz. But above that? An ultrasonic recording reveals
something unexpected.
✧
It is my hypothesis that one reason rats have been so successful living in cities is that while other
animals might be deafened by our noise, rats’ social lives unfold in a register of the auditory
spectrum that we’ve left silent. And no recording I’d heard from a laboratory prepared me for the
richness of that life. Having reclaimed my rat “trap” from its position next to the burrow under
the tree, I sit on a park bench and transfer the contents of the SD card to my computer. Scanning
a spectrogram sampling 24 hours of audio, a few mechanical sounds are visible, along with some
bats. But the rest is rats. 22 kHz alarm calls are there, starting with a distinctive down-swoop
followed by innumerable repetitions, each with a quick upward punctuation at the end. But
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Fig. 3. Author’s annotated spectrogram of an audio recording in the Okavango Delta (© Brian House)
present, too, are complex shapes of all kinds, glissandi-like lightning bolts across the image,
staggering over wide frequency ranges in both repetitive patterns and in unique enunciations.
Clusters of vocalizations appear together, with greater or lesser amplitude indicating multiple
individuals conversing. Every hour holds surprises, new configurations of forms and patterns.
And even in the visual form of a spectrogram, the shape of laughter is unmistakeable.
To hear these sounds is a technical and interpretive exercise. The most straightforward approach
is to play them back slower, also known as downsampling. What was recorded at 192 kHz, when
played back at 8 kHz, is twenty-four times lower in pitch (~4.5 octaves) and well within our
range of hearing. This can’t happen in real time since the duration of the sound also expands by
as much, but the shape of the waveform is preserved. It’s nearly impossible not to hear the result
as speaking (and singing) voices—because that’s what they are. I ended up using a combination
of downsampling and pitch-shifting—an algorithm which changes pitch without expanding
time—in order to fit them into a frequency niche that matched that of the human vocal range,
encouraging us hear them as equals. To that end, I also took out the rat sounds which are
normally audible to us—the squeaks and cries the rat makes out of fear and which are intended
for us to hear—as shifting these would undo a relation that already exists. Finally, I also did
quite a bit of audio restoration in the form of noise reduction, spatialization, double tracking, and
reverb, which re-situated the processed sounds in an acoustic environment and smoothed over
some of the rough edges [32].
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Fig. 4. Spectrogram of ultrasonic audio recording in Columbus Park, NYC (© Brian House)
I don’t view such effects as violating the integrity of the recording, as there is no such thing as
technical objectivity. Rather, it’s a matter of being intentional about modulating between
physiologies. The composer Olivier Messiaen explains that “a bird, being much smaller than we
are, with a heart that beats faster and nervous reactions that are much quicker, sings in extremely
swift tempos, absolutely impossible for our instruments. I’m therefore obliged to transcribe the
song at a slower tempo … it’s a transposition of what I heard, but on a more human scale” [33]. If
we’re to become rat, our ears have to relate to the sound in the way it does to theirs.
Beginning in spring of 2017, I recorded nearly 150 hours of rat sound, which to my knowledge
are the first ultrasonic recordings of urban rats in New York City [34]. Following tips from
ecologists Matthew Combs and Michael Parsons, the sites included not only Columbus Park, but
a waste treatment plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a maintenance shaft in the subway uptown, and
a boarded up “vacant” lot on the Lower East Side. This process often involved trespassing,
which highlighted for me the ways in which rats disrespect architectural boundaries, and which
led to the form of the resulting artwork, Urban Intonation. As a sound installation, the piece
consists of eight public address speakers mounted in a cluster in a corner of a building, whether
outside, in a museum gallery, or, ideally, in a subway tunnel or other rat-frequented domain [35].
Above our heads—and attached to the walls rather than boring through them—is precisely the
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opposite of where we’d expect to find rats in our infrastructure. PA systems are speech rendered
as space. And as the PA leaves the source of the voice unseen, visitors look up to hear them. That
gesture—looking up to hear rat sounds—means we receive the sound differently. Played back as
a constantly varying 8-channel mix of recordings (again using Raspberry Pis together with a
series of amplifiers) places the voices back into spaces they already inhabit; they are not from
elsewhere, but we’re no longer insensitive to them.
✧
It’s clear that humanity is integral to the story of rattus norvegicus. Rats live in a human-built
environment often hostile to the nonhuman; nevertheless, they thrive off of our refuse, and they
have found an acoustic niche in which to communicate and make their own meaning of urban
life. We think ourselves separate. But like it or not, rats are also a part of us, as from urbanization
to biomedical science, they are found throughout the modern sense of what it is to live as
humans. As such, we would do well to acknowledge our participation in ensembles with these
and other nonhuman beings.
Jacques Derrida, after locking eyes with his cat, famously reflected on whether an animal can
consciously respond to another being in a way that rises above instinct. While convinced of the
cat’s singular agency, Derrida nonetheless assumed it lacked language, conceding only that this
might be “something other than a privation” [36]. Donna Haraway has chided him for stopping
there and failing to inquire further about “what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking,
or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning” [37]. Given that cats
can hear up to 64 kHz, I like to think the cat was listening to the rodents talking in the walls—
and wondering why the philosopher wasn’t responding. Even if avert our eyes from those of the
rat, expanding our capacity to listen to other voices may be a means of extending our
sensitivities.
I’ve been asked many times what the rats are saying. While the answer is largely beyond the
current science, consider that what counts as speech is fundamentally political. We’ve been
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Fig. 5. Urban Intonation installed in a Brooklyn subway station (© Brian House)
reluctant to recognize the rights of non-speaking animals given language as the dividing line
between us and them. But if we’re asking this question about the rat, perhaps the division is more
porous than we’d like to admit. We may not understand the words, but the intonation is
nonetheless compelling, as it carries a commonality that resonates within our own throats.
Standing on a subway platform, we listen first; only when we read the placard to learn source of
the sounds do we find it written, “rat.”
Biography
Brian House is an artist who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. He
holds a PhD in Computer Music from Brown University and is Assistant Professor of Art at
Amherst College.
Acknowledgements
This work was conducted via a project residency at Eyebeam and a fellowship at the TOW
Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
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References and Notes
1. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin
Classics, 1997 [1890]).
2. Polly Mosendz, “New York Doesn’t Have More Rats Than People After All,” Newsweek, November
6th, 2014.
3. Emily Puckett et al, “Global population divergence and admixture of the brown rat (Rattus
norvegicus),” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 283 (2016).
4. Matthew Combs et al, “Spatial population genomics of the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) in New York
City,” Molecular Ecology 27 No. 1 (2017).
5. Emma Fitzsimmons, “‘Pizza Rat’ Prompts a Collective ‘Ew’ and Debate on Cleaning New York
Subway,” The New York Times, September 22, 2015.
6. Fred Moten, “Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (review),” MLN 115 No. 5 (2000), p.
1173.
7. Theo Anthony, director, Rat Film (Cinema Guild 2016).
8. See Mosendz [2].
9. Matt Flegenheimer, “New York City Escalates the War on Rats Once Again,” The New York Times,
June 24, 2015.
10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1976]) p. 140.
11. Bayard Bjornson, Harry Pratt, and Kent Littig, Control of Domestic Rats & Mice (Center for Disease
Control, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1956).
12. “Science: Mouse with a Memory,” TIME, May 19, 1952.
13. Remy Melina, “Why Do Medical Researchers Use Mice?” Live Science, November 16, 2010.
14. Philip Iannaccone and Howard Jacob. “Rats!” Disease Models & Mechanisms 2 (1990), pp. 206–210.
15. Ben Guarino, “How Many Lab Mice Did American Researchers Kill in 2015?” Inverse, December 17,
2015
accessed March 3rd, 2017.
16. Jean De Vry, Ulrich Benz, Rudy Schreiber, and Jorg Traber, “Shock-induced ultrasonic vocalization
in young adult rats: a model for testing putative anti-anxiety drugs,” European Journal of Pharmacology
249 No. 3 (1993), pp. 331–339.
17. Jesse Bering, “Rats Laugh, but Not Like Humans.” Scientific American 307 No. 1 (2012).
18. Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf “‘Laughing’ rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?”
Physiology & Behavior 79 (2003), pp. 533–547.
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19. What Deleuze and Guattari call an “Oedipal” animal. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1987 [1980]), p. 260.
20. Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York:
Routledge, 1966).
21. Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2015) p. xvii.
22. See Moten [6], p. 1173.
23. See Deleuze and Guattari [19].
24. Richard Fay, Hearing in vertebrates: a psychophysics databook, (Winnetka: Hill-Fay Associates,
1988).
25. Brian Lee, “Rat Detector Project,”
26. Steven Feld, “From ethnomusicology to echo-muse-ecology,” The Soundscape Newsletter 8 (1994).
27. Bryan Pijanowski, Luis Villanueva-Rivera, Sarah Dumyahn, Almo Farina, Bernie Krause, Brian
Napoletano, Stuart Gage, and Nadia Pieretti, “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the
Landscape,” BioScience 61 No. 3 (2011), pp. 203–216.
28. Brian House, “Against Listening,” Contemporary Music Review 36 No. 3 (2017), pp. 159–170.
29. Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild
Places. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), p. 98.
30. See Krause [29], p. 61.
31. Bernard Stiegler, “Culture and Technology,” video filmed May 13, 2004 at Tate Museum, London.
32. This audio processing was accomplished using a combination of Audacity and Apple’s Logic Pro with
iZotope plugins.
33. Olivier Messiaen, Music and color: conversations with Claude Samuel, translated by E. Thomas
Glasow (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994 [1967]). p. 95.
34. Jana Winderen, who is well known for her pioneering work making ultrasonic recordings of many
animals, presented recordings of urban rats in Oslo later that same year. Additionally, the artist Kathy
High has an ongoing project recording the ultrasonic laughter of lab rats and playing it back to them as a
means of mitigating the stressful laboratory environment—an inspiration for my work.
35. To date, Urban Intonation has been shown at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, the Boulder
Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), and Eyebeam,
along with guerrilla installations on the streets of New York. The New York Times Magazine additionally
featured the work in a piece produced by Kara Oehler.
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Leonardo Just Accepted MS.
https://doi.org/10.1162/
© 2023 ISAST
leon_a_02448
House, Urban Intonation
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
36. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, translated by David Willis (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), p. 48.
37. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 20.
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