I listen to the recording of the frogs and begin to think about time. The sounds of the frogs belong to another time, one that has already passed but is, in a way, preserved within the recording. Yet how much do these frog sounds—captured by a field recorder, processed and compressed on a laptop, played back through headphones or speakers—have to do with the frog sounds at the volcanic lake on Pico? Are my listening experiences identical, since I am supposedly hearing the same sounds twice, at least for those few seconds when I was still near my recorder on Pico?

The ethnographer Stefan Hirschauer writes in his essay: Ethnographisches Schreiben und die Schweigsamkeit des Sozialen: (meaning: Ethnographic Writing and the Silence of the Social:) „Die Entscheidende Leistung der Aufzeichnung besteht […] in einer Dekontextualisierung“. (“The decisive achievement of recording consists […] in a decontextualization.”) Listening again to the recording brings with it new thoughts, which can step out of the frame of the recording time and take seemingly endless time in their repetition. At the same time, listening and sound are torn from their context: from a social situation, a geography, a sound source (the frogs), and a history inscribed in the environment. A recording is therefore not neutral, nor is it a mere copy of the original.

Our guide Antonio tells me that the Azores have always struggled with invasive species. We often stop at the roadside, and he explains which plants are non-endemic and pose a problem for others. Signs reading “Zona de desratização” (rat extermination zone) are everywhere. Rats, a non-endemic species on the Azores, arrived centuries ago with human settlers from the mainland and are now considered a plague.

Hirschauer writes: “What in the temporality of seconds appears as an exact preservation of sequence looks, in the time of biographical or historical processes, like a snapshot that abruptly freezes something in constant motion.” Listening to the recording draws me closer to what I heard, but at the same time distances me with every new thought. My thoughts turn to a memory of our guide. He tells me that the Azores were officially settled by the Portuguese in the 15th century. However, traces of non-endemic trees in sediments, dated to the 8th–9th century, suggest that they were brought by Vikings from Norway, who may have inhabited the Azores before the Portuguese. Donna Haraway writes in Companion Species: “Never purely themselves, things are compound; they are made up of combinations of other things coordinated to magnify power, to make something happen, to engage the world, to risk fleshly acts of interpretation.” Thus the recording and the field recorder are not only themselves. They exist within constellations of material, technology, and decisions. Residues of the landscapes—the sources of the sonic utterances, such as the frogs—can be found within the microphones, within their very construction and design. Neither are the inhabitants—whether the first, the second, or the last— solely themselves. With them came other critters, cooperations, collaborations, and competitions. (Or: the critters brought with them other human critters.) The human being—the Western, male, colonial-benefitting human—imposes power relations on these intra- and inter-actions, placing himself at the top of the hierarchy while conveniently ignoring his dependency, co-construction, and entanglement.

About three quarters of an hour’s drive from the volcanic lake with the frogs, we stop at a cliff and look out over the Atlantic. António puts his finger to his ear and signals for me to listen. “The rocks are rolling” he says. Roughly every seventh wave is stronger than the ones before and audibly stirs the lava stones along the shore he tells us. A few steps further we arrive at an old harbor, no longer in use. Whaling ships once docked here, as did larger ships such as those of the Portuguese in the 15th century. Some time later, back in Germany, I read that the Azores were an important stopover for slave ships. On their route from West Africa—Luanda, for example—to Rio de Janeiro, the ships halted at the Azores to load goods but also to sell slaves.

Listening to the recordings means listening to ecological, political, and technical histories. It means listening to relationships.

I make many more recordings during the eight days on Pico. One evening I sit alone by the sea and hear live music in the distance. A choir is singing the revolution song "Grândola, Vila Morena". It is a holiday in Portugal —the Day of the Carnation Revolution. A direct consequence of the Carnation Revolution was the end of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. The music mingles with car sounds, the distinctive calls of Cory’s shearwaters, and the waves of the Atlantic.  I think of Christina Sharpes Book „In the Wake".

The quotes by gender studies scholar Eva Hayward make me reflect on how nonhuman animals are represented in field recordings of nonhumans. To what extent do they influence their own representation, where and how does the human cause harm in representations, and how might recordings sound that do justice to a more equitable form of representation? How must our listening change? What inscriptions, human and nonhuman, are carried within field recorders and microphones? What does the image, the recording, and my descriptions of the Iberian frog actually say about the frog?
Together with various underwater recordings, I would like to think through some of these questions.

The first recording (1) is from the Atlantic Ocean, more precisely from a natural swimming pool in Lajes do Pico. It was the first time I dropped the hydrophones into the sea, the first time I heard the Atlantic Ocean underwater. I was surprised by the sounds I encountered. Snapping, a dynamic crackling, water splashing, dripping and dropping and slurping. What exactly I was hearing I could not say. In later research, and by comparing with other underwater recordings, I found that most of the sounds stemmed from underwater creatures. The loud popping probably came from snapping shrimps, the crackling from crabs, shrimps, and other shellfish. Just a few meters away in a small pool, maybe 3 meters wide and no deeper than 50 cm, I heard completely new sounds. (Recording 2) I saw that the pool contained many small fish and some shrimp. To me it sounded like a continuous murmuring.
I ask myself whether the animals, the shrimps, the prawns, and the fish actually sound like that, or to what extent the hydrophones, field recorder, computer, and loudspeakers transform their vocalizations into information perceptible to my senses. Do the critters hear each other and themselves the way I hear them?

I want to avoid assuming that I record the sounds as “truthful.” Following Eva Hayward’s statement that “impressions are also traces of indigestible beings that feed on signifying practices, populating meaning with multiple kinds of matter,” I want to ask where the boundaries of understanding lie and what consequences, on the one hand, come with transgressing these boundaries, and on the other, what possibilities might emerge from recognizing the boundaries of these indigestible encounters between two critters.

With the help of software such as Izotope RX, I can isolate specific sounds, filtering out supposed noise, in order to achieve the “purest” recordings possible. For example, I can remove all the sounds in the original recording of the small fish and shrimp that I don't want to hear, such as the humming noise or the conversations I had with other participants, which were also picked up by the hydrophone. The spectrograms show the results of such interventions. I don’t want to say that this constitutes a transgression of boundaries—it can certainly be useful to isolate voices in order to investigate specific characteristics. But what does such a recording represent? Perhaps it is precisely interesting to hear my own and the other human voices to regard this as a place of encounter? Perhaps that would be a step toward a meeting in the contact zone, as Haraway uses the term (borrowed from professor of Portuguese and Spanish literature Mary Louise Pratt) in her book Companion species manifesto:
“To knot companion and species together in encounter, in regard and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with, where who and what are is precisely what is at stake.”

Ich frage mich also, wie ich mich an (fehlende, hinzukommende, leisere, lautere, über die Zeit vereinzelte, oder zunehmende, ausgestorbene) Vogelrufe, Insektenlaute, Stimmen von Säugetieren, Amphibien und allen hörbaren und nicht hörbaren mehr-als-menschliche Kritter erinnern kann, welche in der Zeit verloren gegangen, von den horrenden Auswirkungen des Kapitalismus ausgelöscht und von m/einer Aufmerksamkeit nicht eingefangen wurden. Wie können sie Präsenz finden? Ausgehend von den Überlegungen über den iberischen Frosch, dass Tonäußerungen, Lebewesen und Materialien immer in einer Historizität situiert zu hören und zu verstehen sind, möchte ich in diesem Beispiel erkennen, wie ein Zuhören, wie ich es in dieser Arbeit umfasse, zu einer (lückenfüllenden) Praxis des World-Building, wie Haraway sie formuliert übergehen kann. Die Gefahren einer vorschnellen Manifestation einer Repräsentation von Krittern, der Kategorisierung von Realität und das Ignorieren von Machtdynamiken, wie ich sie im vorherigen Kapitel beschrieben habe, möchte ich hier präsent halten, um mein Ohr einer kritischen Praxis zuzuwenden und auch kritisch der Musik zu lauschen.  Ich denke hier an Saidiya Hartmans entwickelten Begriff Critical Fabulation.
Ich möchte behaupten in den Field Recording Kompositionen und den Musiken spielen Begegnungen eine zentrale Rolle. Spekulative Begegnungen so wie reale. Verschiedene Akteur*innen, Mikrofone, Menschen Software, Tiere, Stimmen, Musik, Kommunikation… stehen in Kontakt miteinander.  Die FR, die Musiken, die Lebewesen und Stimmen, die Technik, ich als Musiker, oder Field Recordist bringen Verbindungen hervor die, so meine These, Raum schaffen um die performative Kraft von relevanten Fragestellungen zu entfalten.
Unterstützen sollen mich bei dieser These unter Anderem die Gedanken der Wissenschaftsphilosophin und wichtige Vertreterin der Animal Studies Vinciane Desprets die sie in ihrem Buch „Our Grateful Dead - Stories of those left behind“ formulierte. Dort schreibt sie, Dinge müssen in die Existenz eingeführt werden. Das heißt sie werden nicht aus dem nichts geholt, geschaffen, sondern sie existieren bereits, werden aber in unsere Existenz eingeführt. (Vgl. S. 7-13) So auch die Beziehung zu unseren Toten (menschlich und nicht-menschlich). Ein zentraler Punkt ist somit, in welcher Art von Umgebung, in welches Milieu diese Existenzen eingeführt werden. Nehmen wir die Stimmen der Toten, der ausgestorbenen Tiere, die Vogelrufe die ich nie hörte und nicht mehr hören werde, die Insekten, die nicht länger in meiner Umgebung, meinem Milieu überleben konnten und in freundlichere Milieus weiterziehen mussten, dort zurückgedrängt wurden. Welche Eigenschaften muss ein Milieu haben, welche ein Einführen der Existenzen, welche (aus)gestorben, verdrängt und zum verstummen gebracht wurden, fördert? Oder auch: Welche Eigenschaften eines Milieus erschweren die Chancen auf das Einführen dieser Existenzen? Mein Ziel ist weniger Antworten auf die Fragen zu finden, als ihre performative Wirkung entfalten zu lassen. Genauso wenig kann oder möchte ich Antwort auf die Fragen finden: Wie kann mensch sich an tote, ausgestorbene Wesen erinnern, sie präsent machen, ihre Präsenz fühlbar machen? Wie hören sich die Stimmen der Ausgestorbenen, Ungehörten an? 
Vielmehr sollen die Fragen als das was sie sind, als etwas nicht vollends lösbares verstanden werden, welche jedoch Raum für Geschichten, Spekulation und kritische Fabulation öffnen. Raum in dem Platz ist für die Fragen und die Wesen die sie betreffen.