Abstract

Because of its temporal and vibrational qualities, sound is a particularly useful rhetorical resource for communicating our currently volatile experiences of climate change and extinction. A critical sonic rhetoric moves us from a disembodied marketplace of ideas to an immersive, interdependent soundscape. This move is exemplified in the work of sound artists Susan Philipsz and Bernie Krause, which provides experiences of surface time (sounds arising and decaying) and what climate change scholars call “deep time” (species coming and going from the earth), along with the affective dimensions of nostalgia and grief that saturate these experiences with individual and cultural meaning.