Relational Sonicality

The sound of the extraction process at the lignite mine Welzow Süd is thunderous and earth shattering. Custom-made bucket-wheel excavators – looking like gigantic iron monsters with shovels the size of a car – bite through the geologic layers, seeking for the combustible material. The monsters’ tails transect entire landscapes transporting the extracted material on humming, hissing and howling conveyor belts to train carriages that move the freight to the nearby power plant Schwarze Pumpe. The site is unfathomably huge. I feel as small as an ant. The machines seem to segregate and organize every geological layer anew, I feel confused and disoriented. But the sheer dimension of the pit and the layered, constant booms from digging and other extraction processes at different locations within the pit are disorienting, too.

After lunch we find ourselves at the former airport of Welzow. Before entering the site we get instructed not to touch anything and that people with pacemakers should stay away from the transformer due to the immense electromagnetic radiation which is emitted by the facility. Curious about the radiation, I entered the site with my sound recorder, carrying with me not only condenser microphones, but also two coils which are capable of transforming electromagnetic fields into sound. We encounter strictly ordered rows of scaffolds holding stripes of solar power panels. The panels form a strip that stretches along the airport runway to the horizon. As a sonic reference to the immense dimension of the power plant, I deliberately record my footsteps, which mostly touch concrete ground, but sometimes tufts of grass. The sound quality of an environment is deemed satisfactory when you can hear both your footsteps and distant sounds clearly.¹ At first glance, what we encounter strongly contrasts with the experience I had at the mine. We are even able to hear birds and insects close-by in the grass. From afar woodpeckers are calling in the woods. Even the rustling sound of the wind in the trees and the grass can be perceived by the ear. My footsteps and the surrounding nature, my moving clothes, some handling noise and distant voices from our workshop group can also be heard. I acivate the channels of the coils and suddenly the most present and dominant sound is the static one of the electromagnetic radiation of the power generating solar panels. Walking besides the panels I crossed 37 rows.

On the 08:49 long recording, the magnetic fields of each row can be heard by short interruptions of the drone sound. By listening, recording and making electromagnetic emissions audible, I have tried to connect to the site of energy production by foregrounding the sonic experience of it.

In 1966 and as a way of giving aesthetic credence to environmental sound, former percussionist and sound artist Max Newhaus invited a handful of friends to join him for a walk through Manhattan, only by listening. Through this act, he and other sound artists, musicians, and researchers asked: What knowledge can be gained about a place and what kind of connection is enabled by foregrounding listening? With such questions in mind, I explored the two places in Lusatia.

The energy transition, I argue, will shift the spectrum of sonic emissions of power extraction to the range of infra- and ultrasound.² I base this observation on multiple field visits to energy infrastructures, not just in Lusatia but across Europe.³ Moreover, it will reach even further beyond the borders of the audible, creating new spaces of electromagnetic contamination. One could speculate that the green energy transition and the infrastructures it generates produce side-effects that aren’t graspable within our range of hearing or our sensory capabilities. This means that we have to listen even more carefully than before and that we also need to consider the effects of green energy transitions that are out of hearing and even out of our perceptual range. There will be a need for specific tools to render these infrastructuring processes and future energy-territories tangible. What is more, the production of photocoltaic panels will also create audible effects on the other side of the planet, e.g. through silicon mining in China, Russia or Brazil which most likely produce sound environments similar to the one we experienced in Welzow Süd.

1. Raymund Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world, 1994, p. 212f. ↩︎
2. André D. Thess / Philipp Lengsfeld, Side Effects of wind Energy: Review of Three Topics – Status and Open Questions, Sustainability, 2022 ↩︎
3. http://christophbruenggel.com/72-Music/79-TurbulentCurrents ↩︎