What does the River know?

Metamorphosis

What does the River see? One thousand blinking eyes, lachrymal riverbed, refracted retinal sunlight. What does the River hear? Helical currents drumming on alluvial membranes, sound and water in cochlear motion. What does the River touch? Stretching delta, arms diverging, saturated skin of the earth.

We need only listen to the River for a short duration for a shallow—preliminary—understanding of its intelligence. We need only dip a toe into its water-world to feel tides of similarity, that familiar pull of recognition: we are like the River and the River is like us. The senses which form the bedrock for our musical bodies mean something to the River, too, albeit in a way that requires us to think outside of our established perceptual frames of reference. How can we participate in River-music, know the River-as-musician, and feel riverine creativity? In June, the Time to Listen Conference invites musicians and sound artists from around the world to consider multispecies creativity and more-than-human perception. It is part of the Spreeklänge (25–28 June), a festival of contemporary music along the Spree River organised by the Akademie der Künste. The River will host us, this sprawling body, the lifeblood for creative symbiosis, a wash of imagination born from fluid interdependencies. This article asks more questions than it provides answers, so as not to pre-empt the River’s responses as they might arrive in June: How can we become compassionate participants in multispecies worlds? How can we extend our awareness beyond our species boundaries—through those shadowlands of difference and towards the non-human in an act of radical perceptive metamorphosis? In the context of deepening environmental crisis, it’s an artist’s prerogative to believe this metamorphosis is possible. We can practice optimism in the knowledge that our human bodies are porous, and that we are implicated within environments that writhe and churn, from which chimeric subjects are made. We are endlessly enfolded within each other, and it is from this generative vantage point that the artist can come to know the River.

Immersion

The term ›more-than-human‹ was coined by David Abram in 1996 as a means of expressing not only the indeterminate possibility of non-human relationality, but also the abundance of what it means to be human in a multispecies world.[1] We overflow. Especially in creative contexts, the apparent rigidity of our species limit is not only arbitrary, but unproductive, as Anna Tsing notes (perhaps here echoing the cyborg philosophy of Donna Haraway[2]): »Consider the narrowing of the scope of analysis here: everything humans know and do is human. This tautology is hardly sufficient for understanding anything. It defines ›human‹ as a limit, not an open-ended quest; it denies the transformative power of training, intimacy, experience, or prosthetics. It makes learning a joke, since we have established our encapsulation before asking a question«.[3]

What is music if not training, intimacy, experience, and prosthetics? What is music if not an art of dedication, an act of extending oneself towards the other via the prosthetics of sound?

The concept of immersion offers a way for humans (artists and musicians alike) to engage with more-than-human worlds through our overflowing, myriad senses. Thom van Dooren is a proponent of »passionate immersion« as a way of understanding the priorities of non-humans, as applied in his research into the life-worlds of snails, and modes of multispecies storytelling: »Immersive ways of knowing and being with others involves careful attention to what matters to them—attention to how they craft shared lives and worlds… In short, passionate immersion means becoming curious and so entangled, learning to be affected, and so perhaps to understand and care a little differently«.[4] The most crucial aspect of this quote is »what matters to them« as an expression of care, pivoting away from anthropocentric understandings of self-determination.

Moving beyond the realm of metaphor, writer Melody Jue describes immersion in her scuba-diving practice, noting the way her body is reoriented towards alternative (watery) ways of knowing the world: »If you decide to descend under the surface, you too will discover the ways that you notice, and how what you notice takes the form of an embodied memory, and how this memory returns to you in a dream-like way after you surface to do your creative work at desks and studios, a little bit more amphibious«.[5] In lieu of literally descending beneath the surface of the Spree, the artists involved in Spreeklänge will practice a kind of creative amphibiousness—that which configures musical bodies across multispecies worlds.

Testimony

A question is missing from the introduction—how does the River speak? Tidal diaphragm, gush of breath, effusive streams vibrate sinewy reeds. Agency is often synonymous with voice, an especially useful term in the context of projects engaging with sound and music media. How do non-humans voice what matters to them?

Here, an important ethical distinction emerges between speaking for and speaking with in arts practice, even becoming a vessel for the more-than-human voice: »[Creative] practice [is] a process of allowing an environment to work through you instead of engaging it as a body you must speak for« (Polly Stanton, 2022).[6] Artists must be ready for the possibility that our non-human collaborators express stress or tension, a sorrowful product of environmental neglect in the context of late-stage capitalism and ongoing colonialism. Indeed, the Spree was once so polluted that its pulse was weakened to the point where the water flowed backwards. The question then arises as to how to be responsible caretakers; how to enfold practices of care within our creative processes. Haraway encourages us to »stay with the trouble«,[7] linger in the productive tensions revealed by passionate immersion. In an explicitly sonic context, Mark Peter Wright asks us to orient towards uncertainty in listening: »This is not a time for symphonic transpositions. It is a time to destabilize listening, a time to linger in the knowing anxiety that all is not quite right«.[8] It is the critical imperative of the artist to stand witness to anthropogenic devastation. The artist may well be reminded, however, that the entangled nature of their practice means that there are countless other witnesses to the same devastation: »If something is deemed an agential subject, by proxy it is also a witness and can give testimony to events… Nature, therefore, witnesses, and ›speaks back‹« (Susan Schuppli, 2020 9 as cited in Wright, 2022). Justice wells up from testimony, and we are in dire need of creative ways to facilitate and listen to the testimonies of the more-than-human. Music has a long history of entanglement with justice in human social settings; let this entanglement spill over to climate justice. How can music help us understand what justice means to the River?

Confluence

The confluence of multispecies conversations at the upcoming Spreeklänge festival and Time to Listen conference might go some way towards answering the questions posed in this article. Let us make time to listen to, see, and feel the more-than-human; let us be attentive to these myriad voices as they rise up in our music; let our voices be their voices as we flow through each another. This short article presents a handful of creative methodologies for compassionate relations with the more-than-human—I encourage the reader to attend Spreeklänge and Time to Listen to experience how artists transform these principles in their work.

What does the River know? Extend yourself to the River Spree, and find an infinite, generative knowledge in its meandering body.

Acknowledgements: This article was written with/in Gadigal Land—a place of multispecies abundance. My writing companions include garraway (sulphur crested cockatoo), garmit (black cockatoo), and warin (rainbow lorikeet). More reclusively, there is wallaru (wallaby) and malya (diamond python). I pay my respects to Gadigal and Dharug elders who continue to care for Country, and I recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.

Kate Milligan is an Australian composer and designer based between Amsterdam and Sydney. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary research, exploring themes of temporality, ecology, and more-than-human creativity. She is an ARC Laureate PhD Candidate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

1 Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage Books Editions, a division on Penguin Random House LLC.
2 Haraway, D. (1987). A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Australian Feminist Studies, 2 (4), 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538
3 Tsing, A. (2019). When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking »The Material«. In Harvey, P., Krohn-Hansen, C., and Nustad, K. G. (Eds.), Anthropos and the Material (pp. 221–244). Duke University Press.
4 van Dooren, T. (2025, June 18-20). Paying Attention to Earth Others: Multispecies Storytelling, Snail Stories [Conference Panel Presentation]. Multispecies Justice Symposium: Including the More-Than-Human in Decision-Making, Sydney, Australia.
5 Jue, M. (2022). Scuba Diving Praxis: A Field Guide for Underwater Orientation. In Crone, B., Nightingale, S., & Stanton, P. (Eds.), Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research (pp. 443-472). Onomatopee Projects.
6 Stanton, P. (2022). Indefinite Terrains: Fieldwork as Making-With. In Crone, B., Nightingale, S., & Stanton, P. (Eds.), Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research (pp. 93-116). Onomatopee Projects.
7 Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q
8 Wright, M. P. (2022). Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. Bloomsbury Publishing.
9 Schuppli, S. (2020). Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. MIT Press.