Listening to climate change: sound, imagination and environmental sociology

Across different disciplines, there is a burgeoning interest in sound and what it can reveal. This interest, however, has yet to carry over to environmental sociology. The originality of this interdisciplinary article lies in addressing this gap, through a specific focus on some of the myriad connections between sound and climate change. While there are many scientific studies analysing how the effects of climate change can be measured acoustically, these often fail to capture the relational significance of sound – and the potential that it offers to build new relationships with more-than-human worlds, or to thicken and deepen existing ones. The article foregrounds this relational thematic in two ways. First, it discusses some examples of sound art, to accentuate the power of sound to immerse us in other lifeworlds and to stimulate new listening practices. Second, it examines some of the impacts that climate change is having on baleen whale song, to emphasise the utility of sound as a novel way of bridging simplistic culture/nature binaries. Ultimately, it argues that researching with sound and listening to more-than-human worlds can foster new relational, embodied and multisensory ways of being and knowing, thereby enriching our sociological imaginations in the fight against climate change.