In my recent work, I have been working with hydrophes under water, listening to what we cannot always hear, and to what resists being heard.

What began as an attempt to record whale songs in northern Iceland became something else entirely: a study in how to listen without taking. My hydrophones, lowered into the fjord, didn’t reveal the voices of whales but the density of human noise: ferries, fishing boats, engines reverberating through the body of the sea. At first, this felt like failure. Then it became a teacher.

Over time, I began to understand that listening itself can be extractive. Scientific, artistic, and psychiatric forms of listening often mirror the same colonial gesture: gathering sound, story, or data in order to prove something. They turn other beings’ voices into evidence. But what if listening could refuse that hunger for possession?

Non-extractive listening, for me, is a posture rather than a method. It begins where control ends. It is a commitment to relation over resource, attention over capture. To listen in this way is to share the labour of awareness with the world, to let sound remain partly opaque, unowned, and alive.

In my process, this practice takes several forms:

1. Listening with the body. I adapt to my hearing loss and sensory sensitivities, letting my body’s rhythms determine when and how I listen. Physical limitation becomes part of the method, not an obstacle to it.
2. Accepting interference. The hum of engines, the clatter of waves, the intrusion of human sound are no longer disruptions but part of the conversation. Every interference tells a story about coexistence.
3. Attending without claiming. I resist the urge to translate sound into evidence. Instead, I hold it as a trace, a shimmer of relation that cannot be owned.
4. Listening with empathy. To stay with the discomfort of what I hear, the sonic violence of our presence in the sea, is to witness rather than to fix.

Through these gestures, non-extractive listening becomes an ethics of attention. It invites tenderness over mastery, presence over possession. It asks what it means to listen with rather than to, to be changed by what one hears without needing to control or define it.

This approach continues to shape my sound work and writing. It reminds me that listening, at its deepest, is a relational act, one that can hold noise, grief, and silence without making them clean. In that sense, I no longer listen for whales alone. I listen for the sea itself, and for the possibility of hearing without owning what is heard.

Related Concepts

Posthuman Listening & Sonic Relationality
Scholars such as Salomé Voegelin and Jonathan Sterne have expanded listening beyond human-centered frameworks, exploring how sound reveals entanglements between bodies, environments, and technologies. Posthuman listening recognises that we are always already part of the soundscape, listeners and noise-makers at once.

Decolonial and Non-Extractive Methodologies
Decolonial scholars and artists (for example, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) critique research practices rooted in extraction and control. Non-extractive methods centre reciprocity, consent, and relational accountability. Listening through this lens becomes a form of care work, an attunement to power, access, and the right to opacity.

Acoustic Ecology & Sonic Ethics
The field of acoustic ecology (R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp) examines the relationships between living beings and their sonic environments. A sonic ethics builds on this lineage by foregrounding listening as a moral and ecological practice, a way of acknowledging harm, interdependence, and responsibility through sound.

Embodied Perception & Disability Aesthetics
Artists and theorists working with disability studies (for example, Petra Kuppers, 2014) reveal how embodied difference transforms perception. My own approach to non-extractive listening emerges from lived experience with hearing loss and hyperacusis, a reminder that every act of listening is situated, sensory, and contingent.

Feminist Ethics of Care
Feminist frameworks, especially those of Joan Tronto and Carol Gilligan, offer an ethics grounded in interdependence and care. In this context, listening becomes a relational act of care rather than mastery, a practice of being-with, not knowing-about.