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Sensing, Sharing, and Listening to Musicking Animals across the Sonic Environments of Social Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

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Abstract

This article explores the strategies employed by user-creators as they listen to, sense, make, and share digital audiovisual memes of musicking non-human animals on social media. Memes, reels, and other forms of audiovisual social media posts are a form of cultural expression that reveals the varied ways humans relate to, connect with, and represent non-human animals – especially their pets – through sound, music, and the moving image. By listening to the plurality of musicking animals circulating on social media platforms and networks, I argue that user-creators conspicuously use music and performance to express alternative ideas of what it means to be musical, to feel closer to and connect with the important animals in their lives, and to explore the ways they can represent non-human animals using sound and music to explore musical concepts. Using a varied selection of viral musicking animal memes shared across social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, I frame musicking animal participatory media as a creative space for exploring different approaches to listening, performing with, and scoring sound and music to the behaviour, movement, and acoustic communication of the non-human animal. Non-human animal musicking takes a variety of forms across this particular kind of participatory media making by online user-creators.

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Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 19 , Special Issue 3: Listening In: Musical Digital Communities in Public and Private , October 2022 , pp. 369 - 392
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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