Tuning Species: Gibbon Conservation and the Acoustemological Politics of Vitality

Abstract At the Gibbon Conservation Center—a nonprofit facility in Southern California dedicated to caring for endangered primates that produce complex and coordinated vocalizations—sound, as both a material and a metaphor, disciplines the conceptualization and implementation of a breeding program intended to stabilize the genetic diversity of the captive animal population. Understanding this program of compulsory reproductive biopolitics to be a project of “tuning species,” this article argues that gibbon conservation's constitutive elision of sonic and genetic processes results in an entirely new configuration of biopower derived from a theory of vitality based on the possibility of achieving perpetual replication rather than persisting against contamination or decay. A project of preservation that is nevertheless ontologically, socially, and sonically productive, the auditory labor of fixing a biological species in time and place implicates both gibbons and their human caretakers together in relations of intense vulnerability and multispecies intimacy that challenge the received terms of endangered species conservation.