Noisy Listening: Climate Change as Vibratory Milieu

“Noisy listening” explores resonances between sound and climate change by listening to and thinking with noise, being in noise as conditions shift more or less dramatically, taking form and becoming palpable or legible, or remaining indeterminate. Noise as a way of knowing is at once phenomenal and epistemological, its materio-semiotic status providing an opening for conceptualizing climate change as a vibratory milieu. I develop a reading of the concept of milieu as participatory, supporting an understanding of anthropogenic climate change as immanent rather than external to sensing subjects. This reading is sustained through a discussion of ways in which noise resonates with key aspects of climate change: as atmospheric or generalizable, as emergent, and as uncertain. While vibration provides a starting point for understanding sound as immanent, the article treats noise as capacious. Its forms, definitions, and operations emerge across a range of cases, writings, artworks, and musical compositions as low-frequency sound, noise pollution, loudness, the uncertainty of unknowability, and a capacity to rework existing logics from within.