Sawt, Bodies, Species. Sonic Pluralism in Morocco.

In Sawt, Bodies, Species, Gilles Aubry offers an account on sound and listening in Morocco across a wide domain of activities, including musical and artistic expression, sound archives, urban planning, building techniques, seismology, healing practices, industrial extractivism, and ecology. Sawt in Arabic literally means sound and voice. Sound in Morocco thus intimately relates to the body; it never quite corresponds with its modern Western counterpart as a phenomenon separable from the other senses.
Sonic pluralism recapitulates Aubry's attempts to think sound and aurality together with modernity and (de-)coloniality. The transformative power of sonic pluralism is expressed in people's acts of listen- ing and sounding, aimed at questioning and shifting social conventions. On the level of ecology, sonic pluralism reveals extra-human agencies that mediate between people and their environment.
Drawing on critical Sound Studies, ethnographic research, and artistic practice, Aubry's dense descriptions are complemented by audiovisual essays created in collaboration with local musicians, artists, and scientists.