Become Rat
Some of the most widely-held sentiments toward NYC rats include disgust, fear, aversion, and horror. But how could these associations be challenged if we momentarily see or hear things from their perspective? How might our relationships to rats change in light of their ability to communicate and speak to one another?
For his project, Urban Intonation, Brian House (sound artist and Professor of Art at Amherst College) recorded rats on the streets of NYC using an ultrasonic microphone. He then pitch-shifted those recordings into the range of human hearing, capturing the uncanny speech-like sounds of rat communication.
In this episode, “Become Rat,” House tells a story about ultrasonic soundscapes, Urban Intonation, and the ecological relationships between humans and the Norwegian Brown Rat in New York City. All proceeds from this episode will be donated to Word Up Community Bookshop, a multilingual and collectively owned bookshop and arts space in Washington Heights.
Further Resources
New York City's Wonder, Gal Nissim
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[All the voices from Season One of The Sonocene begin to overlap and blend together in a single, collective gesture.]
Listen.
Listen to my voice.
To spoken words and ambient sounds.
[High-pitched groans, followed by the sound of feet stomping against concrete and a forest soundscape, fade into your foreground. A subway car rattles and pedestrians shuffle along the sidewalk. These sounds begin to overlap and cycle, each assuming your foreground at different moments.]
Together they tell the story about people and place; about plants and animals; about the ecological relationships within New York City during a time of rapid change. And the way they all resonate as an interwoven network of vibrations.
[Voices and sounds crescendo, and then hard cut to silence. All the storytellers from Season One exclaim in unison:]
Welcome to The Sonocene—
[The voice of “Become Rat” episode storyteller, Brian House, replies.]
ecological stories told through sound.
[The wheels of a cart rattle against the cracks of street and sidewalk. People’s voices carry overhead. Steam issues from vents nearby. Cars drive close. Metal “clinks” as someone steps on a sewer grate. This is a soundscape from Times Square. You’re listening from ground level.]
[00:59] What is the soundscape of New York City? But not just soundscape in the sense of landscape or like background. What are the actual kinds of ecological relationships that we have in this place where I live? Who am I entangled with living in this city as I'm walking down the street? We have a complicated and symbiotic or parasitic or exploitative relationship with other creatures.
[1:42] In this case, we have the rat.
[A rat” squeaks” with a high-pitched intensity.]
And the rat is iconic on so many levels. You know, the rat kind of burrows its way throughout human culture.
[Different New York City residents share their thoughts about rats. This montage transitions between New York City residents and the episode storyteller, Brian House. A Washington Square Park soundscape can be heard in the background, providing a context from where residents are speaking. And this soundscape add an additional layer to the Times Square soundscape (still present, but sounding in the background).]
Big as fuck.
In the streets I'd rather not go near them.
I'm scared to death of them!
...disease infested.
[1:59] In New York we associate rats with trash. We associate them with the subway.
[An arriving Q train slowly grinds to a stop.]
Maybe it runs over your foot when it's running from trash bag to trash bag.
Sometimes I get spooked when they scurry across my feet when I'm walking.
Maybe it steals a piece of pizza and that becomes a meme online.
What I thought was a piece of squished pizza was actually a rat that had been runover and had its guts explode.
[2:23] It's gross. It does something with our expectations of how things should be. Well, you know, okay, there shouldn't be this animal right there invading our space in this way. Those are the kind of associations that there's an infestation. That it's vermin.
We think they're vermin who are disgusting...
That it's coming for us. That it's compromising in some way.
It really seems like rats run the city and not the humans.
[2:47] It's also an animal living on its own terms within the city and is, you know, partly responsible for making the city what it is.
We could probably learn from them. That's probably the irony.
Rats are living creatures just like humans, enjoying the crap that we don't.
Domesticated they're very intelligent, very smart, and very cute.
If I really meet one and I get to know them from the inside, I probably would sympathize maybe even empathize with one.
[3:16] What is it to become rat a little bit? What is it to what is it? To hear things from their perspectives? Does that do something for us in considering what it is that the city actually is?
[3:30] Today's storyteller is...
Brian House. I'm a sound artist and a professor of art at Amherst College.
[The soundscapes from Times Square and Washington Square Park fade to silence, as traffic and pedestrian noise from the corner of Lafayette and Broadway enter your foreground. You can distinctly hear the shuffling of footwear against the sidewalk, which pans from left to right. You’re still listening from groundlevel.]
[3:48] Every City Hall likes to declare its war on rats. I mean, this goes back decades where there's this idea that we're going to eradicate rats from New York City. And I think that approach, you know, whether it's the “Rat Czar” or “The War on Rats” or, you know, whether it's control of populations or extermination. This kind of language, it makes it about the rat. It makes it sound like it's the rats fault. The presence of rats in a neighborhood indicates that there are other structural issues going on. There's not the attention paid by City Services that probably there should be. There's human issues going on. And I think City Hall likes to make it about the rat because that's easier to solve. Well, of course, it will never be solved. But it's avoidance from maybe solving some of these other more fundamental issues with poverty that should be addressed.
[The soundscape from Lafayette and Broadway fade to silence, as an evening soundscape from Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, enters your foreground. Birds chirp. Cricket lull. The forest canopy sings.]
[4:54] And as for the arrival of the rat: the Brown Rat is not the same as the Black Rat that was involved in the plague in Europe. The Brown Rat actually is indigenous to Central Asia, but at a certain point that rat figured out that human trade routes were good places to find food. The rat had this idea of like, okay, let's tag along with humans and see what happens.
[The Himalayan soundscape fades to silence as the sound of waves crashing upon a beach enters your foreground. Ocean meets land at the Coney Island beach. Waves continue to rhythmically rise and fall, rise and fall.]
[5:25] And so the trade routes along the Silk Road is what originally brought the Brown Rat all throughout Central Asia and into Europe. And then, of course, it was the ships leaving from Europe that then spread it across all the colonial enterprises throughout the world to those port cities and to those urban areas. So the arrival of the Brown Rat in New York, you know, has everything to do with New York being a port of trade. From the earliest then associations of rats hanging out with humans—rats have always been capitalists, I think—it's been about trade and exchange. What is our relationship to that rat and are there an acoustics to that? Could I think of that relationship through sound or could I record that relationship somehow?
[The sounds of ocean waves fades to silence, as a strident vocal tone enters your foreground. It seems like a novel sound, and yet, uncannily similar to song or speech. This sound soon fades to silence.]
[6:29] Sound is not on the electromagnetic spectrum, right? Sound isn't a thing…
[A sine wave briefly sounds in rhythmic unison with the storyteller’s voice.]
in and of itself. It's vibrations in air…
[A lower-pitched sine wave slowly bends and alternates frequency.]
…in a space. We can hear a certain frequency range of those vibrations,
[The frequency alterations increase rate, and then move with a glissando effect from a lower pitch to a higher pitch. Once again, this gesture is rhythmically-aligned with the storyteller’s description of “20 times a second, up to 20,000 times a second.” Once the glissando reaches its highest pitch, it abruptly returns to the slow undulations of the original low-frequency sine wave.]
classically from 20 hertz up to 20 kilohertz. So that's vibrations at 20 times a second, up to 20,000 times a second.
[6:57] That has to do just with the human apparatus for hearing. And of course, different people hear different amounts or not at all, depending on your body's facility. So we have these terms infrasonic and ultrasonic, which are anthropocentric terms.
[Extremely low and high frequencies sound out as the storyteller states “lower than we can hear” and “above what we can hear.”]
Infrasonic just means sound lower than we can hear and ultrasonic is sound above what we can hear.
[7:22] Rats have a different range of hearing. Somewhere in the hundreds of hertz is their lower range of hearing. And then it goes up to nearly a hundred kilohertz. That's a much wider range than us, particularly in the higher registers.
[The oscillating sine wave fades to silence as the original Times Square soundscape returns. People talk. Cars “honk” and idle. Feet shuffle in the hustle and bustle of the city.]
[7:40] Now, microphones, of course, have been made with human hearing in mind. So most microphones throughout the history of recording are really optimized for frequency ranges around the human voice. So an ultrasonic mike is something that's been designed to be able to go above that. What I needed to make recordings of rats was something that was, first of all, portable, something that can record for a long period of time, because I wanted to let this out for, you know, whether it's 24 hours or 48 hours. I'm not going to chase around a rat with a microphone. I want to hear them talking to themselves when I'm not around. What I ended up doing was putting together a small computer, a Raspberry Pi Computer is what they're called, together with a battery pack. And that managed the recording and recorded the audio onto an SD card. In order to leave those electronics out, I put it all in a rat trap. Those little black boxes that you see everywhere all the time. And that's infrastructure that we ignore because we don't want to know what's going on there, you know, whether it's poison or rat carcass or, you know, something disgusting. Just like all things rat, that's something we'd rather not pay conscious attention to. It's part of that kind of subliminal infrastructure of the city. So the rats didn't care so much. It was more about keeping it away from the humans.
[9:13] So I would put all this recording equipment into a rat trap and then leave it out. And the rats would come out and have their conversations and then that would be recorded onto the computer. I would then come and collect that hardware. I had to learn what do rat vocalizations look like when you visualize the audio signal in a way that you can see the shapes of the frequencies and the amplitude envelopes. Then I would take that signal, pitch it down so that then I could listen to it. The material that I'm working with is the recording from the street, but now a way that we can hear it in some approximation of how of how the rat does. What is it to become rat a little bit. What is it to? What is it to hear things from their perspective? Does that do something for us in considering what it is that the city actually is?
[The Times Square soundscape fades to silence as a the previous song/speech-like sound returns. You begin to realize that these must be recordings of rats. The noises are multi-layered, complex, and not unlike the sounds that humans can make. Some of the tones are short and rhythmic, others are very lengthy and drawn out.]
[10:47] You're hearing audio, which is from the project called Urban Intonation. And for this work I recorded rats at multiple sites on the streets of New York City with an ultrasonic microphone. And then resampled and pitch shifted those recordings into the range of the human voice and mixed it for playback over a human public address system. And that makes rat noise in public space, something that's suddenly recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech.
[The recordings from Urban Intonation continue to sound.]
[11:36] You know, what are the rats saying to each other? Are these merely vocalizations, or can we call this speech? And I mean, I think I like leaving that as a question. To me, listening to them it's very complex. It's sophisticated. It's talking about life in New York City. It's talking about experience and aspiration and desire and feeling and all of these things that we're talking about in New York City as well. And of course, one of the really striking things with rats is that they laugh. So something that we hear in the audio is rat laughter.
[The unmistakable sound of airy, rhythmic laughter plays from the recording.]
[12:16] These sounds are something that are not all that foreign to the sounds that I can make. You know, that kind of resonance, I think, is very powerful. This is like one of the hallmarks of human intelligence or one of the things we pride ourselves on is that, okay, we're the speaking animal, and other animals do not. That's maybe a little bit more of a continuum than than a binary. All animals communicate. All animals are sensitive to each other and to other species in various ways. What gets to count as speech is, of course, a political issue. A non-speaking animal doesn't have rights in the way that that a speaking animal, aka a human, does.
[13:07] Clearly we have to rethink our relationships, our social relationships among humans and and more than humans, because the way we've conceived of individuality and society and interdependence in general the terms are off. Because we're in a system now that is unsustainable. I mean, the the kind of neoliberal proliferation of a capital mindset is ultimately exploitative in this unsustainable way. And of course that's a policy problem. That's an economic problem. That's a moral problem. But it is a philosophical problem. It is how do we position ourselves in relationship to each other and how do we even understand the individual and the boundaries of self?
[14:07] We accept by default that there's these divisions between ourselves and the non-human world, between nature and culture. And there's something to learn about ourselves when we realize that that's not always the case. As an artist trying to complicate or destabilize the ways in which we're experiencing the world and get around some of the filters or assumptions or the basic terms that are in place that are maybe not working—maybe that will do something. You know? If nothing else, to try to bear witness to other truths and ways of being that are not captured in the predominant language about humans and environment and climate change and whatever else.
[The recordings of rat speech begin to slowly fade to silence.]
I mean, that spiritual change has to be a deep one, like an embodied one. It's a weird one. And so the fact that sound can get inside us can vibrate us in different ways, can address us on the level of affect even before we know what emotion we're feeling—that's an opportunity.
[The recordings of rat speech slowly fade to your foreground.]
[15:37] Hearing how the rats are communicating amongst themselves is a nice shift in perspective because they're inhabiting the city and navigating the city. And it's not it's not always about us. Obviously humans have an outsized influence, but they're adapted to to live with us.
[The opening soundscape from Times Square begins to blend with the sounds of rat communication.]
[16:05] What is the soundscape of New York City? And that's what I realized then that really fascinated me was that we make a lot of sound in the city and it makes it very hard for a lot of different animals to live in the city. But for a rat, this sound is happening really at the lower end of their frequency spectrum. The rat is hearing and talking above our range of hearing. It has its own sonic world. And the city is, you know, sounds very different out there.
[High-pitched rat “squeaking” slowly lowers pitch and transforms into the recordings of Urban Intonation. While this occurs, the soundscape of Times Square also lowers pitch. It is as if you, as a human listener, have entered into a soundscape of New York City—but one that, heretofore, has only been accessible to rats.]
Urban Intonation. This project wouldn't have been possible without the support of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. And also Eyebeam.
The Sonocene is supported by Humanities New York, the NYU Center for the Humanities, and the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Music Department. Our production team is a collective of environmental humanities scholars and artists, including Elizabeth Fickey, Bailey Hilgren, Konstantine Vlasis. Original Music by Annie Garlid, a.k.a. UCC Harlo. Sound Design and Mixing by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan. And voiceover by me, Elizabeth Geist. All proceeds from today's episode will be donated to Word-Up Community Bookshop. If you'd like to support this podcast, have an ecological story you'd like to share, or would like to learn more about the topics of today's episode, please visit our website at www.thesonoscene.com or check out our social media pages @thesonocene. Thanks for listening.
