Resonating Soils: Bioacoustics and the Relational (Re)Mediation of Soil

How might we learn to listen to soils beyond dominant conceptions of passive substrate toward more dynamic, relational understandings? This article examines soil bioacoustics, an emergent conservation method that records subterranean sonic activity, to explore tensions between instrumental and relational approaches to environmental knowledge. Drawing on sensory ethnographic fieldwork on farms in Devon, UK, I trace how listening encounters both reproduce familiar patterns of environmental measurement and open tentative possibilities for different forms of human-soil attention. Rather than evaluating soil bioacoustics’ technical efficacy, the analysis situates these listening practices within broader struggles over what counts as conservation knowledge and whose worlds they sustain. By bringing together empirical field encounters with practices of contemporary artists, I argue that soil bioacoustics can become a mode of speculative correspondence—one that neither translates nor reveals soil’s meanings but opens other ways of being in relation. These preliminary findings gesture toward soil listening as a form of relational (re)mediation: a practice that works alongside ecological restoration whilst opening space for experimental, situated engagements with damaged human–soil relations.

© 2026 Public Access and the authors and artists. Published by Intellect Ltd