Jim Nollman Readings
By Jeffrey Jacobs (04/27/10 11:16:27)
I read a few selected chapters from Jim Nollman's book The Man Who Talks To Whales and I really enjoyed the way the author described his own discovery that it is far more interesting to learn from non-human animals rather than about them. I thought that this was a great point because modern science has us believe that as humans it is out job to learn about out world and the animals that inhabit it. Nollman makes the point that if we work together with animals in our methods of research, through artistic collaboration, there is far more to gain from the experience than just studying the animal as separate entities all together. Jim Nollman spent years out on a boat in the Puget Sound between Washington and Canada pumping the music of his guitar into the water so that he could collaborate with the whales and have them sing back to him. When I first heard of this project and heard one of the sound files of him and the whales seamlessly playing a song together I thought that it was awesome. However, the more I thought about it, and especially after hearing him talk so unenthusiastically about the work my opinions changed a little bit. He even said himself that for every twenty or thirty hours they would spend playing music into the water, he would only get a few seconds of usable recordings together with the whales. This made me start to think that perhaps he might just be bothering the whales by pumping noise pollution into the water. After all, who knows if the music was even aesthetically pleasing for a whales ears? Perhaps the times when the whales were communicating back to him they were really just trying to satisfy him to get him to stop trying, or even telling him to be quiet. Either way, the project was interesting nonetheless, I just don't know if it was as much of an actual collaboration or a chance interaction. It seems to me that if you play music to whales most days for twenty years, sometimes whale noises will probably be heard in the recordings.
On a completely unrelated note, I was also a little bummed to hear that the man who used to play music for turkeys now kills them and eats them... people change I guess.

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