Sound Ecology Is Inherently Protest: Annea Lockwood’s Sound Map of the Danube

Composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood is renowned for her lifelong engagement with natural acoustic environments, creating works that move fluidly between installation, performance, and ecological documentation. For decades, she has pursued what she once described as a deceptively simple mission: to record the sound of every river in the world. Though impossible in scope, this aspiration has guided her through a series of major compositions, most notably the Danube, the Hudson, and, most recently, the Housatonic. I will focus primarily on A Sound Map of the Danube, drawing on insights from her Hudson project to deepen my analysis. Both rivers hold dense and turbulent histories, shaped by colonial extraction, shifting national borders, industrialization, and ongoing environmental degradation. They are, in Lockwood’s hands, more than waterways: they are dynamic archives of political, ecological, and historical processes.

Lockwood’s work has become central to the field of ecological sound art and to emerging theories of political listening, even as she resists framing her compositions as explicitly “political.” This refusal to name her work as protest is precisely what makes her practice so compelling: it opens space for political interpretation even as she declines to frame it that way. One such interpretation comes from Ihlara McIndoe, a PhD student in the music department at Columbia University and a composer-musicologist from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work questions themes of exploration, preservation, and artistic ecology. Her practice spans acoustic and electroacoustic forms, orchestral writing, solo works, and interdisciplinary collaborations that weave movement, poetry, and narrative. When McIndoe took this same course, Analysis in New Music, she turned to Lockwood’s Sound Map of the Hudson and approached it through Māori frameworks of relationality and sovereignty. In particular, she read Lockwood’s work alongside the Te Awa Tupua Act of 2017, which granted the Whanganui River legal personhood, recognizing it as a single, living, and indivisible entity. This legal and philosophical shift, made possible through generations of Māori resistance and activism, opens a powerful entry point into understanding how rivers speak to us, and helps illuminate the political and ecological stakes at play within Lockwood’s own sonic cartographies. 

Across the world, ecological entities are increasingly being granted legal personhood as a strategy for conservation and for redefining human–environment relations. New Zealand has been at the forefront of this movement: both the Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua) and Mount Taranaki have been recognized as legal persons, each supported by governance structures that embed Māori cosmologies and custodial obligations into law. Similar developments have appeared elsewhere. In Australia, the Yarra River (Birrarung) has been accorded a form of legal protection that centers Indigenous custodianship, and in India, the Gangotri and Yamunotri Rivers have likewise been granted personhood in recognition of their cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance. Yet the question remains: what does such personhood actually do? Does it offer material protection for these ecosystems, strengthen Indigenous sovereignty, or simply repackage existing environmental legislation in symbolic terms? And more broadly, how does assigning “personhood” to natural elements reshape our understanding of ecological responsibility? How does listening to the Danube through Ihlara’s legal pluralist framework reshape Lockwood’s sound map as a practice of witnessing and reciprocity? And more explicitly, is this practice inherently an act of protest?

Throughout history, art has functioned not only as a mode of expression, but also as a vital tool for documentation, public education, and ecological intervention. When scientific data or political discourse struggle to generate urgency, artists often step in to render environmental crises tangible, translating abstract realities into sensory, emotional, and embodied encounters. In the world, music documentation has repeatedly served as a powerful political tool. Across genres, hip-hop, electronic, classical, experimental, artists have used sound to intervene in public discourse and reshape collective consciousness. From Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor (2006) exposing the violence embedded within U.S. nationalism, to the Tropicália movement in 1960s Brazil resisting authoritarianism through sonic hybridity. Music has long been a site where political struggle becomes audible. Lockwood is working within this lineage and that lineage is working within her as well. By documenting the river’s sounds, she is not simply archiving an environment; she is activating a mode of listening that reveals the political forces shaping ecological life. Her work draws on the precedent of artists who have used sound to expose, critique, and reimagine power, yet she extends this tradition by shifting the political subject from human conflict to the relations between humans, nonhumans, and the environments they inhabit.

It is within this broader tradition that Mark A. Cheetham has situated  this analysis in Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ’60s, where he offers an ambitious reassessment of how artistic engagements with the natural world have developed over time. Paul Monty Paret created a deep analysis that explores what Cheetham identifies as a lineage that links three distinct artistic formations: the landscape painting traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the land art movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and the emergence of contemporary ecological or “eco” art. This last category, he argues, encompasses artists working from the late 1990s onward whose practices confront ideas of nature through the overarching lens of the global climate crisis. While Cheetham’s framework is invaluable for tracing these continuities, my interest lies in examining how this structure operates within contemporary practices and clarifying the interpretive lenses he uses to position these artists within longer histories. Central to Cheetham’s argument is the notion that artists today participate in what he calls an “ongoing drama of articulation” among aesthetics, the earth sciences, and human society (7). By placing eco art in dialogue with earlier modes of representing and transforming the land, he offers “pathways for understanding contemporary eco art by situating it in relation to earlier artistic engagements with the natural world” (26). This approach helps illuminate why certain contemporary works, especially those that make environmental processes physically present, carry such resonance.

Introducing Relational Legal Pluralism

Cheetham’s framework becomes essential when turning to Annea Lockwood’s work, particularly her river sound maps. Her recordings do far more than document the acoustic qualities of rivers; they compress vast, overlapping temporal scales into brief auditory encounters, allowing listeners to hear histories that are otherwise invisible. This was one of the most profound insights I carried away from my conversation with Ihlara McIndoe, who emphasized that Lockwood’s sound maps are, at their core, deeply political projects. Every river Lockwood engages with is shaped by material histories of extraction, colonization, and nation-building, histories that continue to resonate in their soundscapes. As Ihlara explained in her paper Listening with the River, attentively “In the Hudson you hear echoes of colonialism… the train, tugboats… displacement of Indigenous people.” What might initially seem like ambient background noise becomes, through Lockwood’s framing, an acoustic archive of structural power. The river’s present-day sounds carry the weight of centuries of environmental transformation and human intervention. Ihlara drew similar connections when reflecting on the Danube: “With the Danube, more human sounds and ideas of ownership, nationhood, borders and parts of the river once one country, now another.” In this context, Lockwood’s recordings reveal the river as a political entity, one whose sonic texture is shaped by shifting borders, competing sovereignties, and the lingering scars of European nationalisms. The Danube becomes not just a geographical feature but a living witness to the continent’s fractured political histories. Seen through Cheetham’s lens, Lockwood’s work participates in that “ongoing drama of articulation” between aesthetics and environmental politics. Her sound maps make audible the entanglement of ecological processes and political forces. Much like the Whanganui, these bodies of water have a real voice that allows them to present information to us loaded with historical knowledge. 

There is a reason why studying rivers through this lens is so vital. Rivers are not simply bodies of water; they hold holistic worldviews that are multidimensional, weaving together the physical and the metaphysical. Approaching rivers in this way acknowledges that they carry knowledge systems, relational ethics, and legal meanings that extend far beyond traditional Western frameworks. Ihlara’s paper , delves into this complexity by examining the forms of relational legal pluralism present in the Whanganui River’s legal and cultural frameworks. As she explains, “This relational legal pluralism approaches law not as one singular system, but as a multi-faceted governance structure.” In other words, rather than privileging a single legal tradition, the Whanganui model brings different systems into conversation, allowing each to shape how the river is understood and cared for. This fundamentally challenges the dominance of British colonial common law by placing it alongside Māori law, Te Ao Māori, a worldview that embraces relationality, reciprocity, and multidimensional forms of knowledge. “Viewing the river as an ancestor but also a legal person,” Ihlara notes, “is an attempt to embrace Te Ao Māori, a holistic worldview with openness and multidimensionality.” The river becomes not an object to be managed but a relative, one with whom relationships, responsibilities, and obligations must be continually nurtured. In this sense, it also functions as a pedagogical force, shaping how culture is lived and understood by those who exist in relation to it. Such a shift fundamentally redefines what it means to act ethically within river spaces. As Ihlara emphasizes, “Granting agency to the river enabled legal recognition of the obligations of everyone interacting with this space, a duty of care.” Legal personhood does not simply endow the river with rights; it articulates and formalizes human responsibilities. It calls upon communities, governments, and individuals to engage with the river not as a resource to be extracted or controlled, but as a being with whom we share deep lineages with. 

The Whanganui River is frequently cited as a global exemplar of what it means for a river and its people to exist in an ongoing, reciprocal relationship. Its recognition as a legal entity through the Te Awa Tupua Act (2017) emerged from a Treaty of Waitangi settlement negotiated by Whanganui Māori, yet much of the international discourse fixates on the novelty of “legal personhood” rather than the lived legal, cultural, and relational practices that make the framework meaningful. Scholars like Miriama Cribb writing from outside Whanganui, and often outside Aotearoa, tend to overlook that the Act is best understood as a reaffirmation of a plural, relational legal order grounded in kawa, Indigenous law, whose central achievement is the restoration of genuine decision-making authority to hapū and local Māori communities. By contrast, the case of the Danube south of Bratislava demonstrates what happens when a river is governed primarily through state-centered engineering and technocratic control. Over the twentieth century, the Danube floodplains, Slovakia’s largest wetland system, were severed from the river’s natural flow by large-scale hydropower infrastructure, navigation canals, and extensive dykes, leaving the wetlands reliant on a poorly managed artificial water regime. Unlike Te Awa Tupua, which recenters Indigenous jurisdiction and affirms the river’s own relational authority, Danube management has been shaped by multi-stakeholder negotiations among NGOs, water authorities, conservation agencies, and EU-funded programmes. This approach emphasizes mediated ecological repair rather than acknowledging the river as a rights-bearing being, revealing two fundamentally different philosophies of what it means to relate to and care for a river.

Lockwood’s Aural Cartography: How Sound Maps Create Relations

When reflecting on Lockwood’s practice, Ihlara underscores that her approach is rooted in what she calls “listening with the river,” rather than simply listening to it. This distinction matters: for Ihlara, Lockwood’s process acknowledges that “we are part of that environment, we are organisms listening with one another in a space,” a formulation that echoes Lockwood’s own remarks in her interview with Sam Green, about sound as a shared, interspecies field of relation. This attentiveness is paired with a strong “leave no trace” ethic. As Ihlara explains, Lockwood “leaves as little trace as possible, not hearing her footsteps, but also how she interacts with the space,” emphasizing not only the minimization of human noise but a broader ethic of careful presence. Her choices about what to record similarly reflect this commitment. Ihlara notes that Lockwood selects specific moments because of their “sound qualities, liveliness, interior details, places where the river is strongest,” focusing on sonic textures that reveal the river’s dynamic and expressive capacities. This selection process is not neutral, yet it is governed by a desire to foreground the river’s agency. As Ihlara puts it, “There’s a coexistence of agency, she chooses but tries to amplify the river as much as possible.” Lockwood’s curatorial decisions therefore operate in tension and collaboration with the river’s own acoustic life, producing recordings that aim to let the river speak while acknowledging the artist’s role in shaping how that speech is heard.

This emphasis on the relational conditions of listening resonates strongly with Maryanne Amacher’s insights into auditory perception. Amacher argues that the manner in which sounds are taken in is just as crucial as the sounds themselves. The perceptual modes that listening activates, how and where sounds register for the listener, shape the architecture of an aural experience as much as pitch, timbre, or rhythm. The ways we orient ourselves to sound, how we “locate, sense, and feel sonic events,” become defining forces in constructing immersive auditory worlds. Reading Lockwood through Amacher’s perspective clarifies that her river recordings are not merely environmental documents but carefully crafted invitations into altered modes of attention. They are experiences that reshape how listeners physically and perceptually inhabit a place. Lockwood is thus not only amplifying the river’s agency; she is cultivating a form of listening that interlaces human perception with nonhuman presence, making the river’s vitality perceptible on sensory and political levels. This resonates with Jeff Titon’s reflections in Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint, where he grapples with the idea of stewardship, a principle increasingly tied to conservation ecology. Traditionally, a steward tended to something not their own, and by extension, humans, distinctly aware of the Earth’s abundance, bear responsibility for caring for the biosphere. Titon extends this logic to music, arguing that stewardship entails supporting musicians, sustaining musical communities and institutions, and protecting the cultural and sonic resources that form the world’s diverse “musiculture.” Seen together, Lockwood’s practice and Titon’s structure reveal a shared ethic: Both frame listening as a relational, caretaking act, one that binds human responsibility to the natural world and insists that listening itself becomes a critique of how we live. Because really, what is protest if not an expression of care? What are we defending if we don’t love it first?

One idea that really jumped out at me was the tension between curation and collaging. Can the river ever truly “speak for itself,” or is every act of recording already a form of mediation? Within many Indigenous epistemologies, the river is not an object but an ancestor, a being with agency, memory, and voice. Those relational histories make communication possible; they offer protocols for listening that are rooted in kinship rather than extraction. But what does this mean for listeners and recordists who are not Indigenous, who do not inherit those frameworks of reciprocity? How can someone without that cultural lineage begin to “converse” with the river? Is such a conversation even possible, or does it require entirely new forms of attention and relational ethics? This leads to the question of composition: what does it mean to introduce additional sonic objects into a recording of the river? Adding compositional layers, whether instruments, textures, or collage elements, can be read as an imposition, a shaping of what the river “says” into something more legible to human listeners. Ihlara stated, “It’s not like the river can say ‘don’t record me’, she’s still composing and choosing what part of the voice to amplify.” So within any attempt, there will be human intervention. Lockwood stated, “I recorded from the banks, finding a great variety of water sounds as the gradient and bank materials changed, often feeling that I was hearing the process of geological change in real time. Towards the end of the final field trip, while listening to small waves slap into a rounded overhang the river had carved in a mud bank in Rasova, Romania (CD 3 track 2), I realised that the river has agency; it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it sculpts its banks.”

Close Listening: 

Beginning around minute 38, the recording enters its first truly pivotal transitional moment. Up until this point, the soundscape is shaped primarily by human presence: people talking softly, their voices dispersed across space, overlapping and fading in and out of clarity. This intimacy is suddenly interrupted by the tolling of bells, resonant and authoritative and then by the deep, cavernous echo of a waterfall. The shift is more than a change in texture; it marks the moment when Lockwood reveals the structural logic of the entire piece. From here on, the listener is asked to move across radically different sonic registers: the social (voices), the ritual (bells), the geological (waterfall), and the ecological (river). Lockwood folds these domains into one another without smoothing their edges, establishing a listening terrain where transitions feel abrupt, disorienting, and meaningful. Expanding this moment through McIndoe’s framework clarifies its significance. McIndoe’s notion of multiple “jurisdictions” of sound becomes audible here, where each sound source articulates a distinct way of being and knowing. The murmuring voices gesture toward the human aspect; the bells mark a ritual jurisdiction with its own temporal authority; and the rushing water resonance signals the earth’s deep time. These coexisting sonic authorities form a kind of legal-pluralist soundscape, one in which no single voice governs the meaning of place. This minute-38 transition thus becomes the conceptual hinge of the recording, teaching the listener how to hear the rest of the piece: not as a linear narrative, but as a negotiation between multiple sovereignties of sound.

Around 1:27:00 in the record, this logic culminates in one of the work’s most striking ruptures: an abrupt collision between industrial violence and the river’s own acoustic presence. The passage begins with a dense accumulation of low-frequency rumbling, the unmistakable weight of trucks and heavy machinery grinding at the river’s edge. Metallic impacts punctuate the soundscape with sledgehammer-like precision, producing a harsh rhythmic pattern that overwhelms the auditory field. Beneath this, Lockwood threads a faint ethereal overtone, almost like a hovering shimmer that destabilizes the boundary between field recording and compositional intervention. The result is a sonic texture that feels simultaneously crushing and spectral, a reminder of how industrial power both haunts and trespasses upon the river. Then, almost violently, the sound clears. The machinery drops away, replaced by soft birdsong, the delicate pulse of water, and the intimate texture of a small current moving past the microphone. The river here is not monumental or theatrical; instead, it feels fragile, as if one were listening to raindrops filling a cup. A single bird cry cuts through the quiet; a frog croaks somewhere in the distance. The transition is not merely aesthetic but epistemological. This moment enacts what McIndoe describes as listening with the river rather than listening to it. The industrial machinery represents a jurisdiction of extractive power, the logic of infrastructure, nation-states, and economic domination, while the birds, water, and subtle ecological detail articulate the river’s own cosmological and ancestral presence. In the context of Te Awa Tupua, where the river’s agency is understood as living and relational, this return of ecological sound is a moment where the Danube’s own authority becomes audible again after being submerged beneath industrial noise.

By refusing to smooth this transition or offer a narrative cushion, Lockwood forces the listener into the discomfort McIndoe identifies as essential for ethical engagement. The rupture becomes a microcosm of the broader ecological tension: the river continually negotiates the violence enacted upon it, yet remains a living relative whose voice persists. McIndoe argues that relational legal pluralism acknowledges overlapping systems of meaning acting on a place at once, and Lockwood’s composition stages these tensions sonically. The industrial rumble conveys one form of governance; the birds and water express another. In this sense, both the minute-38 transition and the 1:27:00 rupture reveal the Danube not as a passive backdrop but as a site of overlapping histories, jurisdictions, and agencies, an environment continually rearticulating itself through sound. I believe this is a form of aural jurisprudence. It acts out what McIndoe argues the law must recognize: that the river expresses itself even under duress, that its agency is relational rather than singular, and that listening becomes an ethical mode of acknowledging its presence. The moment at 1:27:00 becomes not only an environmental observation but a political gesture.

Sound Ecology Is Inherently Protest: An Exploration of Annea Lockwood’s Sound Map of the Danube through Ihlara McIndoe’s Analysis of the Whanganui River

Lockwood’s A Sound Map of the Danube urges us to rethink what it means to listen in ways that are political, ethical, and deeply relational. Rather than treating the river as a passive object of documentation, her work shows that it actively shapes the sonic, ecological, and historical worlds it moves through. When read alongside McIndoe’s notion of relational legal pluralism, the recordings shift from being mere aesthetic artifacts to becoming sites where multiple forms of authority and meaning intersect. Industrial infrastructures, human practices, ecological processes, and long histories of habitation all register within the soundscape, creating a layered field in which no single system fully governs what the river is allowed to express. The Whanganui River’s legal recognition offers a parallel: there, law becomes a dialogue among coexisting systems rather than a single sovereign voice. Lockwood’s approach to listening performs a similar kind of multiplicity, allowing the Danube to emerge as a participant whose presence is shaped by, and resistant to, centuries of extraction, territorial restructuring, and hydrological control. Even within a landscape transformed by political borders and engineered channels, the river continues to assert itself, speaking through moments of turbulence, through the interruptions of machinery, and through the quieter intervals. In amplifying this complexity, Lockwood shows how art can operate as a form of aural jurisprudence, a mode of witnessing that makes audible the tensions between human authority and nonhuman sovereignty. Lockwood’s careful attunement, her refusal to erase the river’s own compositional intelligence, models an ethic of stewardship that resonates far beyond the field of ecological sound art. It aligns with Indigenous philosophies of ancestry with Cheetham’s eco-art histories that position artists within larger environmental dramas, and with long-standing musical traditions that use sound to expose and critique structures of power. What emerges across these frameworks is a renewed understanding of protest, one that does not rely on slogans or explicit demands, but on cultivating forms of attention that reveal the stakes of environmental life. Lockwood’s protest is quiet, patient, and deeply relational. It is the protest of refusing to treat the river as a resource, refusing to overwrite its voice, refusing to pretend that listening is apolitical. Her work asks us to hear rivers as living archives of their own making and unmaking, and to recognize that the responsibility to listen and to respond extends far beyond the boundaries of art. In this sense, Lockwood’s Danube is not just a sound map; it is a call to inhabit a different form of relation, one that listens with rivers rather than merely to them, and that understands care as a practice of shared, ongoing, and transformative attention.