The Nature of Music 21: Marina Peterson

How does one listen with rather than listen to? And how might listening with allow the listener to more fruitfully conceptualize climate change? On Wednesday, September 9, 2026, Other Minds welcomes musician, anthropologist, and philosopher of sound Marina Peterson to discuss these questions at the Goldman Theater, David Brower Center.

Listening with is listening with air and ground, listening that expands beyond the ear, listening with more than human species, listening with microphones and other sensors. Listening with is writing sound and writing with sound, the score as a work that cultivates modes of attunement, wind noise recordings that trouble the transparency of the microphone. Listening with is an opening for an approach to environmental sound and its mediation that attends to how the physicality of air matters for what we hear and queries embedded logics of recording technologies. In decentering the human, listening with makes possible a conceptualization of climate change as a vibratory milieu.

This concert is the 21st edition of Other Minds’s The Nature of Music series, made possible through generous support from the EarthWays Foundation.

Parking
Garage parking is available on an hourly basis at numerous nearby locations. The closest garage is the City of Berkeley’s Oxford Garage, located directly underneath the Brower Center – enter at 2161 Kittredge. For more information on parking downtown, please visit the City of Berkeley’s off-street parking information and view a map of downtown Berkeley here.

Accessibility
The Goldman Theater strives to be accessible to all audiences. The Theater is fully compliant with ADA regulations. We also offer assisted-listening devices that can be set up for events in the Goldman Theater. Any questions or needs can be directed to devin@otherminds.org.

Marina Peterson’s Website

Marina Peterson is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She writes, thinks and listens with the unruliness of elemental forces and phase shifting matters—sound, clouds, cities—as a locus for epistemic uncertainties. Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021) examines ways in which environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise from the 1960s to the present. The book traces noise as it animates atmospheric registers across airspace law, environmental legislation, acoustic treatments, and neighborhoods cleared for noise mitigation now home to an endangered species of butterfly. Peterson is also the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles and co-editor of Global Downtowns (with Gary McDonogh) as well as Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader, Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art and Errant Elements (with Gretchen Bakke). She is currently an Editor-in-Chief of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Peterson co-directs the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography at UT Austin and is a founding member of the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Digital Curatorial Collective. M&D, a collaboration with Danny Fisher, creates text, sound, and installation work that emerges from site-based investigations. As a cellist, her improvisational practice experiments with sonic textures and materialities. She has released recordings with Ossatura and Gene Coleman (Die Schachtel) and in the Quartet Solo Series (Striking Mechanism), as well as contributed sound and text for experimental films.