Love Unto Death : The Multispecies Aesthetics of Birdsong and Bird Extinction in Indonesia
Bubandt, Nils and Groth, Sanne Krogh LU
(2025)
In Seismograf
- Abstract
- In villages and cities across the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of songbird competitions are held every week. In these competitions, members of one species of songbird compete each other, where the aesthetic qualities the song, including its rhythm, melody, timbre, and volume, are evaluated by a team of referees. First prizes are large cash awards and sometimes cars. Birdsong that incorporates motifs from other species is especially valued, and bird owners spend much time caringly teaching their birds the song of other species. Champion birds are traded for as much as 100,000 euros.
The competitions are at the vortex of a “songbird craze”, called kicau-mania in Indonesia, that has emerged in the last two decades. Some 14... (More) - In villages and cities across the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of songbird competitions are held every week. In these competitions, members of one species of songbird compete each other, where the aesthetic qualities the song, including its rhythm, melody, timbre, and volume, are evaluated by a team of referees. First prizes are large cash awards and sometimes cars. Birdsong that incorporates motifs from other species is especially valued, and bird owners spend much time caringly teaching their birds the song of other species. Champion birds are traded for as much as 100,000 euros.
The competitions are at the vortex of a “songbird craze”, called kicau-mania in Indonesia, that has emerged in the last two decades. Some 14 million songbirds, endemic to the region, are held captive on Java alone. The unsustainable industry of trapping and trading to satisfy the demand of Indonesian songbird lovers now threatens dozens of endemic species with extinction.
Following bird trainers, owners, and referees, this audio paper investigates the awkward and “non-innocent care” that links multispecies love to extinction in the Asian Songbird Crisis. We argue that the aesthetics of Indonesian bird lovers – intimate, caring, situated, individual, and more-than-human – presents a challenge and a contrast, full of ambivalence, to the abstract, general, species-focused, and Romantic aesthetics at the heart of Western environmentalism in the Anthropocene.
The audio paper argues that an attention to the multiplicity of multispecies aesthetics is needed to avert the extinction of endemic species, a possibility that we will explore in the new research project “Aesthetics of Extinction” (https://cas.au.dk/en/extinction) (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/b37aae15-5236-47d2-b5c3-e706bd0893c9
- author
- Bubandt, Nils
and Groth, Sanne Krogh
LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2025-05
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- in press
- subject
- keywords
- birds, birdsinging, noise, Java, Indonesia, audio paper
- in
- Seismograf
- ISSN
- 2245-4705
- project
- Java-Futurism: Chronotopes of Sound Activism in Indonesia
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- b37aae15-5236-47d2-b5c3-e706bd0893c9
- date added to LUP
- 2025-05-01 12:20:17
- date last changed
- 2025-05-20 14:29:25
@article{b37aae15-5236-47d2-b5c3-e706bd0893c9,
abstract = {{In villages and cities across the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of songbird competitions are held every week. In these competitions, members of one species of songbird compete each other, where the aesthetic qualities the song, including its rhythm, melody, timbre, and volume, are evaluated by a team of referees. First prizes are large cash awards and sometimes cars. Birdsong that incorporates motifs from other species is especially valued, and bird owners spend much time caringly teaching their birds the song of other species. Champion birds are traded for as much as 100,000 euros. <br/>The competitions are at the vortex of a “songbird craze”, called kicau-mania in Indonesia, that has emerged in the last two decades. Some 14 million songbirds, endemic to the region, are held captive on Java alone. The unsustainable industry of trapping and trading to satisfy the demand of Indonesian songbird lovers now threatens dozens of endemic species with extinction. <br/>Following bird trainers, owners, and referees, this audio paper investigates the awkward and “non-innocent care” that links multispecies love to extinction in the Asian Songbird Crisis. We argue that the aesthetics of Indonesian bird lovers – intimate, caring, situated, individual, and more-than-human – presents a challenge and a contrast, full of ambivalence, to the abstract, general, species-focused, and Romantic aesthetics at the heart of Western environmentalism in the Anthropocene.<br/>The audio paper argues that an attention to the multiplicity of multispecies aesthetics is needed to avert the extinction of endemic species, a possibility that we will explore in the new research project “Aesthetics of Extinction” (https://cas.au.dk/en/extinction)}},
author = {{Bubandt, Nils and Groth, Sanne Krogh}},
issn = {{2245-4705}},
keywords = {{birds; birdsinging; noise; Java; Indonesia; audio paper}},
language = {{eng}},
series = {{Seismograf}},
title = {{Love Unto Death : The Multispecies Aesthetics of Birdsong and Bird Extinction in Indonesia}},
year = {{2025}},
}