Listening as Language: Rowan Savage in conversation with Joel Stern

This conversation took place online on Friday 28 March across unceded Aboriginal lands. Signal to Noise co-curator Joel Stern speaks with musician and artist Rowan Savage (salllvage) about Carrion Sentience, a new sound work commissioned for the exhibition. Together, they explore themes of listening, Country, language, crows, and the entangled relations between human, animal, and machine.

Joel Stern: How did you first get into music and sound?

Rowan Savage: I started out as a music writer. Some people say all critics are frustrated musicians, but I didn’t feel like that at the time. I was writing for Tiny Mix Tapes, which was quite important in the early 2010s for writing about experimental music. I think I was already deeply reflecting on what experimental music is and could be, before I started making it.

Eventually, though, I caught the bug. I began by making more straight-up, club-oriented stuff, but it didn’t feel satisfying. It didn’t speak to me on a deeper, more spiritual level. I felt like I needed to go further. For me, that meant renewing a connection to Country—something that had been disrupted in my life due to family background and broken links with the Blackfulla side.

So I started working with field recordings. And straight away, it changed how I listened—not just in the act of recording, but all the time. My listening practice shifted.

Joel: How did field recording transform your music-making?

Rowan: I try not to valorise innovation for its own sake, but I do prick up my ears when I hear something unfamiliar. That’s what I want to make myself. My first experiments were about making club music out of field recordings—can you turn a bird call into a kick drum? A creek into a hi-hat? And the answer is: yes, you can.

But as I did that, I got drawn further into the art world and started exploring the overlap between the rhythmicity of club music and more open, less structured sonic spaces. I began to think about sound as language—listening to birds, to water, to the world around me—and that eventually led me to working with AI.

Joel: There’s been a lot of powerful thinking recently by First Nations scholars and allies about decolonial approaches to sound. Acoustic ecology, for instance, brought with it assumptions about sound and listening that reflected the colonial imaginary of the natural soundscape, colonialism’s ‘tin ear’ as Dylan Robinson puts it . Understanding the soundscape as language is not only expansive but positions us differently in the world. Could you say more about how listening on Country became a language for you? And how that led into the piece you’ve made for NCM, Carrion Sentience.

Rowan: I didn’t grow up living on Country, so I had to think carefully about how I redevelop that relationship. I’ve always been into music and felt a sense of the sublime from it, so listening was a natural way in for me. Over time, as I slowed down, I began to understand that what I was hearing was language.

I’ve always used a DIY, lo-fi approachbut as I went on, even some basic equipment like binaural headphones for recording felt like it was removing me from the experience, and I had to strip it back even more. It felt too much like observing from the outside. And that’s the colonial mindset, right? The view from nowhere. Observing, recording, owning.

What I want instead is embeddedness. So my work includes not just nature sounds, but what you might call colonial sounds too—cars, dogs, planes. I’ve even made a piece using the drone of planes flying overhead because I had just five minutes to record between showers of rain.

Joel: And what about crows?

Rowan: We have our Kombumerri totems, but I don’t have an individual totem because that line of connection was lost. So it felt important to rebuild relationships—ones that could stand in, in some way, for what was broken by colonialism. I’ve always felt a strong connection to crows. They’re often seen in Western culture as birds of ill omen, associated with death and decay. That resonated with me as an Aboriginal person living in a post-apocalypse, but still finding joy and beauty in it.

I love the harshness of their calls. Birds here don’t always “sing”—you hear cockatoos, kookaburras, and especially crows. Their harshness is musical to me. I’ve started using less and less processing on those sounds. I want them to be heard in their rawness, in ways that daily life doesn’t usually allow.

I’m also not trying to deny my Anglo-European heritage. There’s a tradition in that culture too—like the mystical idea of a secret “language of the birds.” That suggests that bird calls speak to something deeper than words. I’m interested in language not as sense-making, but as something non-verbal and profound. I try to let the sounds just be.

Joel: Your work with AI doesn’t flatten the complexity of human-animal relationships into data or categories. It feels like the technology is drawn into your poetics, rather than the other way around.

Rowan: Yes, that’s where the “Indigenous” part of Indigenous Futurisms comes in. I’m not interested in AI in the usual way people are. I’m interested in language and translation—how AI can be a go-between, deepening relationships, particularly between human and animal. That boundary is one I want to break down. I see humans as animals, and we need to repair that relationship.

So I’ve used AI to translate my voice and the sound of crows. The AI was trained on both. It asks: if I were a crow, what would I sound like? And vice versa. That’s been moving for me—hearing myself as a crow. It deepens the relationship.

I’m also really interested in when the tech doesn’t work. The glitches. Experimental music thrives on things going wrong. The AI I used, Koup music , was better a few years ago. Now it’s degraded—it tries to revert to pop music, probably because that’s what the larger model was trained on. So instead of accurate crow-speech hybrids, it produces strange, semi-musical fragments. I’ve ended up Frankensteining those pieces together—using the degraded material to build something new, while leaving space for what the AI wants to do.

Joel: I’m tempted to call it Indigenous glitch futurism.

Rowan: I like that!

Joel: You treat the AI almost like the crow—with respect for its agency. You’re dismantling the division between human and animal, but also human and technology. There’s a kind of relational dynamic running through it all.

Rowan: I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but yes. I’ve been wary of some of the accelerationist takes out there. I’m not cheering on tech for its own sake. But I am interested in the possibility of bringing spirit to light. And maybe it’s a deeply human thing—to recognise agency in others, even when you don’t intellectually believe they’re sentient. If something presents to you as a subject, your instinct is to give it space, to let it speak.