Environmental Humanities Seminar with Cana McGhee

Instruments Unearthed: Bioacoustics, Bio-Sonification, and Making Plants Musical

Speaker: Cana McGhee, 2025-26 MHC Interdisciplinary Dissertation Completion Fellow

Respondent: Deirdre Loughridge

Cana McGhee is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University. Her research and teaching rely on methods from environmental studies and history of science to explore how ideas about listenership and musicality can shift our attunements to multispecies relationships and more-than-human nature amid ongoing global climate crisis. Her dissertation theorizes "botanical musicalities," a term she develops to refer to treatments of plants as musical actors, even as their sounds may or may not be readily audible to human ears. Her case studies consider several musical and sonic encounters among plants and humans that range from: representations of botanical scents in 19th century French art song; ambient electronic music made via bio-sonification; and plant-themed audiovisual digital media.

Her work has been published in Musicology Now and in a special issue of Open Cultural Studies on Critical Plant Studies, and will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Music and the Environment. While at Harvard, she served as Chair of the Graduate Music Forum, co-coordinated several multidisciplinary symposia, and maintains an active singing life as a choral alto. Previously, she earned her BA in Music and French from Emory University, in her hometown of Atlanta.

Deirdre Loughridge is Professor of Music and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at Northeastern University. She is a music historian who specializes in the history of music and technology. Her scholarship engages with the history of science and media studies to illuminate music from material and multisensory perspectives.

Registration is required for this event.

About the Series

The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2025-26 postdoctoral fellows.