Sounds Wild and Broken, page 38
We are familiar with the synesthetic and emotional effects of sound in the everyday human realm. The right music can make food taste better, warm our skin, open us to the effects of touch, awaken and relax our muscles, and heighten our sense of belonging in our bodies and communities. Barclay’s work brought those sensory, affective connections to an unfamiliar place, expanding our empathy and imagination into the water.
Of the human voices in the piece, one stood out to me, a recounting of the cooperative bond between the Gubbi Gubbi and dolphins. Before colonial invasion broke this connection, local people would call to dolphins by, in the words of nineteenth-century European observers, “jobbing with their spears into the sand under the water, making a queer noise” or using spears to make a “peculiar splashing in the water.” The dolphins heard and understood these sounds, and swam close to join the hunting team. By circling then moving inward toward shore, dolphins corralled the fish. People, wading in the water, then speared or netted the trapped quarry. The dolphins got their share, often fearlessly taking fish proffered on spear tips.
Humans and dolphins each have sophisticated vocal cultures. Their societies thrive through sound-mediated reciprocity and coordinated action. These two great animal cultures, triumphs of mammalian evolution, used sound to knit their intelligences into cooperative action. Only recently have some human cultures forgotten that we belong within a speaking, listening, and intelligent world, one where we can converse with other beings for mutual benefit. The first step back to this knowledge is, perhaps, better listening, along with renewed respect for the cultures of other humans and nonhuman beings.
More than twenty thousand people have experienced Barclay’s River Listening Sound Walk, either as I did, in small groups, or through self-guided experiences via a smartphone app. Started here on the Noosa River, the project now includes three other sites in Australia and rivers in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific.
Barclay’s mastery of the technologies of recording and composition, along with her ability to offer engaging community experiences, is sonic wizardry, raising the hidden energies in the water into human attention. The results can transform people in unexpected ways. Many local farmers are skeptical of city-based artists and scientists coming to “listen to the river,” a place the farmers have known through work and recreation, sometimes for decades, without any need of seemingly esoteric art. But dropping a hydrophone into these familiar places produces jolts of excitement and curiosity. Connecting the hydrophone to a live-feed transmitter deepens the connection. Barclay told me that several farmers now start their days by listening in their kitchens to live feeds from nearby rivers. The fact that the sound is both live and local is important. A recorded track or a feed from some distant locale might be interesting for a while, but the sounds of your home place are of immediate relevance and emotional power. Might readily accessible data from hydrophones and microphones one day become as ubiquitous as the temperature and rainfall readings from weather stations, technological aids to human senses and curiosity?
Among scientists, too, listening to the river can change behavior. Biologists often become inured to the damage they do to their “subjects,” walled off by educational curricula that favor vivisection and objectification over affective and sensory connection. In my own early education in biology, I was asked hundreds of times to apply the scalpel or a lethal dose of ethanol to animals from rats to fruit flies to snails, but not once was I challenged to converse with these beings that Darwin taught us were blood kin. In surveys of rivers, field biologists routinely kill the animals they have sampled with electric shocks or nets. After listening to the river through her equipment, Barclay told me that many scientists say, “Well, maybe we’ll put them back alive this time.” Listening to the many sounds of fish opens human imagination. We hear them not as numbers on a spreadsheet but as communicative creatures in whose voices we hear selfhood and agency. This is a sensory lesson in kinship.
Sound-recording technologies, then, open our ears to the lives of other beings. For aquatic creatures, hydrophones break what is mostly an impenetrable sensory barrier. On land, too, sounds captured by microphones and shared with listeners can reveal hidden stories and encourage connection to place. From “nature sound” albums, to websites that teach us to notice and understand the voices of our nonhuman neighbors, to apps that guide listeners through curated aural experiences of notable sites, recording technology opens our ears, and thus our imagination and empathy, to the beauty and the travails of the world. By freezing ephemeral sound waves on magnetic tape or in a microchip, we bring them partly under our control. We can then share, rework, puzzle over, measure, and celebrate sound’s many qualities.
Too much control, though, can distance us from the places and lives we seek to hear. Barclay told me of students whose work integrated the latest aquatic recording devices with sophisticated analysis software. Their work demonstrated great technological proficiency. Yet not one of them had listened to their “study soundscapes” with unaided ears or from raw electronic recordings. Like passive acoustic monitoring in rain forests, microphones and computer software in the hands of artists and scientists do not necessarily displace embodied listening. But their powers can sometimes make us forget the testimony of our own bodies.
Leah Barclay’s work seems especially noteworthy to me because it uses technology to reembody listeners in their senses and relocate them in landscapes and water. She builds on the work of pioneers such as Annea Lockwood and Pauline Oliveros, whose music calls us to listen more fully to the places around us, especially to the voices of the beyond-human world. This contrasts with the philosophy underlying so much technological evocation of “nature” where screens and loudspeakers transport us to exciting locales and action-filled narratives, yet do little to open our senses to the stories of our home places. Indeed, after the excitement of a documentary film, the edited highlights of thousands of hours of filming and sound recording, the creatures we live among can seem disappointingly dull. Escape from the mundane has its place, of course, and art should sometimes lift us into other places and times. But the discovery of the rhythms and stories of home is vital too. These are the foundations not only of delight but of wise ethical discernment.
River Listening is not polemical—it contains no gunning outboard engines or throbs of offshore container ships—but instead offers open-ended invitations to listen and extend human sensory attention into aquatic realms. This expanded sensory and imaginative connection is much needed. Beyond the mouth of the Noosa River, along a coast rich in sea life, including the breeding grounds of whales and the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, shipping traffic is increasing by nearly 5 percent per year. Several large new inland mines have recently been approved in Queensland that will export their coal and minerals by ship. Each one of these vessels will haze water with noise. As is true along all shipping routes, the devastating effects of this noise on sea life remain hidden from us. As sensory beings, we are disoriented without direct experience of the consequences of our actions. For a species that transports about 90 percent of our goods by water, our disconnection from aquatic sounds is ruinous to moral clarity and right action. Never have human guides to the underwater world of sound been more needed.
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The rain held off. The sun is out. For a November morning in New York City, this is glorious weather. Here on the grounds of the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), trees are on the hinge of late summer and autumn. The low sun gleams from ginkgo leaves now almost entirely turned gold. Larger beeches, maples, and oaks are bronzed and sulfured. Saplings, though, retain late summer’s green, no doubt stealing an extra fortnight of photosynthesis as their frost-exposed elders retire. The mellow aroma and crunch of freshly fallen maple leaves rise from underfoot.
Along walkways through the garden, pedestrian traffic flows inward, toward the forested ridge that forms the spine around which more formal collections of the gardens are arranged. We gather at a small table where a leaf-strewn path breaks away from the wider avenue, the entryway to the forest. We have come to listen to an afternoon performance, one that will mingle human voices with those of nonhuman animals and trees. For the next hour, choral groups, loudspeakers, apps on visitor cell phones, and small wooden “robot” instruments animate the loop path through the forest. Visitors move within this promenade of sound, each at their own pace, going back and forth as they please, creating their own sonic narratives.
The performance, Chorus of the Forest, is the work of NYBG’s 2019 composer in residence, Angélica Negrón. She composed the piece for this site, bringing her musical ideas into relationship with the sounds of the woodland. As I walk the pathways, I pass through overlapping domes of sound, each one centered on a choral group or a cluster of loudspeakers. In the spaces between, the domes merge into one another and the ambient sounds of forest and city.
Near the start of the loop trail, a speaker near a box of electronics delivers crackling sounds mixed with shifting pure tones. These are stimulated by electrodes that run from a rhododendron’s living green leaves. A few steps down the path, wooden automata swing clappers against small sheets of wood and metal bells. Made by sound artist Nick Yulman, these devices have the form of small trees, their trunks and side branches made from recycled sawed lumber. As I walk on, I hear amplified clicks and rasps of insects chewing wood, wind and ice playing against leaves, and the thrum of vibrations inside tree trunks layered into much slower, purer tones. These are sounds I recorded from trees and shared with Negrón, which she then interpreted, mixed, and sculpted with sound-editing software. Another electronic enhancement comes later along the loop walk when visitors dial a number to play the sounds of white-throated sparrows and other birds through their phones.
At six different stations along the pathway, choral groups sing her compositions. Close up, we hear the words and musical details. At a distance, the forest adds its signature, a gentle blur and glow of reverberation. Each piece evokes a different dimension of human relationship to forests. In “Awaken,” for example, the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus lifts into song dozens of verbs about forest interconnection, words that Negrón drew from books and social media conversations. Other pieces are inspired by poems and stories that explore trees, ecological justice, and human resilience. In all, more than one hundred singers are here, including several local school choirs. At two places along the walk, singers line both sides of the path and the stone bridge over the Bronx River, creating a sonic avenue through which visitors walk. As I pass through these spaces, bathed in harmonized human song, voices seemed to rise within my chest, a joyful sympathetic vibration.
This is a work of convergence. The second-by-second physiology of plants, recorded on electronic sensors, merges with percussive sounds from Yulman’s creations and my tree recordings, and reveals the materiality and inner lives of wood. This music offers both a contrast and a complement to that of wooden instruments like violins or pianos, which also draw on the physicality of trees but in a form more highly mediated by human intent. The blend of human song with tree and bird sounds creates contrasts in musical forms. The emotional power of human voices is direct and clear; nonhuman sounds are foreign tongues, harder for our human senses to comprehend.
Unifying all these elements of the composition are the sounds of the site itself. A light wind stirs a sandy hiss from dry maple leaves in the canopy. Near the river, water churns over a short weir. Squirrels rustle through leaf litter. Traffic sound and the occasional siren from the roads that circle the gardens arrive in unpredictable waves, buffeted by wind. Visitors talk as they move between choir stations, laugh when the bird sounds leap from their phones, or stand and whisper as they gaze up into the canopy or at one of the wooden automata.
I’m delighted to hear this convergence of musical evocations of the forest. But what strikes me most in the event is the balance between control and openness. Unlike in a concert hall where great efforts go into excluding “outside” sound, human creativity here exists in active relationship to the site and the moving bodies of listeners. The composer has a central voice but one with only partial control. Human creativity exists within the other energies of the place, including wind, traffic, chatty visitors, birds, and the inner lives of plants. This embeddedness aims to elevate our attention to these uncontrolled sounds. Angélica Negrón said of the project, her hands adding air quotes, “My big hope is that when people walk out of the forest and the sound of the piece ‘stops’—so the piece is ‘done’—they notice that it’s still going on, all the time, around them.” For the more than three thousand people who experienced the piece, this is music as invitation to listen. It is also music that invites community. We do not sit in the dark isolated from others. We shed our earbuds and headphones before entering the forest. No rules forbid talk or laughter. I came alone but shared short conversations about the experience with a dozen other visitors, a rare occurrence in public spaces in the city or after a concert at Lincoln Center or another recital hall.
Composer John Luther Adams has also noted the convivial effect of music played in unstructured spaces, with audience members free to move. Reflecting on Inuksuit, a piece for percussion usually performed in spaces like the forests of Vermont, he wrote, “When I originally composed Inuksuit, I wasn’t prepared for the strong sense of community the piece seems to create.” When music is placed in relationship with the nonhuman world, human community is intensified too.
By inviting us to listen beyond the rigidly defined boundaries of typical performance spaces, these pieces allow us to better hear and connect with one another. Once one wall is breached, others follow. In this opening, we reinhabit our nature. Most of us now live in places where we must block out sound to retain any hope of focus or well-being. We do this sometimes with technology—noise-canceling headphones, closed doors, or sound-proofed walls—but mostly by acts of the will, withdrawing attention from traffic, whir of computers, sigh of air coming from heating or cooling units, chatter and bang of neighbors and coworkers, rumble of jets overhead, construction noises across the street, and the sounds of birds and insects through cracked windows. Most of these sounds contain no information immediately relevant to our work or social lives. But for our ancestors, attention to sound was the source of food and knowledge about local conditions, just as it remains for people today who live and work in close relationship to the nonhuman world. This is the original function of hearing, to bring the stories around us into human awareness. To shut off listening is, in these circumstances, like an industrialized human turning off the internet and TV: you lose connection to news and to networks that link you to others. People who straddle the industrialized and ecological worlds deliberately switch between modes of listening. When I leave the city for places dominated by nonhuman beings, I repeatedly ask myself to open up. Listen, touch, smell, look, then repeat again and again. Only then can I hope to connect to and properly inhabit the forest, prairie, or seashore. When done with others, this opening necessarily brings us into closer human community too. On reentry to the built environment, I rewall the senses, steeling myself against the incoming surge and tightening the filter on what gets my attention. This includes mostly not interacting with other humans. To greet them as I would in the forest would be not only exhausting but out of step with the social dynamics of city life. Works such as Angélica Negrón’s Chorus of the Forest offer invitations to lower the sensory barriers we must sometimes necessarily erect. She fashioned this inducement out of the delight and power of human voices and the intriguing strangeness of plant sounds, experiences rich in their musical forms and reorientations of our senses.
Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg takes the invitation further, beyond the boundaries of the human. His performances with insects, birds, and whales ask other species to participate. We humans are not the only species with keen ears and voices eager to connect. In Rothenberg’s hands, clarinets become experiments in cross-species connection and sonic innovation. Unlike the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century players of the merline and other bird organs used for training captives, Rothenberg’s birds are free-living, and the creative process is interactive, ceding some control to the other singer. Instead of layering prerecorded nonhuman animal sounds into a musical performance, as many contemporary ecologically minded musicians do, Rothenberg goes to living animals and offers them an opportunity for sonic dialogue, for creative reciprocity.
In my conversations with him and in his writings, Rothenberg emphasizes the primary importance of listening. His musical roots are in improvisational jazz, where close attention to the sounds of other players is vital. To listen and play with another human player is hard. To do the same with an animal whose lineage separated from ours tens or hundreds of millions of years ago brings our ears to the edge of a vast chasm of sensory and aesthetic experience. Therein lies much of the power of his work. This is experimental biology and philosophy of sensory experience.
Rothenberg’s most recent major project involved playing with nightingales over a span of five years in the city parks of Berlin. He did this sometimes alone with the birds, but also with other people, from violinists and oud players, to vocalists, to electronic musicians. Hearing the interplay between these human sound makers and the birds, experiences captured in the film Nightingales in Berlin, I am struck by contrasts of pacing. We must sound to the bird as humpback whales seem to us: creatures for whom time is slowed and aural attention is greatly elongated. The nightingale song comprises bursts of trills, whistles, and gurgles whose details are too fast for our sluggish brains to grasp. Rothenberg asks of the birds and his fellow musicians, “What can be done together? Can you ask questions through music?” Are the nightingales riffing with the humans? To my ears, listening from outside the back-and-forth interaction between human players and birds, it is hard to tell. The birds’ songs are complex, like insanely fast electronic music, continually remixed. Discerning responses to humans amid this sonic craziness is beyond me. But for Rothenberg, “the nightingale dances musically in and around samples and transpositions of himself.” Can two species with rich vocal cultures—nightingales and humans—engage in creative musical dialogue? Rothenberg explores these questions through participation. He says, “My biggest hope with the project is that it should not end up being strange, but rather familiar. All music education, anyone who studies music . . . should have to reckon with the music of other musicians on this planet, other animals.”
