Sounds Wild and Broken, page 39
Rothenberg honors the rich evolutionary diversity of sound and, for birds and whales, he takes seriously the sophistication of their vocal learning and cognition. Humans, birds, and whales are three pinnacles of sonic culture. To put them into active relationship with one another is an act of respect and kinship, profoundly Darwinian and ecological in its approach. Yet to play music with birds in a city park also seems more than a little odd in the context of industrialized, technological human culture. His work, then, reveals our everyday estrangement from the living Earth. We live among other species with elaborate vocal cultures, yet we seldom reach out to experience what might lie at an intersection of sonic cultures. Rothenberg’s playing also uncovers and highlights the great diversity of animal aesthetics. Each species has its own preferences for timbre, pacing, and style, varieties brought into vivid contrast with our own through active, embodied dialogue. Scientists understand, through theory and experiment, that these diverse aesthetics are engines of genetic and cultural evolution. Rothenberg’s musical work provides a complement to science, investigating aesthetics from the inside, in ways impossible through the objective, but distant, insights of replicated scientific inquiry. Just as an understanding of human music is deepened through the perspectives of players and singers, cross-species participation might also help us to fathom the music of other species.
After Angélica Negrón’s piece ended, I leaned on the wooden fence that defines the pathway and enjoyed a sense of calm after the rush of activity and people had passed. A hermit thrush, likely newly arrived from more northerly forests, snatched a tiny spider from among loops of speaker cable in the freshly fallen maple leaves. The bird flew to the crossbeam of the wooden fence next to me, then gave a loud, low tchup. Like the human voices that sounded from this same spot an hour ago, the thrush’s sound had a pleasing fatness and resonance. Deciduous forests have an acoustic warmth similar to that of concert halls. Sound waves bounce back from tree trunks and leaves, giving a lively sense of immediacy and a warming touch of reverberation. In our concert halls, we re-create the acoustic properties of woodlands, the sonic homes of our primate ancestors for tens of millions of years. The music we heard this afternoon connects us, perhaps, to some of the aesthetic origins of more conventional performance spaces.
But the link here between sound and times past is deeper than the human or primate lineage. It is fitting that a botanical garden should host a celebration of sound. The first trees and shrubs, four hundred million years ago, caused insects to crawl upward, then to evolve wings. This led to Earth’s first animal songs. Later, flowering plants fueled the evolutionary explosion that wrapped Earth in the sounds of birds, most insects, and mammals. In this garden, land animal sound has come home.
In the Deep Past and Future
On a moonless night on an escarpment south of Santa Fe, I am astonished by the brightness of the gleam above. With no city light pollution, few clouds, and little dust to obscure vision, the night sky in New Mexico is a confusion of bright flecks against a silvery haze. I lift my binoculars. The haze resolves into yet more stars, with stellar clouds behind them in depths whose magnitude frightens me. The chill of the cold, dry air reinforces my unease. Although I’m breathing easily and rooted to the ground by gravity, I feel somehow unmoored. Daylight is a mask. When the veil of a glowing daytime sky falls away, it reveals stars of such abundance and brilliance that our senses and imaginations are unearthed into a huge and humbling cosmos.
From the same mountains, starting in 2000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey used a mirror two and a half meters in diameter to gather light from the night sky. This surface is about twenty thousand times larger than the retinas of my eyes. The telescope scanned back and forth across the sky for five years, recording with electronic sensors the coordinates of galaxies.
The telescope found order within the smokelike multitude of stars. Galaxies are more likely to be separated by spans of five hundred million light-years than by other distances. This regularity is the wave mark left by the first sounds of the universe, a remnant from the early cosmos scored into the patterns of the sky. On a clear sky, then, we can stare up and see the origins of sound in the universe.
Where were these first sounds born?
Not in the “big bang.” The primordial expansion of the universe was encompassed in nothingness: no space, no time, and no matter. But sound exists only in space and time, its waves flowing through matter. No sound could announce the universe’s birth.
Nor was sound born in planetary or geologic tremors, watery vibrations, or the stirrings of bacterial cells. These are all sounds traveling through matter made from atoms: gases, liquids, and solids. But sound is older than atoms.
After its birth, in its infant years, the universe—all energy, all matter—was packed so tight that the temperature blazed into billions of degrees. No atom could exist in such heat. Instead, protons and electrons roiled in a hot lava, a plasma. The plasma was a mire so dense that particles of light, photons, were trapped. Inside this furnace, sound was born.
Irregularities in the plasma sent out pulses. Each pulse was a sound wave, a traveling front of high and low pressure, just like the waves of compression in air that we create when we snap our fingers. The waves traveled through the plasma hundreds of thousands of times faster than sound on present-day Earth.
As the universe expanded, the crowding eased, causing the temperature to drop from billions to mere millions of degrees. At about 380,000 years after the universe’s origin, the cosmos cooled enough for the plasma to transform into material familiar to us now. Protons and electrons combined, making stable atoms. As the traffic jam of protons eased, light was no longer trapped and fled.
As atoms formed, they were marked by the waves that flowed through the plasma. Each wave crest, a place where the plasma was compressed, became an aggregation of atoms, separated by wave troughs where atoms were sparse. Gravity’s convivial imperative then drew clusters of atoms together, building the former crests of waves into ever denser crowds. From these early clumps, stars and galaxies grew. By our earthly clocks, this was an unhurried ingathering. One hundred and eighty million years passed before the first stars blazed. It took another billion years for galaxies to flock the skies. Now, 13.5 billion years later, a telescope on a piney ridge in New Mexico can measure distances between galaxies and find the regular peaks of the ancient sound waves.
The wave marks are also discernible in the light that escaped the plasma. This light energy became cosmic microwave background radiation, a faint glow that now permeates the universe, detectable only with the most sensitive instruments. The glow is not uniform but is rippled with slight peaks and troughs. These patterns, like the spacing of galaxies, were imprinted on the radiation in the moment of its origin in the cooling plasma.
All sound relays what is past—even the voices of everyday conversation are created a few milliseconds before we hear them—but these waves are older than Earth itself. These ancient sounds exist on scales that feel preternatural. Waves larger than galaxies? Ancient microwave energies passing through us undetected? Our earthbound senses have no bodily understanding of such beyondness. Our imaginations, though, feed on the gleanings of science, casting our minds into places and times previously undreamed. The brains that ponder the first sound waves are themselves made from these waves because our own planet and star are, like all planets and stars, descendants of the primordial plasma. And so our bodies—and the thought that emerges within them—are made from the remnants of acoustic waves in the plasma. From inside ancient sound, we listen.
Some sound waves dissipate. But others evoke new arrangements of matter and energy. Stars were seeded by ancient sound waves. Sound has always been a creative force. This creative property of sound is not mystical; it emerges from the physical laws of our universe. The arrangements of stars and cosmic radiation are among the first of these creations, the opening salvos of the universe’s rich sonic history.
Thirteen billion years after the plasma cooled, sound met its new creative partner, life on Earth. What followed is a flourishing unrivaled, as far as we know, by any other time or place in the cosmos. From the thrum of bacteria, to the effusion of animal voices, to human music in concert halls, ours is a sonic planet, full of listeners and communicative voices. This extraordinary blooming is partly rooted in times much older than Earth, in the ancient generative capacity of sound itself.
What is sound’s future?
Cosmologists disagree about the fate of the universe, but all agree that the present state of matter will not last. Either we collapse back into infinitesimal smallness, expand into cold flatness, or are torn into a thin fog of elementary particles. All leads to silence. Earth will be devoured by the sun long before this final end, taking with it all the diverse songs of earthly life.
If all living sound is doomed, why care about creativity, diversity, and diminishment in our present moment? Ethical nihilism is one response to the fleeting and fated nature of existence. But sound itself suggests another answer. All sonic experience moves from silence, into ephemeral existence, and then back into silence. Silence also gives sound its shape, providing the open space in which sonic form emerges. The songs of a blackbird or the music of an orchestra recapitulate the journey of sound in the cosmos: out of nothing, into brief life, then a return to silence. In this lies their value. The Earth’s sounds matter in part because they are ephemeral manifestations of order and narrative. There is a parallel here with the value of each of our personal journeys from nonexistence, to form and movement, into death. Listening gives us an experience of the value of temporary existence unlike any other bodily sense. Sound departs as soon as it arrives, whereas a gaze onto a scene, or a touch on the skin, or the aroma of a flower all linger, at least for a while.
But sound has one more quality that gives it special value. Sound waves are fugitive, yet the energies and patterns they leave are creative. Sound seeded the stars, caused voices to arise from primordial living beings, and made music and language in animals.
Sound, then, has value because it is generative. Waves in ancient plasma, the songs of crickets and whales, the babble of young sparrows and humans, the tones of human breath in mammoth ivory: these are creators. Not as gods, but as the living and physical processes that made the universe.
This is why the diversity of sounds is so glorious. We hear not only the result of creation but the very act of creation. We inhabit the generative power of the universe, expressed in the particularity of the moment. By killing and smothering Earth’s many voices, we silence and destroy what made us.
In the seemingly straightforward act of listening, we discover not endings but connection and creativity in the present. Our senses and aesthetics arrive from deep time, made of atoms built from ancient sound waves, animated by tiny hairs on cells, and shaped by the long evolution of animals reaching out to one another in sonic eagerness. These legacies disclose the beauty and brokenness of the present time, giving us sensory foundations for joy, belonging, and action.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In these pages, I make the case that the acoustic crisis has four main pressing and intersecting dimensions: the silencing that ensues from loss of ecological habitat and attacks on human rights, especially in tropical forests; the nightmare of industrial sound in the oceans; the inequities of noise pollution in cities; and our frequent failures as individuals and cultures to listen to and celebrate the storied sensory richness of our world. I will donate at least half of my net proceeds from this book to organizations that work to heal and reverse these aggressions, fragmentations, and losses.
Books such as this have single names on their covers, but whatever insight is carried in their pages arrives from a community and not a single individual. My listening, comprehension, and writing are immeasurably deepened by Katie Lehman’s companionship, keen and curious ears, empathetic imagination, and brilliant mind. Paul Slovak’s extraordinary work as my editor has shaped and refined the book’s ideas and the text, and I am very grateful for the many ways he invigorates, clarifies, and supports my work. Paul’s colleagues at Viking have done outstanding work on this and my previous books. Alice Martell is the best agent I could hope for, providing wise counsel, effective advocacy, and unstinting encouragement. I also thank Stephanie Finman, at the Martell Agency, for her support and assistance, especially amid the difficulties of the pandemic. Meagan Binkley gave invaluable encouragement and practical help with the preparation of the manuscript. My parents, Jean and George Haskell, not only nurtured and spurred my youthful curiosities but steeped my upbringing in the music of humans and nonhumans, and more recently provided many fruitful leads for the research for this book.
For answering my queries and generously sharing their expertise about evolution and ecology I am very grateful to Olivier Béthoux, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris; Luis Alberto Bezares-Calderón, University of Exeter; Martin Brazeau, Imperial College London; John Clarke, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; Rex Cocroft, University of Missouri; Allison Daley, University of Lausanne; Sammy De Grave, Oxford University Museum of Natural History; Gregory Edgecombe, Natural History Museum, London; Eric Keen, University of the South; Rudy Lerosey-Aubril, Harvard University; Lauren Mathews, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Eric Montie, University of South Carolina Beaufort; Eric Parmentier, Université de Liège; Sheila Patek, Duke University; Arthur Popper, University of Maryland; Rebecca Safran, University of Colorado; William Shear, Hampden-Sydney College; Kirsty Wan, University of Exeter; and Michael Webster, Cornell University. Tim Low, biologist and writer, was especially helpful in clarifying my thinking through both his writing and our conversations.
Zuzana Burivalova, University of Wisconsin Madison, and Eddie Game, The Nature Conservancy, shared with me both their time and their extraordinary sound recordings. These data are hosted at the Ecoacoustics Research Group at the Queensland University of Technology. Wendy Erb, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Martha Stevenson, World Wildlife Fund, also generously shared their insights about tropical forests, fire, and biological conservation.
Composers, sound artists, and musicians Leah Barclay, University of the Sunshine Coast; Angélica Negrón; and David Rothenberg, New Jersey Institute of Technology, opened my ears and mind in new ways, through both their public work and our conversations. Their work at the intersections of art, science, philosophy, and activism provides joyful and hopeful paths to the future. At the New York Botanical Garden, I thank Hillarie O’Toole and Thomas Mulhare for commissioning and organizing performances and public discussions of forest sounds, and Annie Novak for the many ways she encouraged and catalyzed my work.
Wulf Hein and Anna Friederike Potengowski did extraordinary work on the experimental reconstruction and playing of the mammoth-ivory flute and were a delight to collaborate with. Nicholas Conard, University of Tübingen, was a welcoming and insightful guide to the Paleolithic caves of southern Germany.
At National Sawdust, I thank Paola Prestini, Garth MacAleavey, and Holly Hunter for their welcome, conversation, and in situ demonstrations. John Meyer, Pierre Germain, Steve Ellison, and Jane Eagleson shared their insights into the work of Meyer Sound Laboratories. Jayson Kerr Dobney helped me to see the many layers of story and interconnection in the Musical Instruments collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City. Sherry Sylar of the New York Philharmonic kindly shared with me her perspective on the many relationships among musicians and the materiality of their instruments.
Audiologist Dr. Shawn Denham was a skillful and wise guide to the hair cells of my inner ears.
For stimulating conversations about sound and its many manifestations, and for their welcome during my travels, I thank Joseph Bordley, John Boulton, Sunniva Boulton, Nickole Brown, Dror Burstein, Angus Carlyle, Lang Elliott, Charles Foster, Peter Greste, John Grim, Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt, Holly Haworth, Caspar Henderson, Christine Jackman, Jessica Jacobs, James Lees, Adam Loften, Sanford McGee, Paul Miller, Indira Naidoo, Kate Nash, Rhiannon Phillips, Richard Prum, Marcus Sheffer, Richard Smyth, Stephen Sparks, Mitchell Thomashow, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Marianne Tyndall, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Sophy Williams, Peter Wimberger, and Kirk Zigler. I offer special thanks to David Abram, for his inspiring work, our fruitful conversations, and his encouragement during this project.
My publishers and colleagues in Australia, Black Inc., along with the Byron Writers Festival, the Bendigo Writers Festival, the National Library of Australia, and Integrity 20 at Griffith University, generously hosted me in Australia. In Ecuador, the managers and staff at Universidad San Francisco de Quito’s Tiputini Biodiversity Station were welcoming colleagues. I also thank Esteban Suárez, Andrés Reyes, Given Harper, and Chris Hebdon for their companionship and many insights in Ecuador.
