dec 2021 | words on nature

the sounds we see

Written after watching a TED Talk on soundscape ecology

The Sounds We See

In 1994, Susan J. Smith published a paper in Area titled, “Soundscape.” At the time, Smith was the Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. She taught at the Institute of Geography on 1 Drummond Street, in a two-storied Italian-Renaissance building that was once a surgical hospital. I would find myself gazing skeptically at its baby pink corridors twenty years later, on my way to an undergraduate lecture.

I didn’t study soundscapes during my time in Edinburgh. Smith had left for Cambridge and my latter-years’ pursuits were in glaciology. In my armchair travels to the coasts of West Antarctica, I saw silence. I didn’t hear the thunder of calving glaciers, nor the creaking of ice shelves lifting with the tides. I didn’t hear blue whales calling in the Southern Ocean. The icescape looked still, and so, it must have been.

Our creaturely love for visuals overpowers what sound can uncover. As Smith writes of her field, “the ‘ideology of the visual’ has afforded an epistemological privilege to sight over hearing.” When interpreting landscapes of culture and history, music, Smith argues, should have as distinguished a place as the other arts. Music carries a mindset that harbors a context. Just as paintings and literature can reveal colonial attitudes, political oppression, and daily life, music is a mirror of society.

A violin’s vibrato shimmers, a chirp is bright. When we describe audio imagery, the English language often resorts to drawing on visual equivalents. That’s a sentiment I heard in a TED talk by soundscape ecologist, Bernie Krause. Whereas Smith explores music in describing landscapes, Krause listens to a genre less of our composition. Since 1968, Krause has collected over 4,500 hours of sounds from the natural world. From a career in audio engineering and synthesizing, he had carried his equipment into the field. Krause’s archive features dribbling streams laced with howling wolves, hollow echoes from busy woodpeckers, and constellations of birdsongs at dusk and dawn. When Ylvis asked, “What Does the Fox Say?”, in their 2013 hit single, Bernie Krause probably had the answer.

In Krause’s recordings – perhaps the most extensive of their kind – over 15,000 species are heard in their habitats. All these unique portraits of ecology come from near and far around the world over the last 53 years. As with any portrait, they tell a story. There was “biophony,” the sound of all organisms generated at one time and place; “geophony,” the ambience of non-living natural things, like flowing water; and “anthrophony,” all the sounds humans produce. Krause coined these terms in 1998. Together, they form the textures of soundscape.

Nature’s acoustic kaleidoscopes are born from evolution and time. After life awakened 600 million years ago in the oceans, biodiversity flourished. From there, wildlife claimed landscape and enriched soundscape, finding the right wavelengths in a competition to be heard. Indeed, sound is language, and biophony the manifestation of how animals defend territories, attract mates, and protect young. Each species fills a frequency niche. The mammalian murmurs of giraffes and felines crawl along the lower frequencies. Birds honk and trill in the median range. At the highest, insects scintillate alongside bats. Sound has purpose even for us. It was biophony and geophony that guided our ancestors to find animals to hunt and navigate new lands.

200,000 years ago, the landscape murmured of great change. It was the inflection in history when Homo sapiens first stood up in Africa. A severe drought 110,000 years later killed all but 10,000 human beings, edging us close to extinction. After population rebounded, humans ventured far and wide. Inspired by nature, we created music 35,000 years ago. Then things really changed. 12,000 years before modern times, we learned that we could cultivate soils and rear animals. We sowed patchworks of agricultural expanse and groomed landscapes like no other species had. Before then, soundscape was largely the simple harmony of biophony with geophony, and that was enough.

By the time I was born in 1996, over 83% of land on earth had been shaped by humans. Agriculture, industry, and urbanization all need space. When these activities level habitats, pressure wildlife, and disrupt natural climate variations, change is audible. In altering landscape, we change soundscape. Anthrophony can be controlled and deliberate, like the music that Smith hopes we value more. Overwhelmingly, though, anthrophony is noise. The vrooms of vehicles, bangs of construction, and revs of chainsaws on wood are far-reaching human byproducts that impact the soundscape of ecology.

Fifty percent of Krause’s recordings is of habitats that are now entirely silent or no longer recognizable from when Krause initially recorded them. Some recordings are absent of birds that sang from a forest, which was later logged. Others drone with planes near Yosemite National Park and spadefoot toads straining to croak over them. Separately, on September 29, 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed 23 species from their endangered species list. These species hadn’t been sighted in decades despite repeated searching. Their silence is resounding extinction.

For us living today, coexisting with extinction is perhaps some kind of fate. When our ancestors became the architects of landscape, maybe it was inevitable that we continued their vision. I wonder what part of that vision would become our legacy. Is it unearthing the riches of the natural world? Is it preparing for future generations? Perhaps what came of those choices were one and the same for our ancestors, but it isn’t for us.

That’s a grim thought. I would rather not leave you with it. It can be lonely to think of all that we’ll never hear. So, without tolerating the increasing silence of biophony, let’s listen for what remains to be heard. Sound is a sense that envelopes us more than any other. We don’t need a hurricane to be audible to know its damage or hear a wildfire to see its rage. Sound can make an experience terrifyingly real. Yet, we know from Smith and Krause and audible ecologies that there is a meaningful place for sound in how we understand our lived environment. We don’t need to translate biophony. Not even Krause knows what animals are saying. But we can recognize that biophony isn’t noise like the majority of anthrophony. It’s music in a world that’s never still, and which is changing more than we can see.