Sweet, Vigorous Notes Pumping Out Calls

In humans, the cultural evolution of sound and that of other forms of knowledge unite. For us, learned sound is an aesthetic experience, a mediator of social relations, and a source of detailed information about how to navigate and manipulate the world. Other species use culture in all these ways, but we knit them together in a union so far unknown among others. In the last five and a half thousand years, we’ve taken another step. The invention of the written word broke the constraints that confined all previous vocal communication. When I read an ancient poem, the minds of the dead resurrect within me and speak. The possibilities for accretion and interconnection of knowledge are vastly increased over the powers of the spoken word alone. Written notation did the same for human music. The score on my music stand carries a melody across centuries. Text is a crystallization of sound, a diamond compared with the gaseous carbon in breath. But a hard one, too, in the powers that it gives us. This population change is uneven, with pronounced declines in California and Colorado, most likely because of the fragmentation and degradation of its preferred scrubby habitat, but with increases in the northern Rocky Mountains and Newfoundland, for unknown reasons.

An Irrevocable Gesture

Among other cultured species, the loss is yet more catastrophic due to habitat loss, pollution, and hunting. Half of all parrot species are in decline worldwide. Mammals perhaps for about the same time, dating to the origins of bats and whales. Over this long time, vocal learning and cultural evolution were both soil and fertilizer for the growth and blossoming of sonic diversity. In humans, though, these processes turned and started to erode life’s diversity, an abrupt change from the expansion that learning and culture previously encouraged. Perhaps part of the cause of this switch from flourishing to destruction lies in our inattention. We humans, distracted by our newfound powers, turned inward and largely forgot how to learn from the voices of other animal species. If this is true, then by reawakening the practice of attending to the voices of others, we will dim the destructive impulse and renew the creative powers of listening and learning. When introducing students to the practice of attentive listening, I ask them to sit quietly and focus their attention on minute changes in the sounds around them, sending their ears out into the world to forage for acoustic experience. Part of what we learn is how hard it is for our frazzled modern minds to keep our attention on any sensory experience without inner distraction. But repeated practice opens a space where the clamor of the mind quiets and the sonic richness of the world blooms. In just fifteen minutes, we each hear dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different sounds in places where usually we would notice, at most, a handful.

Once Is Enough

By listening in the same location over months, we find that these short exercises excavate not only an impressive count of different sounds but also patterns and relationships among them, fragments of earthly music with many layers and tempi. This subtle complexity underscores how inadequate a few words are to summarize the soundscape of any place. But even a sketch, however incomplete, can perhaps glimpse ways in which sound lives in the moment and has been shaped by history. Contrasts among soundscapes are most obvious to us when their divergent sounds are the product of markedly different physical energies or human noises. Not so superficially obvious are differences among the sounds of living species. For ears not attuned to the voices of insects, birds, and other vocalizing creatures, variations are easy to miss. Just as sounds from ocean waves or mechanical engines reliably disclose their sources, so, too, do animal sounds. The most obvious differences among the many calls and songs of living beings reflect broad taxonomies. Corrugated tymbals of cicadas rasp and whine, rubbing wings of crickets chirp, and membranes in bird chests whistle and trill. In the soundscape of any one place, we hear the sounds of many species and thus many biographies. This is the biological equivalent of wandering through a busy city, hearing a multiplicity of languages and accents. In these sounds, patterns of human indigenity and migration are revealed, some recent and others dating back tens of thousands of years.

Make Me Smile

For nonhuman species, we hear even deeper into the past, sometimes hundreds of millions of years. When we sit and listen to our animal cousins, we open ourselves to the experience not only of the moment but to the marks of plate tectonics, the history of animal movements, and the echoes of evolutionary revolutions. Each one is just under 32 degrees of latitude from the equator. In the divergent textures, cadences, and rhythms of their soundscapes, we hear the imprints of deep time. Mount Scopus, just outside the Old City of Jerusalem, fifty kilometers east of the Mediterranean coast. I wander through the Botanical Garden of Hebrew University. It is July and so the early summer rains have ceased, yet the vegetation remains green, helped by both moderate temperatures on this limestone ridge and trickling sustenance from irrigation pipes. Boulders and small rocks lie all around the walkways. Without the care of horticulturalists, most of the plants here would wither on the thin soils. All around are buildings, roads, and, at the university, irrigated lawns, a startling sight in so dry a land. The gardens are an island refuge in a growing urban sea. I cannot see the singer, but the tight rubbing sound likely comes from the wings of a marbled bush cricket. On the ground, in the jumbles of stones around the base of cypress, pine, and redbud trees, Mediterranean crickets chirp with sweet, vigorous notes, pumping out calls two or three times per second. Both of these insects are mostly night singers, but in midsummer, the height of their breeding season, their songs linger into the morning. From the branches of olive and oak trees, the day’s first cicadas wake, rasping at a lower pitch than the other insects, like a ratchet or windup clock being cranked once per second.