The Signals Arriving In The Laboratory

In these imperiled forests, it is not only the sounds of insects, birds, amphibians, and nonhuman mammals that are in sharp decline but also the acoustic richness of our own species. Because linguistic diversity is especially high in tropical forests, deforestation is a leading cause of endangerment of human languages. The fate of sound in tropical forests, then, reveals the impoverishment and homogenization of human and nonhuman life. One of the five lawn service companies that tend to the turf of neighboring houses is leaf blowing grass clippings from a concrete sidewalk. Mostly, though, the house interior is quiet, an unchanging soundscape of fridge compressors and laptop fans. These are sounds that unify the suburbs. In a world in tumult, our senses here are soothed by familiarity and predictability. It is a universal human desire to make homes that buffer us from the sensory extremes and vagaries of the outside. From Paleolithic caves to modern apartment buildings, human dwellings cocoon us and keep us safe from the threats and discomforts of cold, wind, noise, or attack from others. Industrial power has now made this buffering so complete that it imposes a disconnection that undermines the powerful relationship between sensory experience and human ethics. Many of us now live in almost complete sensory isolation from the people, other species, and land that sustain us. Users, like me, of paper pulp from pine plantations or timber from Bornean forests almost never know where our goods came from.

Irresistible Forces

I look around at the objects in my house. This ignorance and isolation not only are the products of globalized trade, but are the source of the sensory alienation needed to sustain a destructive economy. With our senses cut off from the information and relationships that root and orient ethics, we are adrift. Ecological despoliation and human injustice can thus continue unconstrained by lived relationship. It was these sensory connections that mediated human environmental ethics until the colonial and industrial era. When I first listened to Borneo’s forests in the suburban room, I felt I was wrenched from one world to another. But these are the same world, deeply linked. The unruffled peace of the suburb is the corollary of the storms underway in forests and other habitats. From ruined ecologies and human societies, we extract the resources to build and sustain the calm. Manufactured quiet and predictability provide the conditions needed for continued despoliation, over the horizon, beyond the senses. I drop the needle onto a vinyl album. Industrial diamond meets sound ensnared in polyvinyl chloride.

End Of The Line

The claw of the record player’s stylus follows the spiral furrow. Burned coal and methane, arriving on wires strung across the sky, electrify my amplifier. The powers of factories, oil wells, and mines converge. A humpback whale’s song awakens, leaping out of the sea into air, breaching out of the 1950s into an experience of the moment. Two long introductory cries, a pause, then a string of rumbles and throbbing pulses. The first cry is more than three seconds long, an interlacing of dozens of frequencies, each one swelling and receding at a different pace. The higher registers sweep down, a moan. The lower tones hold steady, droning, then twirl up, accenting the end. Echoes from undersea canyon walls or from the sea’s surface add reverberance. The second cry is a little shorter, simpler. A growl undergirds these sounds, builds in vigor, then resolves into a string of percussive jabs, a trill made of low, fleshy twangs that snake through variations of pitch and tempo. The Cold War captured this whale’s song.

Into The Fire

The work of zoologists and musicians then propelled it into public imagination, awakening human ethical concern for our sea cousins. Later, the song returned to the oceans in the form of whaling bans. The album is a triumph of interspecies listening. The oceans of the 1950s were orders of magnitude quieter than they are now. If there is an acoustic hell, it is in today’s oceans. We have turned the homes of the most acoustically sophisticated and sensitive animals into a bedlam, an inescapable tumult of human sound. The humpback that kicks off the first track of the album was recorded by Francis Watlington, a descendant of whalers who had emigrated from the United Kingdom to Bermuda in the 1600s. Watlington worked in Bermuda for the United States Navy in the 1950s and 1960s, inventing, installing, and monitoring hydrophones that eavesdropped on the Atlantic Ocean. Several patents for underwater listening devices bear his name. Archival photographs show him in cramped rooms surrounded by wires and monitors, at home in the habitat of an inventive electronic engineer. Watlington and his colleagues ran a cable from their onshore lab to a hydrophone three kilometers offshore and down seven hundred meters to the seafloor. At this depth, they hit the deep sound channel, the lens formed by pressure and temperature gradients that transmits sounds thousands of kilometers through the ocean. The electronic ear sought the thrum of engines and the squeal of sonar signals from enemy ships or submarines. Alongside this military intelligence, the hydrophone caught the sounds of humpback whales as they moved in springtime from the Caribbean to northern feeding grounds. From shore, Watlington could see the whales blowing and breaching over his hydrophone. The signals arriving in his laboratory revealed their sounds. Few human ears had listened at such depths before, let alone recorded the sound. The Paynes, working with mathematician and scientist Hella and Scott McVay, fed the magnetic tapes into a sonograph printer, a Second World War technology that turns sound recordings into inked glyphs on long scrolls of paper. The whale’s cries look like the scratch marks of a clawed paw, parallel striations showing the many layers of harmonics. Where the cries resolve into drones or whistles, only a single line is visible, one frequency. Thumps are bold vertical stripes of charcoal. Clicks are light touches of pen. Like a musical score, the scrolls reveal to the eye both the form of each sound and the relationships among the sequences of cries, whistles, bangs, and rattles. On scraps of paper, the internal structure of the whales’ sounds became apparent.