During the past several decades, I’ve spent a lot of time with children in classes ranging from kindergarten through eighth grade, introducing them to the wonders of natural soundscapes. Early on, from the mid-1980s through most of the ’90s, both the younger and older groups seemed able to concentrate intently and for long periods of time on listening for birds, frogs, and insects both outside their classrooms and inside, from the material I brought to play for them. But then things changed. According to a recent Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation study, eight-to eighteen-year-olds spend a daily average of seven hours and thirty-eight minutes on iPhones, on smartphones, and texting. With such devotion to technology, the human one-on-one link disappears as the momentary social needs of young individuals—particularly those in the ten- to fourteen-year-old range—take precedence via the screens of handheld devices.
It is possible that the subject matter or the ways I was offering it didn’t seem immediately relevant. But what is clear is that the noise of competing media has become more difficult to cut through, and I am sad to see it happen. Elements of the natural world are not usually engaged with or delivered as quickly. They are delivered in their own, very different extensions of time. To curb that disparity, perhaps we can find a way to harness these technologies—every smartphone is its own recording device—so that they reconnect young and old tech addicts with their natural roots.
In my exchanges with colleagues and writers who cover other aspects of the natural world, I am reminded of the question posed by the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It seems that Berkeley must have assumed the only acoustically sentient beings were human. This limited focus, centered on the human world, has remained—and maintained itself as a chasm between most of us and nature. The question is: Can we learn to reconnect to the wild through listening?
Except for music, I and individuals of forest-dwelling groups had no language in common when we met, so we didn’t talk much. Still, my best teachers were those who lived more closely connected to the wild natural. It was during long silences in the Amazon and Africa that I paid careful attention and began to decipher the messages inherent in natural soundscapes—the same revelations that once had a presence in all our lives. Over time we have forgotten how to connect with and interpret the rich sonic accounts transmitted through a wild soundscape. As whole systems, their exclusion from our written histories and the literature of both the biological sciences and music testifies to the ways we’ve come to hear the world; it also reveals how we now accept and tolerate current acoustic environments as normal.
It is possible to learn to listen in a totally involved active rather than passive way. A keen awareness of the world of living sound is achieved by anyone willing to learn how to become a careful listener. Living sound surrounds us. Our awareness of it intensifies our connection to the biosphere. The more time I’ve spent in the field, the more devout I have become as a listener. Soundscapes, the primal natural ones in particular, nearly always give me important signs about events taking place within my surroundings. Older, less disturbed sites still retain a classic acoustic integrity in which the subtle indicators—slight changes in bird-song, shifts in insect intensity, frog choruses suddenly silent—tend to be much more informative than those of compromised habitats. With their counterpoint and solid rhythms, they are the Johann Sebastian Bachs of natural sound. I came to learn, in ancient forests, that we reject these signs at great risk.
As a recordist I am a wary voyeur—a cautious intruder—taking what I can for the moment within the limitations of what my equipment will allow. I’m careful not to disrupt nonhuman animal lives in their coveted dwellings. I used to think that what I captured on tape was “authentic.” Now I know better, and I have become much more humble. The inherent meaning in soundscapes depends on the conditions of the environment from which they spring. When recorded and transferred to audio on a CD or iPod, for example, they become transformed and lose some—though not all—of their power. What you hear in your media performance center, sitting on a comfortable couch, encircled by an elaborate surround delivery system, is diminished when compared to what you would experience in real time in the natural world. It is there that the wind or rain on your skin, the smell of the forest floor, or the dry air of the desert combine with the stippled dawn or evening light, heightening the moment in ways that the playback of a recording can only begin to suggest. The very act of recording natural sound means to reach for an illusory momentary scrap, carefully selecting a time, place, and performance; like a great improvisational jazz recital, it is otherwise continuously variable because it is always selecting for and testing the limits of optimal acoustic expression. One day’s biophony will not remain static or repeat ever again. It is this divine, highly selective mutability over the course of time that is the authentic biophonic manifestation of the wild.
Yet, to be sure, short excerpts of recorded soundscapes can be exquisite—listened to with minimum effort and maximum joy—and, as abstractions, are the one aspect of the wild natural world that you can capture at least fragments of. On playback, these recordings come closest of any known medium to a replication of the actual experience. With the soundscape, there is always some physical element left intact—an ethereal resurrection of a fleeting voice.
You’ll hear creatures in almost any habitat on the planet, regardless of how wild it is or isn’t. “Some sing low, some sing higher / Some sing out loud on the telephone wire.” As I spend time actively listening, I discover totem natural sounds—sounds that are so exciting, they capture my attention and make me catch my breath. A mockingbird’s vast repertoire startles even the most tone-deaf human. An injured beaver mourning its lost mate and offspring with a voice quite unlike any I’d heard before. An ant. An earthworm. A virus. Sometimes it’s a frog soloist that stands out while appearing to be supported by the amphibian or insect voices of many other organisms.
Frequently the totem sounds I hear are made up of waves at the seashore. It could be the winter stream that runs full in the arroyo by our home during Northern California’s winter storms. Today it’s made up of the resolute calls and rapid hammering of a pair of pileated woodpeckers nesting just up the hill from my writing desk. These moments remind me why I began this odyssey in the first place. If I’m lucky, I’ll hear them nearly every time I trudge off into the field, anticipating another great adventure.
Even though humans got a late start recording and listening to the natural soundscapes of the world, we are beginning to pay some attention. With insightful professionals such as Martyn Stewart, Chris Watson, Walter Tilgner, and Jean Roché spreading the word, and more recently a host of informed groups such as [email protected], the Nature Sounds Society (www.naturesounds.org), and the World Listening Project ([email protected]), access to great information is universal. The numbers of people sitting quietly in the forests around the globe with earphones on seem to be surging with each passing month. With easy-to-use technologies, these men, women, and youngsters are providing us with marvelous new insights with each gigabyte captured. And some of them will be transposing this material into new forms of musical expression we’ve never imagined. Given the extraordinary power of this approach, the ideas expressed through natural soundscapes are finally gaining traction in the larger community.
One thing is clear: Where biophonies and geophonies still exist unimpaired by human noise, we find places of awesome revitalization and inspiration. Each of us working in the field has uncovered a particle of truth that, when assembled as a whole and shared with the rest of the world community, begins to serve as a composite lens through which we may be able to finally confirm the incomparable value of our natural sonic resources. It is a life’s effort that is deeply engaging and rewarding, both in an aesthetic sense and as a result of the sharpened sensitivity that natural-world expressions reveal. The work is physically and emotion
ally taxing, and often risky given the current difficulties of finding remote locations that remain tranquil and vital. Yet the sheer bliss and wonder that this endeavor bestows always outweighs the energy and the numerous hazards.
I’m often asked whether natural soundscapes could even be restored if we were not around to interfere. In addition to the now abandoned site in Northumberland, the example of Chernobyl, Ukraine, stands out. Humans completely disappeared from the site after the April 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown. Postaccident, the abandoned environment around Chernobyl became immediately silent—so much so that the first scientists sent to monitor the venue were caught by surprise. But equally astounding to them was the gradual return of wildlife sound, beginning three years after the disaster. While it is true that no acoustic monitoring or soundscape recordings were made before or after Chernobyl was built and functioning, a few recordists have been paying particular attention to the aftermath. Peter Cusack is one of these. A British soundscape ecologist and musician, he traveled to Chernobyl to capture sound in the spring of 2006 and again in the summer of 2007. Cusack’s work reveals a remarkably rich fusion of natural sound that is absent humans, a renaissance of part of the environmental structure that illustrates even more bandwidth discrimination than exists in some of the most pristine secondary-growth habitats in North America. The notes from his CD set titled Sounds from Dangerous Places summarize what even the most compromised and abandoned sites in the world would sound like without us. Of Chernobyl wildlife, Cusack writes:
In complete contrast to human life, nature at Chernobyl seems to be thriving. The evacuation of people has created an undisturbed haven and wildlife has taken full advantage. Animals and birds absent for many decades—wolves, moose, white-tailed eagles, black storks—have moved back and the Chernobyl exclusion zone is now one of Europe’s prime wildlife sites. According to anecdote some species left the area immediately after the accident, but all returned within three years and have flourished since.
The wildlife numbers and variety means that the natural sounds of springtime are especially impressive. Birds are impossible to avoid and there is one singing somewhere on virtually every recording I made. For me the passionate species-rich dawn chorus that we heard every morning of our visit became one of Chernobyl’s definitive sounds. Chernobyl is also famous for its frogs and nightingales; so nighttime concerts were equally spectacular.
Cusack told me:
The exclusion zone is now a prime site. However, I can’t make a comparison with what was there before. I tried to interview one of the biologists there, but he didn’t want to speak to me (don’t know why). In fact, getting any real information from officials or scientists was extremely hard work…. Other outside researchers and regular visitors—academics or folklore specialists from Kiev—said they had noticed definite increases in variety and quantities of wild-life sound as well. My impression is that wildlife really has increased in the areas evacuated by humans. The soundscape reflects this.
There are other examples of natural voices in a world without us, places that have returned to a state that might have existed when we first appeared. From some of the remote monitoring systems we’ve set up in unoccupied or vacated places, and where the soil is still nutrient-rich enough to promote a return of vegetation, we find that the answer to the question about whether some soundscapes can be restored is a qualified yes. The world can be a very lively place when we aren’t there to proclaim or assert our presence.
You’d think that desert habitats—dry, remote, thinly populated, and extremely fragile—would have a hard time returning to the delicate balance they once knew before human intercession. Some of these, too, are showing us that if we leave them alone long enough, they might return to a state of dynamic equilibrium. Often thought of as desolate places where nothing much happens, deserts are actually thriving habitats. As we drive past them at seventy miles per hour, what most of us see from the road are flashes of occasional scrub, and cactus materializing from mounds of sand or crusted soil. Our military shells and bombs the desert. Miners dig it out and cast aside the tailings. There’s a whole recreational group that breaks what it considers to be dead silence with dune buggies, dirt bikes, and ORVs, carelessly decimating fragile wildlife in the process of asserting its existence. Yet there are still deserts—even in the United States—that remain as some of the world’s more wild places.
When I lament that 50 percent of the sites I have recorded can now only be heard in my archive, my wife—nudging me back to the present—reminds me that 50 percent still remain. A few sites within the transition zone of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts make up some of the few locations in the Lower 48 that are completely noise-free for extended periods of time. They intersect beginning in northern Mexico and thrust into the United States along the southern reaches of New Mexico, Arizona, and California. While working on a Nature Conservancy site in the New Mexican panhandle, Ruth Happel and I mapped out an area of five square miles at Gray Ranch and recorded there in the spring of 1992. This High Desert bioregion contains many different microzones characterized by distinctive biophonies. Those still working on-site today report that the ranch is even more vibrant, since cattle grazing has been minimized and a strict conservation easement has been put in place. Not all of these more open and dry areas contain the immediately obvious aural territorial boundaries that we see clearly expressed in tropical regions. The density of living organisms is spread over a much wider territory; the biophony is far less rich. But it’s still there.
After several hundred years of overgrazing, this habitat is now in the throes of a slow recovery, just beginning to return to a healthy state. Areas with aspen, juniper, oak, mesquite, cactus, manzanita, alder, hackberry, shrub, Indian ricegrass and saw grass, broom, sagebrush, arrowweed, and ocotillo have returned and contain a unique mix of vocal creatures. Invasive species—both plant and animal—are being replaced with those more natural to the environment. Populated with complex blends of cactus and rock wrens, common and Chihuahuan ravens, western meadowlarks, five species of sparrows, green-tailed towhees, blue grosbeaks, longspurs, loggerhead shrike, vermilion and ashthroated flycatchers, horned larks, western kingbirds, common poorwills, burrowing and great horned owls, ground doves, aplomado falcons, red-tailed hawks, scaled quails, katydids, crickets, coyotes, gray foxes, mountain lions, jackrabbits, squirrels, bats, mice, beetles, ants, termites, grasshoppers, Mormon crickets, toads and frogs of many types, geckos, tortoises, and snakes—each with an expressive voice of its own—it whispers to us now without cattle, sheep, dogs, planes, cars, trains, or trucks within hearing range. Who said there was nothing in the desert?
Another region that remains mostly intact is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the site that the late Alaskan senator Ted Stevens and so many others had wanted to open up to oil drilling. In defense of his position, he tried to convince his colleagues that except for oil, nothing was there. During a 2005 tirade demanding that a remote and fragile site within the Arctic National Wild-life Refuge—known as the “10-02”—be opened up and leased for oil drilling, he passionately contended to members of the Senate chamber that the landscape was lifeless, holding up a featureless white poster board with no images, a clear symbol for him that this was a resource to be tapped in order to benefit the dire needs of consumers.
His arguments caused many to wonder, myself included. To answer my own questions, in 2006 I led three bioacoustic teams to record and film in the refuge. The region is a huge expanse in the northeastern corner of Alaska. It’s nearly the size of Maine, and it has no roads, paths (except for game trails), signage, or gift stores. Each of the three teams—headed by me (with Bob Moore from Maine); Martyn Stewart, a BBC nature recordist; and Kevin Colver, an ornithologist and medical doctor from Utah—covered a different site to get an initial sense of the acoustic dynamics of the refuge in contrasting biomes. One location, visited by Colver’s team, was on the north shore of the Beaufort Sea, almost at the Canadian bor
der. Another was up the North Slope, with Stewart presiding, at Sunset Pass. The third site, covered by me and Moore, was located in the southern foothills of the Brooks Range at Timber Lake, the westernmost extension of the boreal forest that stretches from the Canadian Maritimes all the way across Canada to the refuge. Over a period of ten days, we managed to record a total of about eighty hours of spectacular wild-life soundscapes that included more than seven dozen species of birds, and we had sightings of bears, Arctic foxes, wolves, caribou, squirrels, and mice.
Like the soundscapes of desert habitats, Arctic vocal collectives are sparse and subtle when contrasted with those of tropical or subtropical rain forests, where the vegetation and climate support intensely rich diversity. The flora is not as dense or diverse, and, where it does exist, the delicate tundra tussock spreads as far as the eye can see. It is not easy to navigate. Even walking takes some care and youthful skill. Food sources, for birds especially, are scattered widely. When the air clears from Siberian fires that occasionally foul the northern Alaskan sky in the spring and early summer, the smell of the tundra vegetation is numinous—it’s fresh and herbally fragrant. Everywhere we hiked, we picked what Native Americans call tundra tea—otherwise known as ayuk or Labrador tea—and brewed it for a refreshing change in diet. Bird sound was extremely light and hard to capture because of the near-constant wind that blows in from Siberia and the Beaufort Sea to the north and west. Yet birds are present, and they are vocal. They have a lot to communicate and only a short season in which to do it. As in the desert, birds here spread themselves out over vast expanses.
The Great Animal Orchestra Page 21
