Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  One could, of course, define loud mathematically by decibel count, and one could define it physiologically by what human eardrums or even nervous systems could or could not bear, and the militaries had sonic weapons that took effective advantage of this principle.

  But this was noise, unmodulated chaotic white noise, not music. The goal was pain, not pleasure.

  Mario Roca was an electronic composer and musician. Who wouldn't be, when any sound made by any analog instrument that had ever existed, and an infinity of others that hadn't, could be either sampled and edited or synthesized from whole electronic cloth? They could be perfectly reproduced in their full subtleties and glories, and laid out on a keyboard, up to and including a Stradivarius violin, an African talking drum, an antique Gibson guitar, or for that matter full symphony orchestras of a single composer-musician's own creation.

  Was Mario Roca a popular musician, an avant-garde musician, or a classical musician? As far as he and his audiences were concerned, the distinctions were meaningless, except, of course, in Roca's bank account.

  By that definition, by what he commanded for performances, by his download sales figures, Mario Roca was a popular musician; not quite a pop star, but far from feeling any economic pain. He was an avant-garde musician if one defined avant-garde as always seeking to push the edges of all possible musical envelopes, and some that hovered on the other side of possibility for the moment.

  But he was a classical musician in the sense that he believed that music should be beautiful, should be pleasurable, should resonate positively with the human spirit, should not assault it with atonal noise in the name of theory, and that in some way that he did not yet entirely understand, the western musical scale, with its chords and harmonies, be it “longhair,” “rock,” “country,” “reggae,” whatever, as well as time-mellowed Indian, African, and Arabic musical structures, when successfully performed, resonated synergistically with an elusive something in the depths of the human psyche to produce that aesthetic and spiritual ecstasy.

  As far as he was concerned, any so-called “music” that didn't was noise.

  If he could somehow learn why this was so, he should be awarded the unfortunately non-existent Nobel Prize for Music. And somehow, he believed, he intuited, that understanding the mysterious appeal of even subsonic loud music beyond the range of the human ear, if it was at least true musical loudness, meaning harmonic and not a sonic weapon even if it threatened the eardrums, was the key..

  * * * *

  Caroline Koch would not quite admit that she loved cetaceans—whales, dolphins, orcas—though she was generally acknowledged as the human species’ top expert on the clade. But she was certainly obsessed by them, and in love with their reality, even before she made her conceptual breakthrough.

  For the better part of a century humans had been trying to communicate with these beings who shared the Earth with them and whose brains matched their own in complexity and in some species exceeded them in size, who sang long complex songs that mutated with their tribal affiliations, who stuck their heads up above the water to chatter at them in what seemed a shared frustration.

  Trying to teach them intermediary languages based on phonemes humans could hear. Processing their supersonic sounds down into the humanly audible to decode them into languages, to seek out a cetacean-human Rosetta Stone. Taking LSD with them in isolation tanks to commune on some mystical level beyond language.

  Nada. Rien de tout. Complete failure.

  Until Caroline Koch had her satori.

  She was watching a mediocre 3D movie at the time when it hit her.

  This was the reality of the cetaceans, or anyway a pale shadow thereof.

  No one had ever decoded a cetacean language and no one ever would, because there wasn't any. There wasn't any because cetaceans didn't need any. They had something much better.

  Everyone knew that whales, orcas, dolphins, had “sonar sight” like bats, like human radar, bouncing beamed sonic signals around their watery environment, and “seeing” by what came back from where—moving pictures of their environment similar, and indeed superior to, what humans perceived via reflected light.

  The sounds they made weren't language.

  They were a kind of sonic television. They sent out sounds and “saw” by what bounced back.

  Better than human sight or hearing, which relied on organs that were passive receivers, this was an active sense. That projected as well as received. And that was why no cetacean language had ever been parsed, why they didn't need one, why, if they actually understood, they must pity humans.

  They could project real-time moving images as well as receive. If a dolphin detected a shark, it didn't have to shriek “shark” in some language, it could broadcast the sonic image thereof directly.

  And if cetaceans could do that, could they not project the image of a shark when none was present? And if they could do that, could they not converse with each other directly in 3D imagery, tell stories, create epics?

  Were not the whale sounds far more than songs?

  Were they not 3D moving pictures?

  * * * *

  The more advanced military sonic weapons projected aharmonically mixed frequencies—noise—higher than the human range of hearing to torture their victims with pain. Mario Roca had also heard that there was something called the Panic Frequency, 14 cycles per second, just below the range of human hearing and off-key, which supposedly induced panic in crowds and may have already been used to do so, if you believed the right conspiracy theory.

  Mario Roca had no interest in sonic weapons or conspiracy theories, but upon reflection in his studio in the bleary hours before dawn, he had an epiphany that, once realized, had been hidden in plain sight all along.

  Inaudible sounds could have drastic effects on the human nervous system, psyche, even spirit if you were a musician and credited such a level. Loud inaudible high-frequency noise could bring humans screaming and puking to their knees. The inaudible off-key low-frequency panic note could turn them into fleeing lemmings.

  These were not exactly the effect that he was after.

  But what if you produced inaudible low-frequency music? Meaning subaudible notes and chords, or even interweaving fugal themes that harmonized and were on key?

  Easy enough to do with modern musical technology. Mario Roca quickly recorded a tune in the key of middle C, somehow always the natural default. Even the great twentieth century songwriter Cole Porter never learned to do anything else, and left transcriptions to other keys to the arrangers.

  Mario Roca had no interest at the moment in playing with such key transcriptions, though his software could have done it all in seconds. He simply used the same software to drop his composition written for middle C five octaves down, well beneath the threshold of audibility to humans.

  That much was child's play.

  Playing it back was something else again. He had the best amps and speakers short of football stadium gear, but even that would not have been adequate to play it back. Five octaves down from middle C meant ultra-low-frequency wavefronts, and that meant very long waves indeed. Which required huge speakers and the power to vibrate their diaphragms. He now seemed to understand what Blue Cheer had been fruitlessly and frustratingly about—even their speaker system would not have been able to play back this silent music.

  But this was decades later, and although Mario Roca was a thoroughly electronic musician, he was still a musician, not a sound engineer. If Cole Porter could leave the equivalent of such grubby details to human arrangers, surely he could leave the latter day version to their latter day versions, the sound engineers.

  So he brought his tune five octaves up again to middle C and transformed it into a four-part fugue for electronically synthesized and tweaked organ, acoustic bass, rock guitar, and sitar, dropped it back down to five octaves below middle C, and decided to call it The Music of Silence.

  * * * *

  Caroline Koch had enough grant money to hire a
small team of computer geeks to transpose cetacean ultrasound images into visual images of a kind, no sweat, they told her, once you knew that images, not language, were what you were looking for and had figured out the correct pixel pattern of the raster.

  Caroline Koch's lab was located on the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Francisco, where she could study dolphins in the wet and wild without having to hold them in captivity except for special purposes, and where, in season, she could do likewise with the migrating gray whales. This not being the whale season, what had been recorded and decoded was dolphin sonic traffic.

  When they played back that first video, it was both a breathtaking marvel, and something of a disappointment, though in retrospect one she should have anticipated.

  The disappointment was that the images were in black and white. They couldn't even give her false color like weather satellite imagery, because “sonic vision” by its very nature could not distinguish light and hue variation. The dolphin eye could, but the “melon,” the sonar receiver, could not. All sonic vision was inherently color-blind.

  The marvel of it, though, more than made up for the lack of color.

  The motion pictures, the video, the non-verbal non-language communication packets of the dolphins were not only 3D, they were penetrative, like ultrasound imagery, like X-rays, like CAT scans.

  Dolphins swam and cavorted hither and yon, and while their bodies were in black and white, they were transparent to each other's sonic vision. Their skeletons, their internal organs, their last meals, the very feces forming in their digestive tracts, were visibly suspended within their fleshly envelopes like fruit salad embedded in pearl gray Jell-O. And likewise the innards of the schools of fish they hunted and devoured, of passing sea otters, even of swimming humans.

  And of a huge great white shark with a half-digested seal in its gut whose image was passed around and repeated among the members of the pod like a set of reflections in a hall of mirrors, as they watched each other flee and circle the creature in something like a taunting undersea ballet.

  Which was beautiful, marvelous, but also mysteriously odd.

  Because as far as Caroline Koch knew, and she knew this territory quite well, there were no great whites anywhere near these waters.

  * * * *

  The sound engineers were easily enough able to design speakers that could vibrate five octaves down from middle C all right; in fact they had fun with the fantasy, believing that fantasy it would remain, like Frank Lloyd Wright's fantasy blueprints for a mile-high skyscraper.

  The speakers wouldn't have to be 5,000 feet high and wide, a mere 200 feet would do, hah, hah, hah, but the amps that powered them would have to be built around the kind of cryogenically cooled superconductive electromagnets used in advanced atom smashers, or they would suck up enough electricity to black out the entire west coast grid.

  You could do it, all right, if you could pay for it, hah, hah, hah!

  Having found the key to entrée into the sonic conversational realm of the dolphins on an imagery level, Caroline Koch set about trying to make “grammatical” sense of it before attempting to join in.

  This was more difficult than she had imagined. It was easy enough to get what the dolphins were perceiving in real-time and retelling each other. Moving images of tasty fish schools, followed by coordinated preying behavior. Suggestive sexual invitations that were accepted or declined. Births and deaths. The comings and goings of the bottoms of boats and the placements of fishing nets to be avoided.

  But at least half of the traffic seemed to have no reference to anything in their otherwise observable real-time realm, and was much more complex, to the point of chaotic incomprehensibility.

  Almost.

  Watery dolphin dances about the great crystalline roots of icebergs morphing into majestic copulations of mighty blue whales, battles with pods of orcas playing the fools such creatures were not, what seemed like speeded-up lifetime biographies of individuals being born and nursed, feeding and making love, dying, even assignations with female human swimmers, and often enough all of it interrupting threads as if competing for status, or interweaving harmonically like Bach fugues.

  Scientifically and intellectually incomprehensible to the human psyche, and yet so attractive somehow that Caroline Koch found herself watching it for hours and hours beyond such thoughts, beyond thought itself, immersed in . . . immersed in . . .

  Immersed in its beauty.

  And finally she emerged from one of these séances with an insight that made what Saul experienced on the road to Tarsus seem like a minor revelation.

  It was invented imagery.

  No wonder the cetaceans had never developed language! Human language was a pale shadow of this mode of communication. This was fiction and visual fantasy, dance to inaudible music, biography and pornography, comedy and tragedy.

  It was art.

  * * * *

  “You're out of your mind, Mario,” was the unanimous response from the suits and bankers whenever Mario Roca pitched the project. “A budget that would bankrupt a Third World banana republic to finance a live performance of something that no one can hear and can't be marketed on any recording medium because not even a stadium system could play it back? Where's the payback?”

  “We could tour it with our own sound system . . . “

  “Tour what? We'd have to tour it for a year at primo ticket prices just to break even, and why would anyone shell out a grand just for a cheap seat for a live performance of something they can't even hear?”

  “For the experience.”

  “What experience?”

  “We can't know until we do it, now can we?” was Mario Roca's standard but heartfelt response that unanimously went over like a fart in a flower shop. “This is really experimental music.”

  * * * *

  Technically speaking, actively entering the dolphin discourse was no big problem. Once dolphin ultrasound imagery had been decoded into human visible television, the code being already cracked, it was easy enough to reverse the process and code human visible television imagery into dolphin ultrasound imagery.

  But just as dolphin ultrasound imagery was color blind, what Caroline Koch could send back was all surface, not penetrative, and, she suspected, therefore something like a chimpanzee talking to humans via touch-screen icons in terms of sophistication from a dolphin viewpoint.

  She sent video of dolphin pods, which attracted attention, but what came back was what seemed like deliberately crude imagery of her footage transformed into grossly explicit 3D penetrative cetacean orgies. Sincere prurient invitation, or the dolphin version of dirty jokes?

  When Caroline Koch sent real-time video of herself, she got back her own body stripped naked to the organs diving through the air-ocean interface and swimming toward the stationary pod.

  She tried stock footage of many humans swimming with dolphins, and what was returned was breathtakingly beautiful bi-species ballet, dolphins and humans dancing harmonically to unheard music, morphing into something that would have turned both Busby Berkley and Rudolf Nureyev green with envy, with her own naked avatar cavorting with perfect grace among them.

  Eventually, dolphins began to take a shared lead, clearly, or so it seemed to her, trying as hard as she was to establish rapport, some kind of true communication.

  Atrocity images of dolphins entangled in drag nets from the delphine perspective, replete with penetrative visions of their lungs flooding and their suffocating organs deteriorating, to which Caroline Koch could frame no decent response. Lovely footage of the wildlife flitting about a tropical reef that she answered with hummingbirds and rain forest top canopy footage. Delphine births and human births. Dolphins swimming with sea otters among the waving fronds of an underwater kelp forest, humans strolling through deep woods with their dogs.

  All this seemed to be some kind of communication or esthetic interchange, which, she suspected, amounted to the same thing for the dolphins, but Caroline Koch h
ad no coherent notion of what she was trying to communicate to them, let alone what they were trying to communicate to her, save perhaps both of them simply trying to say this is our world, show us yours.

  Or just perhaps this is our world together.

  Caroline Koch, scientist, knew all too well this was unprofessional anthropomorphizing bordering on tree-hugging pathetic fallacy, but still . . . .

  Could they understand it? She didn't know. But she was an experimental scientist, was she not? It was worth a try.

  Best to try it from their world on up. Kelp forests, coral reefs, teeming with aquatic life, fish, sea otters, seals, dolphins themselves soaring and dancing through them. The surface of the ocean seen from above, with dolphins breaching, leaping, whirling in the air, splashing back beneath the sea in fountains of foam.

  That much the dolphins experienced themselves directly, and Caroline Koch had already shown them woods and rain forest footage of the human realm, which she now replayed, reinforcing the message, or so she hoped, by quick intercuts of recorded delphine videos of their own realm.

  Nothing came back, as if creatures struggling to understand the meaning were eagerly waiting for her to go on.

  So she did. The surface of the sea as the viewpoint majestically rose, revealing the subtle curve of the planet. The same thing, but over a continental land mass. And then the famous Big Blue Marble image of the Earth as captured by astronauts on the Moon. Animation of the planet slowly revolving in the black sea of space, dwindling away into one more point of light all but lost in a brilliant starscape.

  And then Caroline Koch stopped and waited. It seemed like an eternity before a response finally came, and when it did . . .

  Underwater video of a continental shelf dropping off into the deep abyss, with immense shadowy motions on the edge of perception, many, many pods of dolphins, circling, waiting, summoning spirits from the equally vasty deeps, or so it seemed to Caroline Koch.