Originally published 6 May 1996
Maybe it’s because I don’t hear as keenly as I used to that I’ve been paying more attention to my auditory sense.
My walks back and forth to college get longer as I linger to listen to the honking of Canada geese, the raspy territorial calls of red-winged blackbirds, the trombone love song of the meadowlark, the tunk-tunk of downy woodpeckers.
To the insects warming up for summer.
And to the frogs. An expanse of water erupting with sound, a thousand thumping throats raised in clamorous chorus — thawing mud made audible.
I wonder too about the sounds I don’t hear.
Those painted turtles sunning themselves on logs: I read somewhere that turtles are deaf and mute, but it’s hard to imagine that their gurgling internal organs don’t make some sound.
The water striders on the stream: Do their oaring strokes make a sound too faint to hear?
The mallards paddling across the pond: Would an underwater microphone record the push-push of their webbed feet, like the sounds we heard in those old submarine movies as the sub waited silently on the bottom and the destroyer thrummed terrifyingly overhead?
The natural world is full of sounds we do not hear because of the limitations of human hearing, or because they occur in places we do not go.
Audio recordist Jim Metzner has collected 33 extraordinary natural sounds that most of us are unlikely to hear in the ordinary course of our lives, recorded by himself and others, on an audio CD called Pulse of the Planet. The CD is accompanied by a handsome text, published by the Nature Company.
Metzner works electronic magic to make these unfamiliar sounds accessible to our ears.
The buzz and clack of ants, termites, and leafhoppers are amplified to the human scale.
The high-pitched echo-location signals of bats, normally beyond the range of our hearing, are lowered in frequency so that we hear bats as they swarm — a lovely liquid sound.
The songs of thrushes are stretched out to one-quarter speed, revealing unexpected complexity.
The voices of elephants have a low-frequency component that is below the range of human hearing. These deep-throated calls carry for great distances, like the low-frequency conversations of whales that carry for miles through the sea. Metzner speeds up an elephant call — letting us eavesdrop on a love song that rolls across the veldt like the rumble of a distant storm.
He takes us under the Arctic ice to listen in on the otherworldly commerce of bearded seals, and into the Amazon rain forest canopy to hear the strange marimba-like music of the oropendola bird.
And then, there are the sounds of the cosmos.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as cosmic sound. Mechanical vibrations cannot travel in the vacuum of space. Stars blow up without a whisper. Galaxies turn on hushed axes. The Big Bang happens in utter silence; it might better be called the Big Flash.
But electromagnetic waves do propagate through vacuum, and Metzner turns these cosmic radiations into sound, letting us listen to the greater universe.
We hear the insect-like chorus of Jupiter, recorded by the Voyager spacecraft, presumably caused by the solar wind interacting with electrons in the giant planet’s magnetosphere. We hear the mysterious sputterings of Uranus’s moon Miranda. We hear the rhythmic drumming of a pulsar. And, yes, even the flash of the universe’s beginning is made audible, a dull and lifeless static from which all creation springs.
In the introduction to his CD and book, Metzner makes reference to an observation of audiologist Alfred Tomatis that the symbol of the question mark is derived from the shape of a human ear. This is a hint, says Metzner, that in the face of the many challenges we face as individuals and as a species — the ominous decisions and awesome opportunities — we need to stop making such an ungodly racket and perk up our ears.
A few weeks ago, just at dawn on a rainy morning, I stood on a plank walkway in a wetlands in New York state. The creak of the wooden planks, the raindrops pittering onto the surface of the water, the purling currents among the pilings, the rustle of loosestrife, the music of birds and the beating of wings combined into a symphony such as I have seldom heard before. I knew that nature was telling me something — about itself, about my own life — that I should hear.
I stood for a long time, eyes closed — and listened.
