The larger issue is that natural soundscapes are themselves one of the most fertile unexplored open sources of information we have. They contain secrets of our origins, our past, our cultural present, along with significant insights into our future—the increasing presence of our noise, the changes that are based on shifting climate or human evolution. But we need the sensibility, the education, the grace, the patience, and the curiosity to ferret out all these vital riddles. Bias- and agenda-free in the purest sense—with no way to frame them otherwise—biophonies contain the acoustic compass we need to guide us along the route of an ever-challenged planet. With ocean and atmospheric conditions warming, tides rising, and magnetic poles shifting, biophonies are adapting nearly everywhere as a result of interconnected impacts, many of which we simply do not fully understand yet. Some habitats contain whole new mixes of vocal organisms, while others have become seriously depleted or silent altogether.
When noise becomes part of our environment, we expend considerable amounts of energy to shut or filter it out. Yet, when we hear the soundscape organized in familiar patterns, it gets our attention—sometimes in very positive ways. I am reminded of my dad, who died more than a decade ago. Soon after he became afflicted with frontal lobe dementia in his late eighties, he was bedridden for nearly a year and could move only short distances on his own with the help of a walker or a nurse’s aide. Yet, at his ninetieth birthday party, held at a restaurant with a small dance floor, we brought some easy dance music to play through the establishment’s system. Seconds after it began, damn if he didn’t get up off his chair, move to the middle of the dance floor, and, with his thirtysomething grandsons and several other generations of relatives, dance unassisted and energetically for what must have been the better part of twenty or thirty minutes. Talking, watching TV, and being read to did nothing to link him to the present; nothing in the nursing home where he had taken up residence could bring him to his feet. Only the organization of sound—that ancient link to a world long past—could do it.
In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks refers to patients with numerous infirmities—from Parkinson’s to brain tumors—who, when they detect a familiar rhythmic pulse or tune, seem to transform themselves, shaking off their states of inactivity and becoming one with the music, clapping, moving their bodies, singing, or actually dancing. Given this response to music, what, then, might be the effect of organized natural sound? Louis Sarno suggests that a partial answer can be found with the Ba’Aka: when they become psychically and physically diminished by the stress introduced through contact with modernity, the soundscapes of their traditional deep-forest homes—far from civilization—have the same effect on them as music did on my father.
CHAPTER NINE
The Coda of Hope
In early 1990, on our way to record at what is now called Parque Estadual do Rio Doce, a small protected biological island in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil, we had an overnight layover in Rio de Janeiro. Through a good friend, a colleague and I were invited to have dinner with Antônio Carlos Jobim, the composer of “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Desafinado,” and “One Note Samba” and a pioneer of the bossa nova musical style. When “Tom” (as he was known to all Brazilians) heard of our planned soundscape mission, he spent the entire evening and early-morning hours recounting the days of his childhood, when he and his friends played under the jungle canopy, performing music with the subtropical forest animals that once came right to the edge of Rio. To animate his stories, he imitated the calls and songs of the beloved birds, frogs, and mammals that he remembered—many now long gone—with an eloquence and ease that suggested the vocalizations were part of his native language. His poignant imitation of a passerine—a finch—was so articulate that customers looked around to see if there was actually a bird in the restaurant.
“It’s sad,” he added, shaking his head slowly. “A couple of years ago I dedicated an album to these birds [Passarim]. Parque Estadual, where you’re headed in the morning, is four hundred kilometers north of here. And it’s a tiny remnant of what was one of the natural wonders of the world. It’s what remains of the same forest where I used to play with my friends. Only, the jungle’s edge used to be within walking distance of this restaurant. Last time I was there, the sounds were almost gone because the forest is split up into segments and completely surrounded by farms and development and its size is greatly reduced. Record it well. It’s the last of what was once the great Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic Rain Forest.”
It was close to sunrise when we finally returned to our hotel. With no time left for showers or a change of clothes, we were picked up early for the eight-hour transition from the hustle of central Rio de Janeiro to Rio Doce. Our campsite there was surrounded by huge deciduous trees over a hundred feet in height, especially the bottle-shaped barrigudas that sheltered us. On our first hike into the forest after we arrived, we found a rare group of golden lion tamarin monkeys high in the canopy, and captured high-pitched chatter perfectly forged. We were lucky. We never heard or saw them again.
Thousands of species that lived in this once magnificent forest are gone now. Many are extinct. Others that could migrate and required much larger unimpeded spaces moved elsewhere. By the time we arrived, less than 1 percent of the vibrant original forest habitat remained. The resident naturalist told us that it would be slow to recover even if more land was made available and returned from agriculture to a wild state, although some animals, such as the tamarin monkeys, were reintroduced with limited success. Many creatures, human and wild, that once established a precarious balance disappeared from this enchanted locale in just the last century. We could deeply sense the lack of density. A few rare woolly spider monkeys and some howler monkeys came near enough to record, but there was only light, sporadic bird-song. And there was nothing specific even from insects. The biophony sounded too thin—far less dense than we anticipated for a rain forest, even a dry one. It’s as if a full pit orchestra and a cast of dozens for a Broadway show such as Spider-Man had been reduced to a trio. My colleague was ecstatic that we recorded the monkeys—but that feeling was tempered by the sadness we experienced when we saw the incredible devastation evident nearly everywhere we walked. Slash-and-burn deforestation feels to me like the loss of a beloved family member—the missing are never completely forgotten. No place we walked was far enough away for us to escape the ghosts of modern human impact.
While we are drowning out the intricate natural sounds of the biophony and geophony with human-generated noise, we are also altering—or destroying—the wild natural world itself. We’re increasingly aware of that, of course, but with a global economy that progressively ignores the consequences of its own growth, it’s helpful—and sobering at the same time—to see the diminishing extent of the wild as it’s represented acoustically in my own archives.
In total, I’ve recorded the sounds of well over fifteen thousand species and collected more than forty-five hundred hours of natural ambience. Nearly 50 percent of the habitats I have in my library have become so seriously compromised—if not biophonically silent—that many of these once-rich natural soundscapes can now be heard only in this collection. It may not be the largest collection in total hours recorded—with solar-powered digital technologies and multiple systems in one venue, one can now collect thousands of hours of data in a single month. But my archive of focused and attended field recordings, emphasizing quality over quantity, holds the biggest and oldest collection of once-present biophonies from magical places, many of which we’re unlikely to hear live again. Why the change? The most obvious reason, of course, is the loss of representative habitats. A second is the increase of human noise that tends to mask the subtle aural textures of the remaining environments. A direct result of those issues is a decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small, that make up typical natural soundscapes.
Scientists generally agree that we have had five previous mass extinctions over the course of life on our planet. T
he theme of a recent World Science Festival held in New York was the Sixth Extinction. The story of the Sixth Extinction is set in the era we live in—the Holocene, a period beginning a dozen or so millennia ago. To some, this era includes the whole of human agricultural civilization and begins with the earth’s natural warming cycle following the last ice age—the time I wrote about in the opening pages of this book. At the beginning of the Holocene, the numbers and varieties of nonhuman animals were at a peak that we can barely imagine today. However, wherever humans migrated, great numbers of species were lost, usually beginning with the large mammals—the megafauna—and easy-to-capture ground-dwelling birds and their eggs. Now, according to one estimate made in the 1990s by the biologist Edward O. Wilson, approximately thirty thousand species per year are disappearing. In 2005 Wilson revised this prediction, saying that at the current rate of human disruption of the biosphere, half the life-forms on earth will have been lost by 2100.
Humans, populating Australia, New Zealand, smaller islands in the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the coast of Southern Africa, tapped into an abundance of animal and plant resources. No worldwide climactic or celestial event—such as an asteroid hitting the earth—triggered these great losses: it was our transformation of the environments we began to inhabit, combined with the invasive organisms that we introduced into our new habitats, including everything from microbes, to rats, to domestic cats, to other aggressive species, that have added to these effects.
Hawaii, for instance, may be a paradise for some. On the other hand, to others it is considered the extinction capital of the world. In a couple of centuries since the islands were populated by Europeans, fully half of the 140 bird species have disappeared. The Europeans, however, weren’t entirely to blame. The plumage of many birds was prized first by Polynesian royalty and later by colonists from America. So the birds with pretty feathers didn’t have much of a chance. Just one existing Polynesian cloak that was made entirely of avian feathers, dated to about six hundred years ago, required the killing of several thousand birds. But mollusks and some insects, such as a variety of moths, have also disappeared, their habitats utterly transformed by human intervention.
On the other side of the planet, off the eastern coast of Africa on the island of Madagascar, fifteen species of lemurs, an elephant bird (Aepyornis), a pygmy hippo, and giant tortoises have gone extinct—not to mention 90 percent of the lowland forests and an estimated half of the animals, including indigenous insects and birds. The forests no longer served as shelter for the creature life the Malagasy depended on, and an increasing cycle of loss became apparent not only from what was seen but from what was heard—and what wasn’t. Just imagine the soundscapes we might be hearing now if not for those casualties.
If we compare what presently exists with what we believe was happening sixteen thousand years ago, the differences are distressing. It isn’t only that species are dying off at alarming rates but, as Terry Glavin emphasizes in his book The Sixth Extinction, that we’re also losing a legacy of music, languages, and ways of seeing, knowing, and living. It’s a different world—and a different world won’t sound as it did five or five hundred or five thousand years ago.
As the creatures go, so goes a vast storehouse of information that speaks to the roots of nearly every cultural facet of our existence. When I shared the World Science Festival stage at Columbia University with Richard Leakey in the fall of 2008, we spent several hours that evening recounting various perspectives on the Sixth Extinction. The largest species extinction rate is occurring among mammals. According to a Scientific American article printed that same year, a staggering one in four mammal species is threatened. With the exception of a few sites, frog populations are generally in decline worldwide. And birds, aside from sheer numerical drops, are beginning to show radical signs of territorial shifting at both ends of migratory routes and many places in between. Mostly, Leakey and I agreed that things are beginning to quiet down even in the most pristine habitats. Perhaps John Cage’s “4′33″’ was set as a cryptic expression of the natural world soundscape in anticipation of a coming event he neglected to share with us.
The combination of shrinking habitat and increasing human pandemonium has produced conditions under which the communication channels necessary for creature survival are being completely overloaded. At the same time, we are denying ourselves an experience of the wild natural world that is essential to our spiritual and psychological health—a source of rooted wisdom that we simply can’t acquire from other aspects of our modern lives. The voices of the wild in their purest states, where no human noise is present, are splendid symphonies—ensembles to tap into and emulate. But echoing the sentiments of so many before him, the ecologist Bill McKibben once said: “What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it’s dangerous (it’s almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it’s solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). It’s that five miles out in the woods you can’t buy anything.” The resounding animal proto-orchestra—the concerto of the natural world that has inspired our own music—is diminishing in volume by the day. The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it.
Given how hard it has become to locate the native orchestrations of our unaltered habitats, I find that exposing the fundamentals of our musical past and the origins of complex intraspecies connections—challenging already—has become even more difficult. Especially amazing to me are the radical acoustic changes that have taken place in just a bit more than half the course of my life—a geological nanosecond.
With the ebb and flow of “normal” climate cycles, most natural soundscapes can be expected to change gradually over a long span of time. But the rate is occurring much faster than any of us could have imagined. A Native American woman, ninety-one when I recorded her in 1971, was even aware of the shift in her lifetime. Part of that prescient account was told to me by Elizabeth Wilson, elder of the Nez Percé tribe, one fall day in that year. It’s a narrative generated from a number of stories she told. And it is one that belongs to all of us. Incidentally, the flute melody heard at the beginning of this recording was from the same flute that Elizabeth’s son, Angus, cut from the reeds, whittled, and played at the Lake Wallowa site mentioned at the beginning of chapter 2.
The way the medicine men went and got guiding spirit
Contact with animals or whatever it is,
They kept on dancing every winter.
They got strong and power came to them. Power came to them.
Everything was different.
It must have been in those times when everything was different
Clear air and wilderness, and they could get in touch with animals like that.
But I don’t think they can now.
Everything gone—noise and all …
All right! Legend days will be over; humanity is coming soon.
No more legend days.
There will be no more
And they will be sad like I am,
Brokenhearted over my last child
Never to return again.
Death takes her.
And that’s the way it’s going to be;
I wander alone only in the higher mountains
And the heads of the streams all the way through.
I’m never down anywhere where it’s civilized country.
I’m way up in the wilderness.
Years to come people will lose their only child
And they’ll have the feeling just like I have; sad.
And that’s why these days we are that way.
Sadness comes to us.
Later, in another recording, Elizabeth also made a remarkable comment about a melody revealed in the misty breath of a buffalo in winter-morning sunlight. “A kind of whistle and sigh,” she said, her eyes looking off into t
he distance. “A whole song in a whistle and a sigh.” She didn’t elaborate. Yet these types of meaningful aphorisms were innate parts of every story she told.
Angus Wilson was reminiscing about the qualities of wind with his mother when I happened to catch their exchange on tape. “Up the Snake River, the wind blew in such a way that it sounded like a group of men and women off in the distance, all singing in a low soft voice at once,” Angus recalled.
“It’s a special wind that sounds like a whispered timmmmmmmm as it blows through the dead snags. We used to hear it everywhere, but you only hear it now down in the valleys along the river where fire has swept through,” his mother answered. “And even one snag will sound in the wind. But when there’s a bunch altogether, they all sing out to us. It’s a sad noise. I’ve heard that. It hits all the notes.” Angus and Elizabeth mused how the wind taught the water to sing sad songs, an emotion expressed often. Then the water, lonely because it wanted to sing with spirits other than the wind, taught the insects, who in turn taught the frogs, who taught the birds and the bears and the squirrels. The Nez Percé learned their music and dances from the geophony and their animal guides—the sounds of the natural world always driving forces in their lives, until contact with “modern” humans altered the soundscape.
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The Great Animal Orchestra Page 19