Because there are no services over the 1.5 million acres of the designated landscape, human activity is minimal—except for hunters, summertime hikers, and river rafters. So for long periods of time there is little to interfere with wildlife and wildlife sound. While sitting around our campfire, we were told by our guide, the Fairbanks ecologist and poet Frank Keim: “I’ve sometimes hiked for weeks in the Brooks Range and never saw or heard another human being.”
Introducing us to candle ice, Keim described how these formations break away from the leading edge of river ice when they melt. As they do so, they jingle like high-pitched glass wind chimes. The ice-melting soundscape portends other occurrences that Keim also asked us to consider. Holding up a fistful of pencil-shaped melting ice shards, he cautioned to no one in particular:
In the spring, whenever sunlight warms the ice, it travels down through the surface, first warming up motes of surface dust that absorb heat more quickly. Bits of dirt or dust penetrate the ice vertically, causing the ice to melt in pencil-thin shapes. At the base of the ice, there’s an awful lot of algae, and the algae begin to bloom. With the blooming of the algae, the crustaceans—like copepods—eat the algae. The fish eat the crustaceans. The seals eat the fish. And then, of course, the polar bear and humans eat the seals. If this ice doesn’t exist—and it’s quickly disappearing because of global warming—if you don’t have the ice, you don’t have any of that.
Our time in the refuge reinforced for all of us a sense of what the natural world would be like with none or only a few of us around in a truly wild environment. On a more local scale, not twenty minutes from where my wife and I live in Northern California lies a low range of hills called the Mayacamas Mountains, which run north to south and divide the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Near the top of the ridge, there is a state park that is both quiet and sonically active. It isn’t old growth, which would be a bit much to expect in an active rural spot, but with thoughtful management over the past several decades, the area has returned to much of its original vegetation—oak chaparral, some alders, and Douglas fir—at an altitude of about twelve hundred feet. The dawn and evening choruses are resonant and lovely, although I’m sure they don’t sound as they did a hundred or more years ago, when author Jack London roamed these same hills. In fact, the textures have changed even as I’ve been hiking, listening, and recording there over the course of nearly two decades. The obvious changes mostly have to do with the climate and possibly the subtle effects of newly recognized shifts in the earth’s magnetic field. Rainfall amounts have changed—precipitation varies much more widely over the course of the year—and the winter seasons are weeks shorter. Birds reach the peak of their dawn chorusing between eleven and twenty days earlier, on average, than when I first began to visit this site in 1994.
Otherwise, the park, a 2,700 acre site with miles of trails, is pretty quiet. Early in the morning, with little aircraft traffic and almost no visitors, there are few interruptions. At first light, one can expect to record for half an hour or more without hearing a single plane or motorized vehicle—a remarkable feat in our time and in this part of the country. That’s because the airspace on either side of the park is framed by plane traffic either inbound from the north to San Francisco International Airport or outbound from the south to northwestern parts of the country or Europe (over the North Pole route), and the planes are usually out of acoustic range of the park’s airspace.
In more youthful moments and younger days, I would feel a deep yearning to “get out of town” and travel to exotic places to experience real, wild sound. Then I realized that right in my own backyard are locations that have hardly ever been approached with a microphone. I’m willing to bet that there are many more of these unusually active biological islands than we think. Most professional recordists I know have favorite local spots that they like to visit but are reluctant to speak of for fear of having them overrun by those of us looking for places to listen and record.
To get to überexotic places to hear the remaining intact, majestic animal orchestras, you’re going to have to take a bit of a hike, I’m afraid. It’ll be worth it, though—something akin to catching a glimpse of an ivory-billed woodpecker, or a truly dark starlit sky. The problem is that even in remaining old-growth stands in temperate regions, the numbers and kinds of seasonal and migrating birds, frogs, and insects have changed, due in part to the fact that key aspects of their normal habitats both inside and outside the old forests have been altered. Changes include the introduction of exotic and invasive species of insects such as Africanized bees, the yellow crazy ant, fire ants, and the Argentine ant; mammals such as rabbits in Australia, possums in New Zealand, and the mongoose in Hawaii; and aggressive birds, mollusks, fish, and even frogs—some, but not all, brought in to mitigate other problems that we felt needed attention.
Typical of these remaining major sites is the Dzanga-Sangha rain forest in the southwestern part of the Central African Republic—home to the Ba’Aka described earlier. It, too, is changing because of heavy logging pressure from countries in Europe and Asia. But at the time when Louis Sarno’s recordings were first made, the African soundscape was likely much as it had been fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. The music of the forest that Sarno described when he first arrived in the mid-1980s was “older than the pyramids, unchanged over time with all its emotional content, intricacy, and all of the permutations worth chasing after.” Sarno, more than anyone, exemplifies the idea that there is a numinous and practical connection between the sounds of an unaltered landscape and the evolution of human music, dance, and even, probably, language. He has witnessed firsthand, over the course of almost three decades, the transformative processes that turn soundscape into human musical performance. Because he is on-site, living in the forest with his new family, Sarno is now observing the impact modern civilization is having on those who once got every sonic inspiration from the vocal organisms that surrounded them.
But it is not too late. Sites in the far reaches of Alaska, the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, Canada (Ontario, parts of British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories), the floodplains of Brazil’s Pantanal, protected regions of Papua New Guinea, and even sections of northern Minnesota and the Adirondacks are still rich with natural sound. To the extent that we travel lightly, conscientiously, and with respect, some of these locations still remain as sonic monuments—places within the otherwise clamorous labyrinth we’ve chosen to live in that vibrate with wisdom, spirituality, healing, and musical inspiration.
At the conclusion of my public talks, I’m invariably asked what we can do to help preserve our remaining natural environments. It’s easy: leave them alone and stop the inveterate consumption of useless products that none of us need. Whenever we decide to go into the wild, we should go quietly and leave things as we find them. We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that any of us can improve on the natural world by our presence or by what we manage to create. It evolved naturally, selectively, and adaptively over the great sweep of time, through all kinds of trial and error. Bending the natural world to our will and purpose is done at a level of self-inflicted violence that has wide-reaching implications we cannot necessarily see or hear.
In the end, before the forest echoes die, we may want to step back for a moment and listen very carefully to the chorus of the natural world, where rivers of sound flow from crickets, the tiniest frog, whirring insects, wrens, condors, cheetahs, wolves—and us. The whisper of every leaf and creature implores us to love and care for the fragile tapestry of the biophony, which—after all—was the first music our species heard. Those messages told us that we weren’t separate but rather essential parts of a single fragile biological system, voices in an orchestra of many, with no more important cause than the celebration of life itself.
Acknowledgments
For support and/or inspiration, special thanks to: Phil Aaberg, David Abram, Animal Welfare Institute, Skip Ambrose, Jelle Atema, Frank Awbrey, Joseph and Addie Axelrod, Phil Baile
y, Ken Balcomb, Christina and Carroll Ballard, Luis Baptista, Gregory Bateson, Paul Beaver, Terry Bell, Wendell Berry, Doug and Cheryl Breitbart, Anne and Alexander Buck, John Cage, Calgary Zoo, California Academy of Sciences, Jack Campisi, Laurence Campling, Joel Chadabe, Leila Chamma, Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, Kevin Colver, Community Foundation, Mike Cumberland, Jim Cummings, Peter Cusack, Lauren Dewey-Platt, Jannie Dresser, Bob Drewes, Dan Dugan, Loren Eiseley, Evan C. Evans III, Gina Farr, Wolfgang Fasser, Kurt Fristrup, Stuart Gage, Google, Patricia Gray, Herman Gygi, John Hanke, Mike Hanke, Gerry Haslam, Don Hodges, Wes Henry, Al and Michal Hillmann, Bob and Olivia Hillmann, Jack Hines, Institute for Music and Brain Science, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Charles Jurasz, Roger Kaye (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Alaska), Sam Keen, Frank Keim, Garret Keizer, Andy Keller, Sherry and Dan Krause, David Kuhn, Linda and Jim Kuhns, Casey Langfelder, Aldo Leopold, Lobitos Creek Ranch (Steve Michelson), Rick Luttmann, Madrone Audubon Society, Malcolm Margolin, George Marsh, Sir George Martin, Doug and Kathy McConnell, Chuna McIntyre, Bill McKibben, Craig Miller, Nick Miller, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Moog, Bob Moore, Rebecca Moore, Farley Mowat, Murie Center (Steve Duerr), NASA (James Hansen), National Park Service, Nature Sounds Society, Nick Nichols, Ken Norris, Kevin O’Farrell, Mary Oliver, Pauline Oliveros, Loran Olsen, Bob Orban, Tim and Meara O’Reilly, Kevin Padian, Aniruddh Patel, Bryan Pijanowski, Ken Plotkin, Doug Quin, Richard Ranft, Jeff Rice, Mark and Sarah Roos, David Rothenberg, R. Murray Schafer, Bill Schmidt, Alan Shabel, Florence and Paul Shepard, Skywalker Sound, Smithsonian Institution, Derek Solomon, Stanford University (CCRMA and the library), Wallace Stegner, Christopher Struck, Howie Thompson, Mark Tramo, Karen Treviño, Rudy Trubitt, Jack Turner, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, University of Utah (Marriott Library), Van Dyke Parks, Casey Walker, Lilla and Andy Weinberger, Hans-Ulrich Werner, Terry Tempest Williams, E. O. Wilson, Sam Wong, and Aaron Ximm.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the pioneers and leaders in the field, such as Ludwig Koch, Jean Roché, Walter Tilgner, Lang Elliott, Louis Sarno, Steven Feld, Fred Trumbull, Roger Payne, Katy Payne, Chris Clark, Martyn Stewart, Chris Watson, Ruth Happel, Rob Danielson, David Monacchi, and Volker Widmann, to name a few of the outstanding ones. And then the major film field recordists and media sound designers, such as Randy Thom, Ren Klyce, Andy Wiskes, Gary Rydstrom, Walter Murch, Joe Harrington, and Ben Burtt, all of whom understand that sound, abstracted from its original context, is simply an illusion in which every choice is an edit, every edit a work of art, and each subsequent creation an ode and homage to places of great splendor—real and imagined. It’s a world where some produce magic while others choose to think of their work as unmitigated within an abyss of delusion.
Gillian MacKenzie, my superb agent, lit the fire. John Parsley, my editor, stoked it with insight and his finely tuned combo of eye and ear for proper voice and structure. Jeff Galas put the lyrics in order. Karen Landry, copyeditor, perfected the entire narrative. Kat Krause, my dear, tolerant wife, waited ever patiently while I sat each day for nearly two years figuring out how to shape a single thought into a story.
And to Seaweed, who, when she sensed moments of desperation during the process, would jump into my lap and purr in a voice of quiet inspiration—the sound of all animal life, if one’s ears are sufficiently attuned. Or maybe she was just plain hungry.
Notes
Chapter 1: Sound as My Mentor
A note about the recording of Muir Woods: The original field recordings done for In a Wild Sanctuary were of quite poor quality. Although originally I was going to include my own recording, the tape hiss on the sample I saved was completely unacceptable. Remember, it was my very first attempt to capture natural soundscapes in the “wild.” Instead of that example, I’ve used a terrific audio clip from the archive of Dan Dugan, field recordist, audio electronics designer, and current board member of the Nature Sounds Society (http://www.naturesounds.org), who has done extensive work at that site over the past several years and who has really captured the acoustic moment of the place as I remembered it.
Citadels of Mystery, Takoma Records, 1975, was the first album to use a guitar synthesizer and to include a Western composition of material with lyrics in the Quechua language.
Impressed by the sounds of the waters off the coastal environments of Normandy and Brittany, Claude Debussy was so passionately inspired by the acoustic seascapes that he wove those feelings indelibly into his signature piece, La Mer.
The information on Walter Murch, Academy Award–winning sound designer for Apocalypse Now and also sound designer for The Conversation, The Rain People, and The Godfather, is from a recorded interview in Bolinas, California, on February 17, 2010.
With regard to the relative sound levels between the Grateful Dead and snapping shrimp, the loudest concert currently on record was measured on July 15, 2009, at a KISS show presented at the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest in Ottawa, Canada. It was there that a level of 136 dB was measured by City of Ottawa By-Law officers at the sound tent during the actual live performance, making it the world’s loudest show played by any band.
Just prior to the time Schafer first used it, the term soundscape— introduced to describe a general notion of sound within a cityscape—had been mentioned briefly in a paper by Michael Southworth titled “The Sonic Environment of Cities,” Environment and Behavior 1, no. 1 (June 1969): 49–70. Southworth never expanded on the concept. Schafer is credited as the first to give the word its more inclusive definition and to use it as a term of art within the field of acoustics.
In order to consider the brilliant structural components of a piece of audiotape, imagine millions of tiny microscopic particles of metal, each aligned randomly in relation to the others. When the magnet head of the recorder transmits an analog of signal, the fragments reposition themselves in a way that, when developed in a certain type of solution, creates an image on the tape that kind of looks like a bar code. That “bar code,” when drawn across a playback head on an analog recorder, “reads” as sound.
The incomplete sense of the acoustic world that we get from sound fragmentation is sufficient but for the one major shortcoming revealed in a quote from an article about birdsong published in an anthology entitled The Origins of Music (2000), edited by Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown: “Song has two main functions: repelling rivals and attracting mates.” Although this is considered to be a major reference, not one of the twenty-six articles in the anthology speculated on the connection between an individual bird’s song and the complex acoustic structure of the soundscape in which the bird sings. This seminal connection is crucial to our understanding not only of birdsong but of all animals’ sounds and their influence on the origins of human rhythm and music.
Chapter 2: Voices from the Land
Of the many ancient water and sound myths, one folktale I love comes from the Kawésqar, a tribal group—of which less than two dozen native speakers remain—that lives in southern Chile on Wellington Island.
A tale is told about a young man in the past that, a day in which his father was off hunting nutria [a large rodent] and birds, left in search of a taboo nutria, and killed it. He did so when his father and mother were not there, since they left long before he killed the nutria: this is what the story tells.
But then the story tells that a heavy wind rose, and a violent storm began. And the rain came down till water covered all of the earth.
The young man who killed the nutria remained alive, and ran to save his life, and, how the story tells, he ran to the top of a hill. He remained in the top of the hill, and waited for the flood to retreat. The flood always retreats quickly, doesn’t it?
So the flood retreated, and when he saw he could do it, he went down the hill. When he saw that his brother and mother and father were drowned and hanged from a tree, he went down off the hill, as the story tells.
So he saw that everybody was drowned; and he also saw animals, whales and dolphins scattered throughout the woods, as the flood retreated. So the
young man of the past went away. Along the way he met a girl, and the two of them began to build a boat.
They had nothing to build the boat with; so they decided to cover the boat with grass, and they remained there till morning came, this is what the story tells.
When the cold came, the young man had a vision: he dreamed of a coipo [another Chilean term for nutria], he said he saw the rodent in his dream. He also said he dreamed of food, and that he ate in his dream, it was a kind of vision of the future.
And while he was eating in his sleep, he woke up, and said to himself:
Why was I dreaming of this coipo? I killed the coipo, and ate it while I was sleeping; but how, if I have no fire?
Then he fell asleep again, and then he woke up: then he woke up his woman, too, who had become his wife, how the story tells. And he said to his wife:
Look, go and get a big wooden stick, I dreamt that a coipo was coming, so I send you to fetch the stick to kill him, and we will eat it.
So he felt asleep again, and everything he dreamt, appeared. So the earth was full of animals, their songs, and things again, this is what the story tells.
Chapter 3: The Organized Sound of Life Itself
Bloat is the term used to describe a group of hippos.
In the realm of acoustic imaging, I had the opportunity to work as an occasional intern with the late Dr. Thomas Poulter, who, in the latter part of the ’60s, worked for the Stanford Research Institute in California designing echo ranging experiments with sea lions. In one experiment, he placed two different kinds of same-size disks—made of wood, plastic, and/or metal—at a distance of twenty-five yards to test if, by echolocation, the subject animals could distinguish between them. In most cases they did—with remarkable accuracy.
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