With regard to the Pitjantjatjara and sonic GPS, while recording in a riverine rain forest north of Daintree in northeast Australia in 1989, I was introduced to the late Simon Fjell, an ecologist who worked in the field of sustainable agriculture. After dinner in our forest lodgings beside a river, he recounted some of his experiences with the Pitjantjatjara, a nomadic Central Australian aboriginal tribe:
One group member, for example, will often describe a distant meeting place to another almost completely by acoustic clues. They speak in great detail, mind you, of what would appear to us an immense habitat of flat, dry, featureless landscapes, where we would find almost nothing to distinguish one location from another. Parts of Australia are filled with open spaces like these, and it isn’t as if there are obvious geological features there—to the Pitjantjatjara, it is the combined acoustic effect of small local plants and animals that serves as a guide. Sound is one of the most important features they isolate as part of their holographic map, the three-dimensional map of the world as it manifests in their minds.
As members of the Pitjantjatjara travel either alone or in small groups from semiarid to arid country, they identify the species of animals that range through the biomes [distinct habitats] they traverse. They have also learned that the syntax, timbre, frequency, and duration of those animals’ vocalizations have evolved to match subtle geographic and climactic variations in their habitats. These vocal differences serve as beacons to them as they travel through the desert.
(The quote above comes from Fjell’s description. A recorded session originally published in Notes from the Wild, Ellipsis Arts, 1996, by the author.)
Rainsticks from the Amazon Basin region are typically four- or five-foot-long hollowed-out bamboo cylinders about three to four inches in diameter. Tiny holes are bored along the length of the shaft, and either thorns or metal tines are inserted into the holes so that they protrude throughout the inside of the column. Then, small seeds or glass beads are added to the inside of the shaft, and the tube is sealed off at both ends. When the stick is rotated or shaken, or when either end is raised off a horizontal plane, the seeds hit the tines and the resulting effect sounds like drops of rain.
Chapter 4: Biophony: The Proto-Orchestra
While capturing those first field recordings in Kenya in the early 1980s, I was not yet completely separated from the idea that individual animal recordings, based on a species-specific model, were more relevant. My limited field task was reinforced by requests coming from the California Academy of Science’s birds and mammals department, with which I was then associated. Recording with a wider scope and objective was not an easy step to take for a couple of reasons: One was because there was almost no support or precedent, so I could not call on others to tap into their experience. The other was that the equipment needed to record in stereo outside a very controlled interior environment (such as a traditional recording studio) was not readily available, making improvisation with available technologies the key to any success. Wind and humidity were the biggest impediments. The learning curve was precipitous.
The first time I heard a hyrax it scared the hell out of me, its ratcheting voice filtered by my exhausted brain as some kind of warning growl. Except that it’s a completely friendly, cute, and furry animal about the size of a small domestic cat. Anatomically and genetically, it’s remotely related to an elephant.
As the nighttime Kenyan soundscapes began to reveal themselves as structured acoustic fabrics, my lingering doubts about what I was hearing began to disappear; buttressed by the spectrogram images that I later printed out, the soundscapes showed enough detail to infer that frog and insect choruses occupied several distinct frequency niches. When the birds and mammals vocalized, their characteristic expressions fit neatly within the free slots not taken by insects. Additional free slots were filled by the bat and hyrax, while distant hyenas and elephants found still other niches.
Ken Norris, then head of the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had distinguished himself as having discovered the mechanism through which dolphins and other toothed whales perform echolocation. He was a singular supporter of niche hypothesis and immediately saw the connection once it was shown. Other biologists, such as Luis Baptista, E. O. Wilson, and several entomologists who were at first skeptical finally began to accept the relevance of acoustic partitioning and the roles it plays in the field of bioacoustics.
The other great ape species include orangutans, bonobos, and chimpanzees.
Ruth Happel currently lives and works in North Carolina, raising a daughter with her husband and working as a naturalist and wildlife videographer and photographer.
The field of soundscape ecology, being so new, has few noted or published observations related specifically to the subject of how animals learn to partition their voices. From my recordings and time in the field in minimally altered old-growth habitats, I have found that the spectrograms from soundscapes captured at those sites demonstrate clearly partitioned patterns—far more than those from stressed or secondary-growth biomes, whose patterns either tend toward entropy or are nonexistent. So I would make an educated guess that the signals evolve in concert with one another to accommodate the characteristics of each creature’s unique voice.
Chapter 5: First Notes
Ross Lee Finney, head of composition at the School of Music at the University of Michigan when I applied in the mid-’50s, used that exact expression (“the guitar is not a musical instrument”) when I went for my interview one fall day. The other music institutions (Juilliard and Eastman, in particular) dismissed the guitar in much the same terms. At the time, the guitar was not on the list of acceptable musical instruments within the Academy in the United States.
The early May 1963 Weavers reunion concert at Carnegie Hall featured Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, Erik Darling, Frank Hamilton, and me. Bill Lee, the father of film director Spike Lee, played bass.
The “control of sound” idea was and is controversial only for the reason that every person, musician, and researcher has a different idea of music’s components.
A young child at a piano keyboard can randomly choose and hit a particular key, thus controlling a sound (amplitude and pitch). But there is not necessarily structure, nor is the key chosen necessarily intentional.
Curt Olson, a soundscape recordist and naturalist living in Minnesota, told me the details of this beaver-dam-encounter story and provided a recording. He gave his permission to use both.
The Joel Selvin conversation is from January 23, 2011. Used with permission.
In one “orchestra” scenario—almost following an evolutionary course—the insects lay the foundation. The frequencies of whirring wings and rates of stridulation are generally fixed by the particular species, but they will subtly shift as a result of constantly adjusting for external forces such as temperature, sunlight, and weather. Once those positions are taken in the ensemble of the audio spectrum, the amphibians and reptiles enter to claim sound-free niches. Then birds enter the chorus, followed by mammals. Eventually each voice finds an open channel or time to perform. If nonhuman creatures depend on their voices to survive, then they will each need a niche in which to be heard unimpeded.
Oka! Amerikee is also a 2010 film partly based on Louis Sarno’s life, produced and directed by Lavinia Currier.
Chapter 6: Different Croaks for Different Folks
Girolamo Savonarola, the dictatorial Florentine friar who ruled between 1494 and 1498, when he was finally executed, tried to ban the output of all forms of art that he considered morally corrupt.
Chuna McIntyre’s recordings can be heard on the title Drums Across the Tundra, available at http://www.wildsanctuary.mobi/buy/index.php?route=product/category&path=39.
As we came to define our sense of order in the world with regard to nature, it became logical to deconstruct the whole into parts that contrast sharply with a more holistic natural reality. Thus, the rational
extension became “it” (nature) and us.
AmbiSonic sound fields work best when playback is transmitted through anywhere from three to more than a hundred fifty speakers in a given space. It is one of the few systems that truly provides a three-dimensional spherical illusion of space on playback.
“All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir,” copyright 1979, was written by Bill Staines. There’s a wonderful recording of the tune by Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcG1JNpazN4&feature=related. Lyrics used with permission.
Chapter 7: The Fog of Noise
The Yellowstone recordings include a horned lark, black-capped chickadee, cedar waxwing, tree sparrow, rosy finch, house sparrow, song sparrow, Steller’s jay, raven, magpie, and northern flicker.
When sound is present—particularly in a closed space—as the air molecules generated from the source are excited into motion, they tend to warm the environment slightly.
In automobiles or motorcycles, straight-piping is a modification in which the catalytic converter and muffler are removed in an effort to increase performance, with the subsequent result of greatly increased noise, the latter often being the goal in itself.
In addition to acoustic debris, many English words and phrases describe noise. No single definition has emerged victorious, and they each represent pretty much the same phenomenon. Among them, acoustic garbage, unwanted sound, and useless acoustic information.
Weimin Zheng’s quote is from personal correspondence, February 3, 2011. Used with permission.
Even in our recreational activities, the powerful material world that symbolizes the relentless American dream of prosperity and freedom may be at the very heart of our noise problem. As a nation, we have been historically preoccupied with the machinery that drives our sense of might.
The World Health Organization report “Burden of Disease from Environmental Noise” concludes as a guideline that the annual average nighttime exposure to outside noise should not exceed 40 dB. Before my wife and I got rid of our twenty-year-old refrigerator, it registered a noise level of 55 dBA one yard away from the appliance.
Chapter 8: Noise and Biophony / Oil and Water
Before the spring of 1984, my first trip to Mono Lake, no one to my knowledge had experimented with the effect of species’ vocalizations taking place half submerged in a marine environment. To do that, we had to record in two media—water and air—simultaneously. We subsequently and in short order captured recordings of alligators and hippos doing much the same thing. The sounds, because of the media in which they are transmitted, are very different from one another. One can only wonder if they carry multiple streams of information.
As far as recovery from human intervention, depending on the impact, raptors (Swainson’s hawks, for instance) have been known to abandon their nests when disturbed, never to return to the same spot, while other species are not affected in the least and have learned to thrive even in the most heavily populated urban areas. Even though my wife and I live in a relatively quiet rural spot, it is still quite noisy—way too noisy to record natural sound, for example. Traffic noise from a highway 1.5 miles away, constant private and commercial aircraft overhead at all hours of the day, and our human presence do nothing to deter a pair of house finches from nesting only a few feet above us in the rafters just outside our door. Each spring and summer, they breed several clutches of offspring.
The relatively slow pace of bioacoustic research has largely been the result of four factors: disinterest on the part of traditional institutions still favoring older models, the lack of funding necessary to acquire technologies or software needed to conduct the studies and evaluate huge amounts of data, a lack of trained personnel, and finally—except with regard to indoor spaces (as addressed in books such as The Soundscape of Modernity by Emily Thompson)—a lack of collective cultural will to probe too deeply into the realm of natural acoustic environments. That climate is changing, with new studies and publications coming from Michigan State University’s Envirosonics program, and a similar investigative program firmly in place at Purdue University under the aegis of Bryan Pijanowski.
Our recording choices at the time were based on the limits of our technologies and levels of funding: a seven-inch reel of tape on an early portable stereo recorder would last a total of about twenty-two minutes if we were recording for optimum quality. Each tape reel weighed nearly a pound, and it was expensive. So for every hour of recording, we needed about three pounds of tape and 20 percent of a fresh battery supply, for a total outlay of roughly forty dollars. The tape machine itself weighed twenty-five pounds when loaded with the twelve D-cell batteries needed to power it. With just the equipment alone—and for just about eight hours of recording time—our backpacks began at a minimum weight of around fifty pounds. These days, with ultralight trail packs, equipment, etc., weighing about twenty pounds altogether, we are able to hike into the field with clothes, food, water, sleeping bags, a tent, and recording equipment, with enough technology and supplies to record comfortably for a week or more.
Along the same lines as Ken Balcomb’s work, a summary of the impacts of marine anthrophony can be found in “Lethal Sounds,” NRDC report, October 6, 2008, http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/marine/sonar.asp.
Information from Allison Banks and Chris Gabriele was gleaned from personal correspondence, June 29, 2010. Used with permission.
To establish “effective listening areas,” research models need to take into account a wider range of factors. For example, the sound signatures of single- or twin-engine private fix-winged aircraft, different types of helicopters, motorcycles, etc., as they are affected by a range of atmospheric conditions. Each signature will have a different effect not only on wildlife but on the human experience as well.
I obtained a copy of the Don Young and Richard Pombo letter to Gale Norton, secretary of the Department of the Interior, November 21, 2003, from the National Park Service in Boulder, Colorado. At one point, Young, together with Senator Ted Stevens, had tried, with taxpayer money, to fund a $400 million bridge to a tiny community of fifty residents, funded through congressional earmarks. It was the famous “Bridge to Nowhere.”
The following description of the content of Young and Pombo’s letter gives a sense of the hostility that existed with regard to noise regulation, even within our protected areas. Basically, attempting to undermine the program that had been implemented in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the legislators, who by the way served on key congressional committees that funded the NPS, expressed concerns about how noise controls would be implemented by first targeting the term soundscape and then expressing skepticism that one could quantify the effects of human noise either on animal behavior or on visitors—questioning the kinds of studies that had been previously done or that were already in the planning stages. The letter, which did not address the significant efforts to incorporate soundscape monitoring and visitor activity models into the NPS programs, appeared to be a clear attempt to put the brakes on further soundscape activity development. Young and Pombo also asserted that the natural soundscapes had never been sufficiently described and were, in any event, “radical” (in the political sense) concepts. In a final thrust, the document raised questions about how natural soundscapes (if, in fact, there were such phenomena) could be affected by human noise; whether the public had ever been invited to comment on noise, the program, and park ideals (they had indeed); and whether or not the program administrators really believed that visitors would be affected by the noise of aircraft overflights.
A full statement of the original scope of the park service soundscape program can be found in “Director’s Order #47: Soundscape Preservation and Noise Management,” National Park Service, 2000, at http://www.nps.gov/policy/DOrders/DOrder47.html.
Chapter 9: The Coda of Hope
The example of how a soundscape might evolve as a result of human activity would likely be more powerful if we had before-and-after spectrograms from the same
site. But with the field of bioacoustics and soundscape analysis being only thirty years old, we don’t have sufficient recorded data from the same sites to do actual comparisons yet. However, from the few locations where we do have before-and-after data, we would anticipate something similar to the result described earlier at Lincoln Meadow, California, in chapter 3.
Our inattention to the importance of listening to and capturing natural soundscapes until very recently has meant a tremendous loss of informative biophonic data that might have been useful to aspects of resource management, a more comprehensive understanding of the complex role each voice plays within the entire sonic mix, a knowledge of the bioacoustic affects of global warming on density and diversity, and an appreciation of how soundscapes inform our mental, physical, and cultural lives.
Extended examples of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge soundscapes can be obtained at http://www.wildsanctuary.mobi/buy/index.php?route=product/product&keyword=voice&product_id=74.
Bibliography
Books
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Pantheon, 1996.
Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. New York: Hampton Press, 2002.
Beaver, Paul, and Bernie Krause. The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music. New York: Nonesuch Records, 1967.
Bell, Paul et al. Environmental Psychology. 5th ed. London: Psychology Press, 2005.
Berendt, Joachim-Ernst. The Third Ear. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
Bible. 1 Kings 5:15; Romans 8:7.
Bierce, Ambrose. The Devil’s Dictionary. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1958.
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