Sounds Wild and Broken Read online

  also by david george haskell

  The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature

  The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by David George Haskell

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Haskell, David George, author.

  Title: Sounds wild and broken: sonic marvels, evolution’s creativity, and the crisis of sensory extinction / David George Haskell.

  Description: New York: Viking, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021028957 (print) | LCCN 2021028958 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984881540 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984881557 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bioacoustics—Environmental aspects. | Nature sounds—Environmental aspects. | Acoustic phenomena in nature—Environmental aspects. | Sound—Physiological effect.

  Classification: LCC QH510.5 .H37 2022 (print) | LCC QH510.5 (ebook) |

  DDC 591.59/4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028957

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028958

  Cover design: Nayon Cho

  Cover images: (top) Clayton Andersen / Getty Images; (center) Agus Fitriyanto / Getty Images; (bottom) Dai Mar Tamarack / Getty Images; (sound waves) Jackie Niam / Shutterstock

  Designed by Alexis Farabaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

  pid_prh_6.0_139334767_c0_r0

  Dedicated to Katie Lehman, who opens my ears to marvels

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART I

  Origins

  Primal sound and the ancient roots of hearing

  Unity and diversity

  Sensory bargains and biases

  PART II

  The flourishing of animal sounds

  Predators, silence, wings

  Flowers, oceans, milk

  PART III

  Evolution’s creative powers

  Air, water, wood

  In the clamor

  Sexuality and beauty

  Vocal learning and culture

  The imprints of deep time

  PART IV

  Human music and belonging

  Bone, ivory, breath

  Resonant spaces

  Music, forest, body

  PART V

  Diminishment, crisis, and injustice

  Forests

  Oceans

  Cities

  PART VI

  Listening

  In community

  In the deep past and future

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  On the sidewalk that runs along the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, katydids and crickets spice the air with their late-summer songs. Sunset was hours ago, but the heat dallies, animating pulsing rasps and trills of insects hidden in tree branches. The pavement’s light has its own rhythm, a regular pattern from widely spaced streetlights along the park’s wall. The insects are drawn to the lights, gathering in the glowing orbs of leaves around each lamp. As I walk, sound and light rise and fall around me, a subtle swell.

  The katydids sing with snappy, buzzing triplets—ka-ty-did—repeated in a steady pulse, one per second. A few singers abbreviate the song to doublets and slow the pace. Unlike nights when the performers unite in a park-wide beat, powerful enough that I feel it in my chest, tonight’s katydids seem uncoordinated, each finding its own rhythm. These pulsations contrast with drawn-out, single-toned trills of tree crickets that twine their songs into a sweet and almost unvarying drone.

  Security lamps behind a building in the park spill light upward into a cluster of oak trees. One hundred or more starlings gather in the branches. No sleep for these roosting birds, though. Stimulated by bright lights, they squeal, chitter, and whistle at one another, fluttering and jostling among twigs.

  A large airplane passes low overhead, lined up along the western edge of the park as it completes its descent into LaGuardia Airport. The sound starts as a thread on the southern horizon, fattens to a heavy, rough rope as it smothers the insects’ songs, then tapers to a frayed, rumbling tail as it leaves us. In the daytime, during peak landing hours, these planes pass every two minutes.

  Other vehicles join: the whirring complaint of car tires on asphalt, the bark and rumble of accelerating engines, a distant clash of horns at the angry intersections of Grand Army Plaza, and the fizz of speeding e-bikes.

  I walked here from a chamber music concert in the basement of the public library. Musicians merged their bodies with wood, nylon, and metal, a chimeric union of animal, oil, tree, and ore that reawakened sound from its slumber on printed sheet music. Afterward, I spoke with friends and our tremulous vocal folds imparted fugitive meaning to breath. In music and speech, nerves enlist the air as a neurotransmitter, erasing the physical distance between communicating bodies.

  All these sounds draw their energy from the sun. Algae basked, grew, were entombed, then turned to dark oil. We hear the algae roaring now as their long-buried stores of sunlight are released from jet and car engines. The e-bike is juiced by electricity from a coal power plant, the snared light of old forests. This year’s crop of sunlight, held in maple and oak leaves, feeds the katydids and crickets. Wheat and rice do the same for humans. It is night here, but the sun still shines, photons transmuted to sound waves.

  An ordinary evening. A few insect sounds and some birds. Cars and planes on their rounds. Human music and voices. I take this for granted. A planet alive with music and speech.

  Yet it was not always this way. The wonders of Earth’s living voices are of recent origin. And they are fragile.

  For more than nine-tenths of its history, Earth lacked any communicative sounds. No creatures sang when the seas first swarmed with animal life or when the oceans’ reefs first rose. The land’s primeval forests contained no calling insects or vertebrate animals. In those days, animals signaled and connected only by catching the eye of another, or through touch and chemicals. Hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution unfolded in communicative silence.

  Once voices evolved, they knit animals into networks that allowed almost instantaneous conversation and connection, sometimes at great distances, as if by telepathy. Sound carries its messages through fog, turbidity, dense thickets, and night’s dark. It passes through barriers that block aromas and light. Ears are omnidirectional and always open. Sound not only connects animals, its varied pitches, timbres, rhythms, and amplitudes carry nuanced messages.

  When living beings connect, new possibilities appear. Animal voices are catalysts for innovation. This is paradoxical. Sound is ephemeral. Yet in its passage, sound links living beings and wakes the latent powers of biological and cultural evolution. These generative powers, acting over hundreds of millions of years, produced the astonishingly diverse sounds of the living Earth. The words on this page, inked stand-ins for human speech, are but one of the productions of the fruitful union of sound, evolution, and culture. Hundreds of
thousands of other wonders ring out across the world. Every vocal species has a distinctive sound. Every place on the globe has an acoustic character made from the unique confluence of this multitude of voices.

  The diverse sounds of the world are now in crisis. Our species is both an apogee of sonic creativity and the great destroyer of the world’s acoustic riches. Habitat destruction and human noise are erasing sonic diversity worldwide. Never in the history of Earth have sounds been so rich and varied. Never has this diversity been so threatened. We live amid riches and despoliation.

  “Environmental” problems are often presented in terms of atmospheric change, chemical pollution, or species extinction. These are essential perspectives and measures. But we also need a complementary frame: Our actions are bequeathing the future an impoverished sensory world. As wild sounds disappear forever and human noise smothers other voices, Earth becomes less vital, blander. This decline is not a mere loss of sensory ornament. Sound is generative, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative. The crisis exists within our own species too. The burdens of noise—ill health, poor learning, and increased mortality—are unjustly distributed. Racism, sexism, and power asymmetries create dire sonic inequities.

  Listening opens us to the wonders of communication and creativity. Listening also teaches us that we live in an age of diminishment. Aesthetics—the appreciation and consideration of the perceptions of the senses—should therefore be central guides amid the convulsions of change and injustice that we live within. Yet we are increasingly disconnected from sensory, storied relationship to life’s community. This rupture is part of the sensory crisis. We become estranged from both the beauty and brokenness of much of the living world. This destroys the necessary sensory foundation for human ethics. The crises in which we live, then, are not just “environmental,” of the environs, but perceptual. When the most powerful species on Earth ceases to listen to the voices of others, calamity ensues. The vitality of the world depends, in part, on whether we turn our ears back to the living Earth.

  To listen, then, is a delight, a window into life’s creativity, and a political and moral act.

  PART I

  Origins

  Primal Sound and the Ancient Roots of Hearing

  At first, sound on Earth was only of stone, water, lightning, and wind.

  An invitation: listen, and hear this primal Earth today. Wherever life’s voices are hushed or absent we hear sounds largely unchanged since Earth cooled from its fiery start more than four billion years ago. Pressing against mountain peaks, wind yields a low and urgent roar, sometimes twisting into itself with a whip crack as it eddies. In deserts and ice fields, air hisses over sand and snow. On the ocean shore, waves slam and suck at pebbles, grit, and unyielding cliffs. Rain rattles and drums against rock and soil, and seethes into water. Rivers gurgle in their beds. Thunderstorms boom and the surface of the Earth echoes its reply. Sporadic tremors and eruptions of the underworld punctuate these voices of air and water, sounding with geologic growls and bellows.

  These sounds are powered by the sun, gravity, and the heat of the Earth. Sun-warmed air stirs the wind. Waves rise as gales strafe the water. Solar rays lift vapor, then gravity tugs rain back to Earth. Rivers, too, flow under gravity’s imperative. The ocean tides rise and fall from the pull of the moon. Tectonic plates slide over the hot liquid heart of the planet.

  About three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. Today all living voices, save for a few rock-eating bacteria, are animated by the sun. In the murmurs of cells and the voices of animals, we hear solar energy refracted into sound. Human language and music are part of this flow. We are acoustic conduits for plant-snared light as it escapes to air. Even the growl of machines is animated by the burn of long-buried sunlight.

  The first living sounds came from bacteria that sent infinitesimally quiet murmurs, sighs, and purrs into their watery surroundings. Bacterial sounds are now discernible to us only with the most sensitive modern equipment. A microphone in a quiet laboratory can pick up sounds from colonies of Bacillus subtilis, a species of bacteria commonly found in soils and mammalian guts. Amplified, these vibrations sound like the hiss of steam escaping from a tight valve. When a loudspeaker plays similar sounds back into flasks of bacteria, the cells’ growth rate surges, an effect whose biochemical mechanism is as yet unknown. We can also “hear” bacteria by balancing them on the tip of a microscopic arm. This bacteria-coated strut is so small that every shudder from their cell surfaces makes it quiver. A laser beam directed at the arm records and measures these motions. This procedure reveals that bacteria are in constant shimmering motion, producing tremulous sound waves. The crests and troughs of the waves—the extent of the cell’s vibratory movement—are only about five nanometers, one-thousandth of the width of the bacterial cell, and half a million times smaller than the deflections in my vocal folds when I speak.

  Cells make sound because they are in continuous motion. Their lives are sustained by thousands of inner streams and rhythms, each one tuned and shaped by cascades of chemical reactions and relationships. Given this dynamism, it is not surprising that vibrations emanate from their cell surfaces. Our inattention to these sounds is puzzling, especially now that technologies allow our human senses to extend into the bacterial realm. Only a couple of dozen scientific papers have so far examined sound in bacteria. Likewise, although we know that bacterial membranes are studded with proteins that detect physical movement—shear, stretch, touch—how these sensors function with sounds is unknown. Perhaps there is a cultural bias at play here. As biologists, we’re immersed in visual diagrams. In my own training, not once was I asked to use my ears in a lab experiment. The sounds of cells exist not only on the edge of our perception, but of our imagination, shaped as it is by habits and preconceptions.

  Do bacteria speak? Do they use sound to communicate with one another just as they use chemicals to send information from one cell to another? Given that communication among cells is one of the fundamental activities of bacteria, sound would at first seem a likely means of communication. Bacteria are social beings. They live in films and clusters that are so tightly woven that they are often invulnerable to chemical and physical attacks that easily kill solitary cells. Bacterial success depends on networked teamwork and, at the genetic and biochemical levels, bacteria are constantly exchanging molecules. But to date, there are no documented examples of sonic signaling among bacteria, although their increased growth rates when exposed to the sounds of their own kind may be a form of eavesdropping. Sonic communication may be ill-suited to bacterial societies. They live at a scale so tiny that molecules can zip from one cell to another in a fraction of a second. Bacteria use tens of thousands of molecules within their cells, an extensive, complex, and ready-made language. For them, chemical communication may be cheaper, faster, and more nuanced than sound waves.

  Bacteria, and their look-alike cousins the Archaea, were the only life on Earth for about two billion years. Larger cells—amoebas, ciliates, and their kin—evolved about 1.5 billion years ago. These larger cells, the eukaryotes, later gave rise to plants, fungi, and animals. Single eukaryote cells, like bacteria, are full of trembling motion. They, too, are not known to communicate by sound. No yeast cell sings to its mate. No amoeba shouts warnings to its neighbors.

  Life’s quiet continued with the first animals. These ocean dwellers had bodies shaped like disks and pleated ribbons made of cells held together by strands of protein fiber. If we could hold them now, they’d feel like filmy seaweed, thin and rubbery. Their fossil remains are lodged in rocks about 575 million years old. Collectively, they are known as the Ediacaran fauna, named for the Australian hills where some of their number were unearthed.

  The bodily simplicity of the Ediacaran animals obscures their pedigree, leaving no telltale marks to assign them to groups we’d recognize today. No segmented body armor like arthropods. No stif
f column down their backs like fish. No mouths, guts, or organs. And almost certainly, no sound-making devices. There is no hint on these animals of any body part that could make a coherent scrape, pop, thump, or twang. Contemporary animals with more complex bodies but superficially similar body shapes—sponges, jellyfish, and sea fans—are also voiceless, suggesting that these first animal communities were quiet places. To the hum of bacteria and other single-celled creatures, evolution added only the sloshes and swirls of water around soft disk- and fanlike animals.

  For three billion years, life was nearly silent, its sounds confined to the tremors of cell walls and the eddies around simple animals. But during those long, quiet years, evolution built a structure that would later transform the sounds of Earth. This innovation—a tiny wiggly hair on the cell membrane—helped cells to swim, steer, and gather food. This hair, known as a cilium, protrudes into the fluid around the cell. Many cells deploy multiple cilia, gaining extra swimming power from clusters or pelts of the beating hairs. How cilia evolved is not fully understood, but they may have started as extensions of the protein scaffolding within the cell. Any motion in the water is transmitted into the weave of living proteins in the core of the cilium and then back into the cell. This transmission became the foundation for life’s awareness of sound waves. By changing electrical charges in the cells’ membranes and molecules, cilia translated motions exterior to the cell into the chemical language of the cells’ interiors. Today all animals use cilia to sense sonic vibrations around them, using either specialized hearing organs or cilia scattered on the skin and in the body.

  The rich animal sounds that we live among today, including our own voices, are a twofold legacy of the origin of cilia 1.5 billion years ago. First, evolution created diversity of sensory experience through the many ways that cilia are deployed on cells and on animal bodies. Our human ears are just one way of listening. Second, long after sensitivity to vibrations in water first appeared, some animals discovered how to use sound to communicate with one another. The interplay of these two legacies—sonic sensation and expression—fed evolution’s creativity. When we marvel at springtime birdsong, an infant discovering human speech, or the vigor of chorusing insects and frogs on a summer evening, we are immersed in the wondrous legacy of the ciliary hair.