Human Guides To The Underwater World Of Sound

Humans and dolphins each have sophisticated vocal cultures. These two great animal cultures, triumphs of mammalian evolution, used sound to knit their intelligences into cooperative action. Only recently have some human cultures forgotten that we belong within a speaking, listening, and intelligent world, one where we can converse with other beings for mutual benefit. The first step back to this knowledge is, perhaps, better listening, along with renewed respect for the cultures of other humans and nonhuman beings. Barclay’s mastery of the technologies of recording and composition, along with her ability to offer engaging community experiences, is sonic wizardry, raising the hidden energies in the water into human attention. The results can transform people in unexpected ways. But dropping a hydrophone into these familiar places produces jolts of excitement and curiosity. Barclay told me that several farmers now start their days by listening in their kitchens to live feeds from nearby rivers. The fact that the sound is both live and local is important. A recorded track or a feed from some distant locale might be interesting for a while, but the sounds of your home place are of immediate relevance and emotional power. Might readily accessible data from hydrophones and microphones one day become as ubiquitous as the temperature and rainfall readings from weather stations, technological aids to human senses and curiosity? Among scientists, too, listening to the river can change behavior. Biologists often become inured to the damage they do to their subjects, walled off by educational curricula that favor vivisection and objectification over affective and sensory connection.

Under The Thumb

In my own early education in biology, I was asked hundreds of times to apply the scalpel or a lethal dose of ethanol to animals from rats to fruit flies to snails, but not once was I challenged to converse with these beings that Darwin taught us were blood kin. In surveys of rivers, field biologists routinely kill the animals they have sampled with electric shocks or nets. After listening to the river through her equipment, Barclay told me that many scientists say, Well, maybe we’ll put them back alive this time. Listening to the many sounds of fish opens human imagination. We hear them not as numbers on a spreadsheet but as communicative creatures in whose voices we hear selfhood and agency. This is a sensory lesson in kinship. For aquatic creatures, hydrophones break what is mostly an impenetrable sensory barrier. On land, too, sounds captured by microphones and shared with listeners can reveal hidden stories and encourage connection to place. By freezing ephemeral sound waves on magnetic tape or in a microchip, we bring them partly under our control. We can then share, rework, puzzle over, measure, and celebrate sound’s many qualities. Too much control, though, can distance us from the places and lives we seek to hear. Barclay told me of students whose work integrated the latest aquatic recording devices with sophisticated analysis software.

Hearts Full Of Soul

Their work demonstrated great technological proficiency. Yet not one of them had listened to their study soundscapes with unaided ears or from raw electronic recordings. Like passive acoustic monitoring in rain forests, microphones and computer software in the hands of artists and scientists do not necessarily displace embodied listening. But their powers can sometimes make us forget the testimony of our own bodies. Leah Barclay’s work seems especially noteworthy to me because it uses technology to reembody listeners in their senses and relocate them in landscapes and water. Indeed, after the excitement of a documentary film, the edited highlights of thousands of hours of filming and sound recording, the creatures we live among can seem disappointingly dull. Escape from the mundane has its place, of course, and art should sometimes lift us into other places and times. But the discovery of the rhythms and stories of home is vital too. These are the foundations not only of delight but of wise ethical discernment. This expanded sensory and imaginative connection is much needed. Beyond the mouth of the Noosa River, along a coast rich in sea life, including the breeding grounds of whales and the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, shipping traffic is increasing by nearly 5 percent per year. Several large new inland mines have recently been approved in Queensland that will export their coal and minerals by ship.

The Longest Time

Each one of these vessels will haze water with noise. As is true along all shipping routes, the devastating effects of this noise on sea life remain hidden from us. As sensory beings, we are disoriented without direct experience of the consequences of our actions. For a species that transports about 90 percent of our goods by water, our disconnection from aquatic sounds is ruinous to moral clarity and right action. Never have human guides to the underwater world of sound been more needed. For a November morning in New York City, this is glorious weather. The low sun gleams from ginkgo leaves now almost entirely turned gold. Larger beeches, maples, and oaks are bronzed and sulfured. The mellow aroma and crunch of freshly fallen maple leaves rise from underfoot. Along walkways through the garden, pedestrian traffic flows inward, toward the forested ridge that forms the spine around which more formal collections of the gardens are arranged. We have come to listen to an afternoon performance, one that will mingle human voices with those of nonhuman animals and trees. For the next hour, choral groups, loudspeakers, apps on visitor cell phones, and small wooden robot instruments animate the loop path through the forest. Visitors move within this promenade of sound, each at their own pace, going back and forth as they please, creating their own sonic narratives. She composed the piece for this site, bringing her musical ideas into relationship with the sounds of the woodland. As I walk the pathways, I pass through overlapping domes of sound, each one centered on a choral group or a cluster of loudspeakers. In the spaces between, the domes merge into one another and the ambient sounds of forest and city.