Sonic Evolution Without Aesthetic Experience

Sonic evolution without aesthetic experience has little diversifying power. Aesthetic definitions of music, then, are biologically pluralistic, unless we make the unsupported and improbable assumption that experiences of beauty are uniquely human. If music is sound whose meaning and aesthetic value emerge from culture, and whose form changes through time by innovations that arise from creativity, then we share music with other vocal learners, especially whales and birds. In these species, as in humans, the reaction of individuals to sounds is largely mediated by social learning and culture. When a sparrow hears a mate or rival sing, the bird’s response depends on what it has learned of local sonic customs that have been passed down culturally. Often this results in richly textured patterns of sonic variations across the species’ range. Cultural evolution in these species also changes sound through time, at a pace that is swift in some and leisurely in others, depending on their social dynamics. These diverse forms of animal music combine tradition and innovation, just as human music does. If music is sound produced through modification of materials to make instruments and performance spaces in which to listen, then humans are nearly unique. Music, then, separates us from other beings in the sophistication of our tools and architecture, but not in other regards. We are, as other musical animals are, sensing, feeling, thinking, and innovating beings, but we make our music with tools in a built environment of unique complexity and specialization. But, as the orchestra filled the hall with sound, I was plunged back into reality, a joyful return.

No More Tears

No wonder we feel music so deeply. Home to the nature of our bodies, both in the sensory present and through evolutionary history. Home to the ecological connections that give us life. Home to the beauty and fissures in our relationships with other cultures, lands, and species. Wolfe also draws our imaginations into the materiality of instruments and everyday objects. Art here is not an anesthetizing ornament but part of the human quest for meaning. Music wakens or deepens within us the capacity to experience beauty through connection to others. This has been sound’s role in the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years, now expressed in our species as one of the most powerful experiences we can have of our own bodies, emotions, and thoughts, and those of others. Now our power, greed, ignorance, and insouciance have ignited global crises of mass extinction, climate, and injustice. We need more than ever to listen to others with our bodies, emotions, and minds. Can we expand the circle of who and what is included in this other that we come to know through music? Because music is both fully human and entirely of this earth, music embodies interconnection and belonging. This remains true even when we wrap ourselves in architectures and cultural practices that evince separation and superiority.

Starting Over Again

The belief in a maestro species, he who is greater, can be dissolved by music’s unifying powers. Experiences of musical beauty can knit us back into life’s community. But we must first choose to listen. Thorny greenbriars snatch my legs. I dodge the nastiest tangles in the understory, but mostly I try to walk a straight line. 260, equal to 200 meters from the last survey point. I swing my backpack to the ground and retrieve a clipboard. A tick clambers over the tape that I’ve used to seal socks to trouser legs, a defense against the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of blood seekers I encounter each day. Pluck, pinch, flick. I jab the stopwatch and pour my attention into my ears, keeping eyes on the forest canopy. Husky voice, phrases of four up and down notes. Scarlet tanager, twenty meters away.

Breaking Down

Slurred, bright phrases, alternating inflections up and down, a question and an answer. He sings, Where are you? Five minutes are up. Repeat five hundred times. A satellite photograph of the region now shows a swath of green tree canopy running from Kentucky to Alabama through a landscape otherwise dominated by agriculture and urban areas. The region is one of the largest blocks of forest in the eastern United States. Unlike the National Forest and National Park lands to the east, the forests here are mostly privately owned. As the largest temperate forested plateau in the world, the region is a biodiversity hotspot, especially for salamanders, migrant birds, land snails, and flowering plants. The Natural Resources Defense Council calls the region a threatened biogem. The Open Space Institute has three funds dedicated to land conservation in the region. At the time of my surveys, in 2000 and 2001, the diverse oak and hickory forests of the region were being leveled and turned to monoculture plantations of loblolly pine trees, a species native farther south and much favored by the pulp industry for its rapid growth. At the time, timber corporations and state agencies either denied that conversion of forest to plantation was underway or claimed that the change was of little consequence to biodiversity, pointing at housing development as the main threat to the region’s forests. Aerial photographs refuted the denial, showing an accelerating rate of forest clearing and plantation establishment. The effects of forest loss on biodiversity were harder to pin down. These changes cannot be seen from aerial photographs. But they can be heard, and so I set out into the woods with a clipboard to listen. A complete inventory of all the species in any landscape is impossible. We don’t know the identity of most microbes and many small invertebrates. Among known species, enumerating each one could occupy dozens of scientists for years. Conservationists therefore focus their efforts, hoping that samples of a few species will reveal patterns relevant to all. In forests, surveys of birds are the most commonly used technique to rapidly assess biological diversity. Birds are sensitive to changes in vegetation, insect abundance, and the physical structure of habitats. Their populations are like probes into the hidden properties of habitats. Many species could serve this role, but birds have a special advantage.