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The Sounds of
How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants Karen Bakker
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The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance 1st Edition
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Editorial: Alison Kalett and Hallie Schaeffer
Production Editorial: Natalie Baan
Text Design: Karl Spurzem
Jacket/Cover Design: Amanda Weiss
Production: Jacquie Poirier
Publicity: Kate Farquhar-Thomson and Sara Henning- Stout
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Jacket images from top to bottom: European pond turtle from Deutschlands Amphibien und Reptilien by Bruno Dürigen, 1809. “Bees and Lilies,” illustration from Stories of Insect Life by William J. Claxton, 1912, Private Collection / Bridgeman Images. “Group of Corals,” illustration from Science for All by Robert Brown, 1877. Patulous gorgonia or Flat Gorgonia illustration from The Naturalist’s Miscellany (1789–1813) by George Shaw. Medical botany plant / Raw Pixel. Tomato plant, 1649–1659, Hans-Simon Holtzbecker. Soundwave by Marina / Adobe Stock.
This book has been composed in Arno
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the Peace River
Listening to wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.
robin wall kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass
Introduction 1
1. Sounds of Life 11
2. The Singing Ocean 27
3. Quiet Thunder 44
4. Voice of the Turtle 63
5. Reef Lullaby 80
6. Plant Polyphonies 99
7. Bat Banter 119
8. How to Speak Honeybee 138
9. The Internet of Earthlings 158
10. Listening to the Tree of Life 180
Acknowledgments and List of Interviewees 205
Appendix A : How to Start Listening 209
Appendix B: Further Reading 213
Appendix C : Brief Overview of Research on Bio- and Ecoacoustics 215
Notes 221
References 251 Index 345
The Sounds of Life
Introduction
Compared with our cousins on the Tree of Life, humans are poor listeners.1 Below the lower end of human hearing lies deep infrasound: the realm of thunder and tornadoes, elephants and whales. Many creatures can sense and communicate in infrasound, which travels long distances with ease, passing through air and water, soil and stone. In one of the animal kingdom’s most famous mating rituals, male peacocks transmit powerful infrasound with their raised tails; what humans perceive to be a visual display is, in fact, a sonic summons.2
The deepest infrasound is generated by our planet itself. If you could tune into the Earth’s infrasound, you might hear the rumblings of calving icebergs, the howl of a volcano, or the roar of a typhoon halfway around the world.3 Lowest of all, the Earth’s periodic infrasonic pulse resonates below our feet and through the air. As ocean waves collide over continental shelves, they vibrate the Earth’s crust in a rhythmic fashion—the drumming heartbeat of our planet.4 When earthquakes convulse our planet’s surface, they create airborne infrasonic tremors— ringing our atmosphere like a quiet bell.5
The planet’s infrasonic chorus is continuously sounding all around you. Many animals— rock doves and snakes, tigers and mountain beavers—are able to hear these low-frequency sounds, but not humans.6 Our hearing is typically confined to a relatively narrow band of frequencies, between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, a range that narrows as we age. At best, we can sometimes sense infrasound as a throbbing in the chest, or a troubling feeling of unease.7
At the other end of the spectrum, above the upper threshold of human hearing, lies the ultrasonic: high-frequency sounds that vibrate too quickly for us to hear. A surprisingly diverse array of species—mice
and moths, bats and beetles, corn and corals—emit ultrasonic sounds imperceptible to humans.8 Our ancestors may once have been able to hear these high-pitched sounds, and our smaller primate cousins—tiny tarsiers and dwarf lemurs—can still communicate in ultrasound.9 But contemporary humans have lost this ability.10
Still other species use ultrasound to visualize their world: to navigate, find mates, and follow prey. By using what is known as echolocation, bats and toothed whales create images of their surroundings by sending out beams of ultrasound and analyzing the returning echoes. Biosonar (as echolocation is also known) functions somewhat like an acoustic flashlight, honed by evolution to be as accurate as our finest medical devices. Simpler forms of echolocation are also used by cave swiftlets and oil birds, nocturnal shrews and rats; they, too, see the world through sound.11 Yet although these calls are some of the loudest ever recorded in the animal kingdom, they are inaudible to us.12 Attuned humans can occasionally hear the subtle clicks at the lower end of animal echolocation; rarely, blind people even develop the ability to echorange themselves. But for most of us, even the loudest ultrasonic sound blown directly into our ears would feel like nothing more than an empty, ghostly breath of wind.
As Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear says, “The human brain is like a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations . . . the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.”13 Our physiologies—and perhaps our psyches—limit our capacity to listen to our nonhuman kin. But humanity is beginning to expand its hearing ability. Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world.
In recent years, scientists have begun installing digital listening devices in nearly every ecosystem on the planet, from the Arctic to the Amazon. These microphones are computerized, automated, and networked with digital sensors, drones, and satellites so powerful they can hear a mother whale whispering to her calf in the depths of the ocean. Researchers have attached tiny microphones to honeybees and turtles,
and affixed listening posts to coral reefs and trees. When interconnected, these listening networks may stretch across entire continents and ocean basins.14 Amateurs are also listening to nature’s sounds, using inexpensive listening devices, like the AudioMoth (an open-source device the size of a smartphone); the cheapest build-it-yourself version now costs well under $100.15 Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our own sensory capabilities.
This book tells the stories of the scientists who are using these digital technologies to decode the hidden world of nonhuman sound, and the surprising sounds they are hearing. Recent scientific breakthroughs have revealed that a vast array of species makes an astonishing assortment of sounds, mostly beyond the range of human hearing—and so, until recently, unsuspected and unappreciated. (In writing this book, I surveyed research on more than 1,000 species, a small fraction of the scientific findings on bioacoustics—the technical term for the science of listening to nonhuman organisms.) Dolphins and belugas, mice and prairie dogs use unique vocalizations (like signature whistles) to refer to one another, much as we do with individual names.16 Baby bats “babble” at their mothers, who speak back to their young in “motherese,” just like humans do. Turtle hatchlings—previously thought to be mute— coordinate the moment of their birth by calling to one another through their shells. Animals use sound to warn, protect, and lure one another; to teach, amuse, and name one another.
Carefully listening to the nonhuman world reveals complex communication in a broad range of species and challenges the claim that humanity, alone, uniquely possesses language. These claims might seem plausible when discussing primates or birds. But what digital technologies reveal is the vast extent of sonic communication across the natural world. Using digital bioacoustics, scientists have documented the ability of species without ears, or any apparent means of hearing, to interpret and respond to complex information conveyed through sound. When dispersed in the open ocean, fish and coral larvae (creatures only a few millimeters in size, with no central ner vous system) distinguish the sounds of their home reefs from the cacophonous ocean, and then swim
back home to settle. Plants emit distinct ultrasonic noises when dehydrated or distressed. In response to the sound of buzzing bees, flowers flood with sweetened nectar, as if in anticipation. The Earth is in continuous conversation. Now, digital technologies provide a new way for humanity to listen to the vivid soundscapes all around us, opening our ears to the resonant mystery of nonhuman sound.
Resonant Earth
The scientific breakthroughs explained in this book primarily occur in two fields of study: bioacoustics and ecoacoustics. Together, these scientific disciplines enable humans to have digitally mediated access to the hidden conversations ongoing across the natural world, even in the remotest places on Earth. As explored in the chapters that follow, this dramatically enhances our ability to monitor organisms and ecosystems and detect environmental change. Scientists are also experimenting with the use of bioacoustics and ecoacoustics to restore ecosystems; nature’s sounds, they have learned, can be used to regenerate the health of plants and animals, including ourselves. Their research also reveals that environmental noise is an exponentially growing assault on the natural world and a major form of pollution; quieting the human din is thus one of the major conservation challenges of our time.17
What, exactly, is bioacoustics? Put simply, bioacoustics is the study of sounds made by living organisms.18 Researchers in this field are adept at both the art and science of listening. Imagine a field biologist with the training of an audiologist, the skills of a data scientist, and the sensibility of a musical composer, and you have captured about half of the expertise that contemporary bioacousticians possess.19 Bioacoustics brings great insight to the study of wild places; scientists have discovered entirely new species this way, and even rediscovered species that we thought had gone extinct. A camera only spots the animals walking down the forest path, but a digital recorder hears them hiding in the bushes.
Ecoacoustics, also called acoustic ecol ogy or soundscape studies, entails listening to the environmental sounds generated by entire landscapes.20 Imagine standing in the middle of a tropical forest: you might
hear the rustle of leaves, the cries of birds, the roar of a waterfall. These combined sounds form what is called a soundscape.21 Soundscapes can reveal much about the functional condition of ecosystems. A degraded ecosystem sounds very different than a healthy one. Like a stethoscope that detects a heart murmur, ecoacoustics can detect the presence or absence of healthy sounds. Each landscape has its own distinct soundscape, like an acoustical calling card that combines animal (including human), plant, and even geological sounds.22 Simply by listening, an ecoacoustician can tell you the difference between a tree farm and a forest, or detect early signs of degradation in a seemingly intact ecosystem; using ecoacoustics, we can now map wilderness areas without ever setting foot there.23 Ecouacousticians listen to landscapes like a radiologist might look at an MRI scan, discerning the subtlest signs of health and disease.
Bio- and ecoacoustics have recently been transformed by a new generation of digital recording technologies that allow humanity to listen at a distance, in an automated fashion.24 In the early days of analog recordings of nature’s sounds, the technology was bulky, cumbersome, and expensive. Today, heavy reels of magnetic tape have been replaced by portable, lightweight, inexpensive, and long-lasting digital recorders. A few decades ago, the equipment required to do field recordings could fill a small minivan; today’s digital recorders fit inside a backpack or even your back pocket. These digital listening devices can be installed almost anywhere and run continuously, capturing sounds over a larger range than a camera can capture images. This has allowed scientists to listen to the far reaches of the globe, across the Tree of Life. Around the world, both amateurs and experts are tuning in to nature’s sounds.
The digitization of any field creates a tsunami of data. In order to deal with this data deluge, scientists have applied new techniques, derived from artificial intelligence, to analyze their digital acoustic recordings.25 Algorithms originally developed for human use (such as the speech-totext algorithms in a smartphone) are being adapted to analyze and interpret the voices of other species.26 These bioacoustics algorithms have become exponentially more power ful in the past few years: they can identify species and even individual animals, much like voice recognition
software.27 It is impor tant not to exaggerate the current capability of these algorithms, which still do not generalize very well and often require some degree of manual verification.28 Challenges with the underlying hardware used in the field, such as the power limitations of sensors, are also significant.
But if these challenges can be addressed, humanity may be on the brink of inventing a zoological version of Google Translate.29 By combining these digital listening devices with artificial intelligence, scientists are beginning to decode as well as record nonhuman sound. Some scientists are using artificial intelligence to build dictionaries in East African Elephant, Southern Australian Dolphin, and Pacific Sperm Whalish. A few researchers have even successfully achieved two-way communication with nonhumans, mediated by robots and artificial intelligence. Digital technology now allows scientists to approximate an organism’s distinctive pattern of communication: although our vocal cords can’t click like a dolphin or buzz like a bee, our computers and robots can do just that. The same technologies that we use in the Internet of Things are now being developed to communicate with other species in fundamentally new ways.
These technologies have enabled scientific discoveries that revolutionize our understanding of the natural world. In telling the stories of these discoveries in the chapters that follow, I emphasize three points: many more nonhumans can make and sense sound than scientists had previously realized; many species have richer, more complex communication and social behav iors than previously understood; and these findings create new possibilities for both environmental conservation and interspecies communication. Some of these scientific findings were initially met with skepticism. Many researchers initially dismissed the idea that nonhumans could make sounds beyond the range of human hearing (although we now know that many species make, and even more species can hear, such sounds). Many researchers also scoffed at the idea that nonhumans could make subtle sounds that carry complex information; these qualities, it was thought, were reserved for humans (yet we now know the contrary to be true). The scientists whose work is shared in these pages often overcame re sistance from their peers
through painstaking research. Theirs is a collective discovery, decades in the making, of the universal importance of sound to the nonhuman world. In offering these insights, it is important to acknowledge the primacy of traditional ways of listening. Deep listening is a venerable and ancient art, still practiced as a powerful method of revealing nature’s truths. Indeed, many of the “discoveries” recounted in this book are often, in fact, merely rediscoveries of older forms of environmental knowledge. As Potawatomi plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “I smile when my colleagues say ‘I discovered X.’ That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”30 Kimmerer reminds us that if we ask clear, open-minded questions, and patiently pay attention, nature gives us the answers. Much can be learned this way, and traditional ecological knowledge has a great deal to teach us in this regard. Deep listening also provides much-needed guideposts for this new world of digital bioacoustics; it provides an ethics of responsibility and sense of stewardship rooted in place, without which our novel digital tools might enable humanity to further exploit and domesticate rather than protect and connect with other species.
A Globe, Clothing Itself with Ears
Over fifty years ago, philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described the future of computing in a mystical fashion. His poetic metaphor for the growing ubiquity of computer networks was a prescient description: our planet “clothing itself with a brain.” 31 Marshall McLuhan would later expand on de Chardin’s description in his best-selling book The Gutenberg Galaxy. 32 Decades before the invention of the World Wide Web, McLuhan saw on the horizon a digital revolution, in which the interconnection of computer networks was analogous to a planetary ner vous system. He predicted, moreover, that the emergence of this digital network would give rise to new forms of global consciousness. Technologies, according to McLuhan, are not simply tools that people deploy; rather, our inventions alter our behav ior and consciousness, both individually and collectively. The invention of movable type by
Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, for example, was a pivotal point in the development of a standardized, uniform, and ultimately automated cultural production of knowledge through mass print media, such as books and newspapers.
Central to McLuhan’s argument was the interplay between technology and our senses. The rise of movable type, he argued, changed humanity’s perceptual habits. By replacing oral and scribe cultures with print technology, the importance of our visual senses intensified; the salience of oral and aural sensing receded. Information no longer needed to be recalled and remembered; rather, it needed to be collected and organized. Gone were the recitations of long epic poems, which cultivated the art of memory. These were replaced by the segmentation of information, which cultivated the art of knowledge specialization. Literacy replaced orality; the Dewey decimal system supplanted Homer’s Odyssey.
McLuhan also predicted a resurgence of oral cultures. Whereas print culture separated the storyteller from the audience by interposing a fixed text (a book), he foresaw that digital communication would lead to the return of oral modes of interactive storytelling: interplay between storyteller and audience, call-and-response patterns, and mimetic, collaborative evolution of story lines. The rise of internet phenomena like TikTok and interactive computer games arguably prove McLuhan’s point (including his prediction that a renewed tribalism would emerge). What McLuhan and de Chardin failed to predict, however, was the extension of these digital, networked cultures to include nonhumans. What would they have made of digital bioacoustics and the potential for interspecies communication via the internet?
Stories of speaking with animals are as old as human history. In the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous communities relate how Txeemsim (Raven)—trickster and shape-shifter, prankster and shaman—teaches humans about balance and harmony while living within a natural world that both shapes and sustains human beings.33 In the Persian epic poem Shahnameh, the phoenix-god bird Simurgh teaches wisdom to the forsaken Prince Zal, preparing him to rejoin the world of men.34 In the Christian tradition, St. Francis speaks of repentance and love with the
wolves and the birds. In medieval texts and fables, talking animals abound; medieval bestiaries feature animals ventriloquizing human morals, testifying to human fallibility, divine grace, and hy pocrisy in humans’ treatment of nature.35 These stories remind us that nature is a source of teachings, if we remember to listen.
Yet many Western scientists and philosophers also espouse the view (defended in a lineage stretching from Aristotle and Augustine, to Aquinas and Descartes, to the present day), that humans “alone among animals possess speech,” and hence uniquely possess the faculty of reason.36 These views are now being overturned by a new generation of scientific research. Yet human ambivalence about animal language persists and is linked with our uncertainty about human status: Are we one animal among others, or does something (language, toolmaking, logos) truly set us apart?37 Debates over animal language are a touchstone for human uncertainties about our role in the cosmos.
Our uncertainties extend to an ambivalence about our relationship with nature. Although the ability to converse with animals appears in the origin stories of many cultures, our myths also tell us that these voices were silenced. In Greece, the all- powerful oracles lived in sacred groves and asked animate Earth deities for advice, yet this did not stop an onslaught of deforestation; as their fellow citizens denuded the islands, Greek poets wrote that felling a tree was akin to committing murder.38 Once, explains Robin Wall Kimmerer, we all spoke the same language—humans and animals alike; but when colonial settlers came, writes Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows, nonhuman voices fell silent.39 The desire to recover a lost ability to communicate with other species stirs up power ful feelings: from fierce skepticism to a yearning for reconnection. The stories told in this book explore this tension. By remembering that sound is more than digital data, I seek to hold multiple truths si mul taneously: sound as data and information, sound as music and meaning, sound as language and the true tongue of places and nonhuman peoples. Listening is both a scientific practice and a form of witnessing that acknowledges our presence as guests on this planet and embraces our kinship with other species across the Tree of Life.
Digital technologies, allied with science, are often depicted as a method and mindset that distances us from other species. The stories in this book offer another view: the potential for science, enhanced by digital technologies and interwoven with deep listening, to bring us on a journey of rediscovery of the natu ral world. In this way, we might foster communion rather than dominion, kinship rather than ownership of Earth.
We begin by exploring how the Iñupiat shared their traditional knowledge with Western scientists, who used digital technologies to rediscover what Arctic peoples had long known: the vibrancy of whale song in an ocean once presumed to be silent.
1 Sounds of Life
Herbert L. Aldrich discovered whale music on his deathbed. Riddled with tuberculosis and told he had less than a year to live, he made an impulsive decision: to accompany the New England whaling fleet into the Arctic in pursuit of bowhead whales. Aldrich, a journalist for the New Bedford Evening Standard, had never before embarked on a ship. The year was 1887. He was twenty-seven years old.1
Two de cades earlier, the New York Times had described New Bedford—the heart of the American whaling industry—as “probably the wealthiest place” in the United States.2 Across the Old and New Worlds, whale oil fueled industrialization, lighting streetlamps and lubricating pistons, looms, and ball bearings. Whale blubber softened soap, margarine, and lipstick. Baleen whalebone curved corsets under dresses.3 Even before the gold rush flooded the Yukon’s mountains with miners, a whale rush was flooding the Arctic waters with boats.4 A single whale could be worth (in today’s equivalent) over a million dollars; successful whalers could retire rich after only a few expeditions.5
But by the time Aldrich embarked on his journey, the glory days of whaling were over. Whales had been hunted to near extinction in the eastern Arctic; the western Arctic was not far behind. 6 The fleet would exist for only a few more years. Local notables in New Bedford funded the young man’s trip in memoriam: a dying man documenting a dying industry.
Arctic whaling was not for the faint of heart.7 Ships were lost every year to pack ice. Ice jams could quickly build higher than the masts of
ships, smashing the wooden hulls to pieces. Aldrich described feeling utterly vulnerable, dependent on a wooden ship “as frail as an egg shell in the clutches of an ice floe.”8 Only a decade earlier, an entire fleet of forty vessels had been swallowed by the ice as over a thousand men, women, and children fled in small rowboats. 9 Says Ishmael in Moby Dick, “ There is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.”10
Despite the risks, whales were irresistible prey. As the number of whales dwindled, whalers extended their trips into the furthest, most dangerous recesses of the ocean. Here, even the Inuit and Iñupiat, master hunters, danced with death. Ittuangat Aksaarjuk describes hunting at Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island) along the retreating edge of an ice floe.11 Traveling along the shifting edge of open water, the men would haul their open skiffs onto the ice and flip them over for shelter when storms hit, hoping the ice would not break off and carry them away from land. When Aldrich departed on the Young Phoenix in early March, the ice off the Alaska coast was still dense, the sun edging above the horizon. Through heavy fog, the fleet of more than thirty ships followed thin cracks in the ice, which often closed quickly behind them. If another crack opened up, the ships would move forward. If not, they would wait, watching as the floes pressed in. Moving from one watery prison to the next was like playing a perilous game of chess against an evershifting opponent. Aldrich’s captain, Edmund Kelley, had lost his ship, the Seneca, only a few years earlier, and the Young Phoenix itself would eventually be lost off the coast of Alaska in a storm that destroyed several ships.12
To pass the time while waiting for the ice to open, sailors kept themselves busy by hunting walrus and seals, gambling, and storytelling. Aldrich boat-hopped from the Eliza to the Hunter, the Balaena to the Thrasher, photographing the voyage on his Scovill detective cameras.13 But mostly he fretted. Captain Kelley attempted to console him one night by telling tales of “singing” whales. At first, Aldrich assumed this was a joke aimed at him, a gullible outsider and the first writer to accompany the whaling fleet into the western Arctic. Then, one day, he too heard the whale music as the ships followed their prey.
As Aldrich recounts, Kelley was mocked when he first shared his discovery of whale song. But Kelley’s hunting prowess eventually silenced the jibes. Kelley would urge the fleet to follow even the faintest sounds, which he claimed he could hear vibrating through the ship’s hull. “When Captain Kelley took up anchor and set sail,” Aldrich recounts, “every ship followed him.”14 The captains of the other boats took note and began standing guard for whale song, day and night.
After a whale had been harpooned, Kelley would put his ear to the taut towline, listening. As Aldrich would later describe it:
Kelley heard the whale that he had struck give a deep, heavy, agonizing groan, like that of a person in pain. With bowhead whales, the cry is something like the hoo- oo-oo of the hoot- owl, although longer drawn out, and more of a humming sound than a hoot. Beginning on F, the tone may rise to G, A, B and sometimes C before slanting back to F. With the humpbacked- whale, the tone is much finer, often sounding like the E-string of a violin.15
As the whales traveled through the Bering Strait, the narrow marine gateway to the vast Beaufort Sea, their vocalizations enabled Kelley to hunt the bowheads down. That year was remarkable for the bounty of whales caught by the fleet; the whalers’ haul of more than 600,000 pounds of baleen was the largest ever for decades.16
For the whalers, the songs were a giveaway clue in the hunt. But Aldrich wondered about their purpose.17 Could the songs be “a sort of call, or signal for whales when making a passage through the Bering Sea, to notify each other that they are bound north, and perhaps the Straits are clear of ice?”18 Sailors watching from ship mastheads reported that whenever a whale was struck by a harpoon, other whales in the vicinity would be frightened by its cries of pain. Two years earlier, Kelley’s ship had struck a sperm whale and “instantly, the whole school, which was three miles or more off, started for their wounded companion, and circling about it huddled together as if to ask ‘what’s the matter?’ ”19 Aldrich asked his companions about the meaning of whale song. But caught up in the “picturesque excitement” of the chase, the sailors dismissed his musings about whale communication.
On the last day of August, the Young Phoenix arrived in Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, over 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. At this strategic location, the Bering Strait—only 3 miles wide at its narrowest point—fans out into the Beaufort Sea. Aldrich went ashore to find the beach still covered in ice. As he gazed toward the Pole, he described the scene: “As far as the eye could reach into the north and eastward, was ice, blue in its solidity, and no more penetrable than so much granite.”20 The local Iñupiat called this place Utqiaġvik, good land for gathering wild roots (utqiq). But their primary source of food was bowheads, which they hunted from sealskin umiat, boats that could slip through the small ice openings where the southerners’ ships couldn’t pass. Although no whales were to be seen, the Iñupiat said they would follow the pods further north. But the whaling fleet could go no farther; the ice closed in behind them as they headed south toward home.
The voyage of the Young Phoenix was one of the last undertaken by the whaling fleet. The bowheads had been nearly eradicated. Aldrich commented on the devastation: “Before the appearance of the whalemen, the natives caught whales, seals, and walrus in great plenty at their very doors. Now hunters must go a long distance, and are rarely successful. The whales grow more and more shy by the year, to the disadvantage of both natives and whalemen.”21
Aldrich— who recovered and lived to the age of eighty- eight— returned home to publish a book about his journey, lecturing widely about whaling and the Arctic. But his account of whale noise drew little attention and was soon entirely forgotten.22 As anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has noted, popular culture framed oceans as quiescent: from Jacques Cousteau’s book The Silent World to Kipling’s poetic rendering of the ocean (“There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep”), oceans were presumed to be sonic dead zones, silent as the grave.23 By the turn of the twentieth century, ships’ crews could no longer hear whale songs; propellers and engine noise drowned them out. But Captain Kelley’s technique would turn out to be prescient. He was an unintentional pioneer of the science of marine bioacoustics: the study of the sounds made by sea creatures.24
Pesky Biologicals
As soon as microphones were invented, they began inadvertently picking up squawks and whistles from all sorts of creatures. Few humans paid attention. Research on bioacoustics was largely conducted by quirky scientists like Slovenian biologist Ivan Regen, who played recorded insect sounds to other insects and carefully observed their responses. In one of his best-known experiments, Regen arranged for a male insect to call a female of the same species using a then brand-new technology: the telephone.
At the time, few were interested in these esoteric experiments, with one exception: the military.25 After World War II, the world’s armies began conducting classified research into marine sound as a foundation for antisubmarine warfare; the military soon realized that underwater acoustics furnished a trove of valuable information. The Navy’s attention was focused on a specific layer of the ocean known as the deep sound channel.26 Through this channel, which is about half a mile under the surface of the ocean at midlatitudes, sound waves are able to travel thousands of miles. Discovered in the 1940s, the channel (christened SOFAR— sound fixing and ranging channel) became the focus of intense military interest, as it could be used to detect sounds from ship sonar, the marine acoustic equivalent of radar.27 The military found that they could drop a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) into the SOFAR channel and hear submarines moving hundreds of miles away.
Exploiting the SOFAR channel was a top security priority during the Cold War. Faced with a rapid buildup of the Soviet submarine fleet, the US Navy created a classified global network of fixed ocean floor listening posts, referred to as SOSUS—an acronym for sound surveillance system. The SOSUS network proved its worth: it was able to track Soviet submarines across the oceans, with instruments so sensitive they could detect the sounds of a deployed torpedo or even the whisper of a propeller.28
SOSUS became the American “secret weapon” of antisubmarine warfare. The Navy technicians running SOSUS frequently complained, however, of low moaning and rumbling background noises that
interfered with their recordings. Navy scientists were perplexed: Were the noises from hydrothermal vents? Earthquakes? Some of the sounds could be easily confused with sounds from submarines or other military equipment, raising risks of false alarms in the tense Cold War era.
The Navy suspected that some of the sounds were made by marine organisms, so they recruited a number of bioacousticians. Among them was the propitiously named Dr. Marie Poland Fish. Under contract to the Office of Naval Research for over two de cades, Dr. Fish experimented on captive marine organisms by poking them with the equivalent of electrical cattle prods. She recorded the resulting sounds, so that Navy antisubmarine vessel operators could be trained to distinguish sounds made by living marine organisms from those of submarines.29 Studying over three hundred species, from mammals to mussels, she reported that a large number of marine species were capable of making noise. As biologists later realized, many of these sounds were produced by violent muscle contractions and were not representative of the sounds that the animals produced under normal conditions.30 Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because her experiments resembled torture), Dr. Fish’s experiments were neither widely replicated nor appreciated.31
Despite these early experiments, some of the most curious sounds that Navy technicians were hearing still evaded explanation. These sounds emanated from deep in the ocean: clicks, howls, moans, grunts, and ululations. Curiously, some of the sounds could be detected simultaneously by multiple listening posts, even stationed far apart across entire ocean regions. The technicians labeled the mysterious sounds with the names of machines and fictitious beasts: A-train, Jezebel (or Jeze) Monster, Commas, and the Barnyard Chorus. Eventually, Navy researchers realized that these monstrous cries were the distinctive sounds of whales.32 Diving into the ocean, the whales were communicating with one another along the SOFAR channel, where their songs traveled unimpeded across hundreds and even thousands of miles. The whales had long ago perfected what the military had only just discovered. While the Navy’s knowledge of whale sounds began expanding rapidly after World War II, the first publicly available scientific research paper on the subject was published only in 1957. The authors were
inspired by encounters with whales while in the military. Originally trained at Harvard as a paleontologist, Bill Schevill had discovered whale sounds while working with the US Navy during the war, while he was developing underwater listening techniques for SOSUS. The naval listening posts were usually underwater rooms without windows, leading military observers to refer to the sounds as mere “fish noises.”33 Intrigued, Schevill abandoned paleontology and talked his way into a job at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. He was joined by William Watkins, the self-taught son of African missionaries who invented the first tape recorder designed to record marine mammals at sea. Watkins, originally hired as a technician, had an abiding interest in linguistics (at the age of fifty-five, after mastering over thirty African dialects, he obtained his PhD from the University of Tokyo, where he chose to defend his thesis in Japanese).34 Watkins and Schevill traveled the world’s oceans for forty years, sidling up alongside whales on sailboats (quieter than motorboats) to inject them with radio tags so they could be tracked.35 Working together with Schevill’s wife, Barbara, the scientists published several hundred hydrophone studies. Watkins’s marine acoustics database—with over twenty thousand calls of over seventy species of marine mammals—is still used by the military to train sonar technicians.36
Watkins and Schevill’s work laid the groundwork for scientists’ newfound understanding of whales as profoundly acoustically oriented creatures. Whales, like other marine creatures, see the world through sound. Over seventy million years ago, the terrestrial ancestors of today’s aquatic mammals reentered the oceans where life began. There, they began to readapt to the underwater world. Beneath the surface, sound trumps sight. Light travels less well underwater than in the air, and few objects can be perceived distinctly beyond a hundred feet. In contrast, sound travels four times faster in water than in air. Underwater, marine animals can hear much farther than they can see. Through the process of evolution, whales became finely tuned to the sonic environment of the ocean, and sound became the primary way that they hunt, socialize, and escape predators. Some species evolved the ability to hear in the deep infrasonic, while others evolved hearing in the high
ultrasonic. The auditory ganglion (nerve cell) densities of whales are double those of the average land mammal; this exceptionally high auditory nerve fiber count means that whales are wired for more complex signal processing than most land mammals, including humans.37 As Cornell University bioacoustician Chris Clark puts it: “Whales are highly acoustically oriented. Their consciousness and sense of self is based on sound, not sight.”38
Broadly speaking, cetaceans (marine mammals, such as whales, dolphins, and porpoises) employ three different types of sound communication.39 The first type of sound—social calls—involves vocalizations that fall largely within human hearing range. To us, these mostly sound like whistles, pulsed squeaks, or squeals, in a variety of patterns. For example, killer whale babies babble when they are born, and begin imitating sounds made by their families when they are a few months old. Like humans, killer whales use sound to identify individuals, exchange information, and negotiate social relationships. Each pod has its own unique dialect of calls that calves learn from their mothers over several years, one of the most complex cultural communication repertoires in the animal world.40 As pod members stay together their entire lives, their dialects form part of their identity and indicate a strong cultural bond; killer whales with different dialects rarely intermingle for long.41 These dialects are so distinct that scientists (and even trained amateurs) can differentiate between pods simply by listening. Some whale calls are also very loud: sperm whales, the loudest animal in the world, can vocalize at over 200 decibels, louder than a rocket launch or a jet engine at takeoff (and loud enough to burst your eardrums if you were swimming nearby).
The second type of sound, used by odontocetes (over seventy species of toothed whales, including dolphins, killer whales, porpoises, and sperm whales), is echolocation, also called biosonar. When an animal uses biosonar (which sounds like a series of fast clicks to us), they visualize their surroundings by projecting high-frequency sound waves and discerning the distance and direction of objects from the resulting echoes—much like an ultrasound machine in a doctor’s office. Echolocation enables odontocetes (and other animals, like bats) to “see” and navigate their environment, find prey, and even scan the insides of other
animals’ bodies. Killer whales use sound to continuously scan their environment, just like we do with our eyes; their survival depends on their ability to hear their biosonar echoing back from fast-moving fish, or from the hulls of approaching ships.42 As Clark puts it: “Their mind’s eye is their mind’s ear.”43
The third type of sound made by some cetaceans is the long, low, rhythmic pattern of sounds produced by baleen whales (Mysticeti), popularly referred to as whale song. The songs, which are thought to be sung exclusively by males and may be related to mating, are some of the most complex sonic displays in the animal kingdom. Some whales sing in the infrasound range, while others sing at frequencies that are audible to humans. Humpback whale songs are the best studied, although other species also sing distinct songs. The difference in vocalization patterns reflects a delicate evolutionary balance between habitat and the sound properties of varying ocean depths where different whale species dwell. For deep-water species, sounds need to be simple, even sparse, in order to reliably broadcast over long distances. But for species in shallower waters, where sound cannot travel as far due to the acoustic properties of the ocean, greater variability in patterns and frequencies helps to optimize communication and navigation. Some whale songs are longer, others shorter; if humpbacks and bowheads recite sonnets, blue and fin whales are the marine masters of Zen koans.44
Given the challenge of contending with corrosive salt water, storms, and currents, few people outside the Navy had the time, money, or savvy to rec ord whale sounds. Cumbersome reel- to- reel tape recorders—the size of small suitcases and, notably, not waterproof— made the task particularly daunting. Although the initial SOSUS recordings were declassified to some degree after 1991, newer versions remained classified.45 Whale bioacoustics remained little known, until an unexpected encounter brought whale music to the world.
Whale Music Goes Platinum
In 1967, scientists Roger and Katy Payne traveled to Bermuda to go whale watching.46 It was a curious quest, born of a tragic encounter. Katy was a classically trained musician. Roger was an acoustic biologist
