Sounds Wild and Broken

Description

Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Winner of the Acoustical Society of America’s 2023 Science Communication Award

“[A] glorious guide to the miracle of life’s sound.” —The New York Times Book Review

A lyrical exploration of the diverse sounds of our planet, the creative processes that produced these marvels, and the perils that sonic diversity now faces

We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution’s creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animal groups and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution.
 
Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets, and shows that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, just, and beautiful. The appreciation of the beauty and brokenness of sound is therefore an important guide in today’s convulsions and crises of change and inequity.
 
Sounds Wild and Broken is an invitation to listen, wonder, belong, and act.“Haskell’s own joy of discovery makes it irresistible to tune in . . . [he] is spot on that sensory connection can inspire people to care in ways that dry statistics never will . . . Haskell’s previous books […] suggested the emergence of a great poet-scientist. [Sounds Wild and Broken] affirms [him] as a laureate for the earth, his finely tuned scientific observations made more potent by his deep love for the wild he hopes to save.”
—New York Times Book Review 

“Earth sings and rings and warbles: a musical planet, maybe the only one in the universe. As David George Haskell tells it in his captivating new book, Sounds Wild and Broken, it is astonishing good fortune—and a fearsome responsibility—to be given this music and the ears to hear it with . . . Sounds Wild and Broken offer[s] one delight after another.”
—Kathleen Dean Moore, Scientific American

“[Haskell] is something of an idiosynchratic genius . . . [his] previous works leveraged two tools that established him as one of America’s premier nature writers: his Zen-like ability to pay granular attention to what most people ignore and a lyrical writing style few scientists can muster . . . As he did in The Songs of Trees, Haskell enlivens the science by taking us on a journey, hopping from continent to continent. He wanders the mountains of southern France, treks Ecuador’s Amazon jungle, and noses about eucalyptus forests in New South Wales, all to illustrate the connection between sound and place.”
—Outside 

“A moving paean to Earth’s fraying soundtrack . . . [Haskell] traces, beautifully and brilliantly […] all the infinite serial interactions between communication and reception . . . [Sounds Wild and Broken is] a reminder that the narrow aural spectrum on which most of us operate, and the ways in which human life is led, blocks out the planet’s great, orchestral richness.”
—The Guardian

“A soaring panegyric not just to the human ear but also to the auditory equipment of every living being . . . It’s beautiful, Haskell’s devotion to his ears . . . Haskell wants us, above all, to listen, to use our glorious ciliary hairs for good. Those twitching hairs delivered us from pond scum, after all. Maybe, if properly attuned, they can deliver us from catastrophe.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Haskell’s voice is unique in contemporary nature writing . . . [he] creates a pleasing poetry of nature, his carefully crafted sentences luring readers in for the long haul . . . glorious.”
—Chapter16.org

“Unsurprisingly, Haskell is attuned to the music of written language; his sonic descriptions ring with the truth of poetry. . . Thanks to Haskell’s profound prose, readers of Sounds Wild and Broken get to eavesdrop on cloistered conversations: rainforest mice trilling, croc offspring chirping, spiny lobsters yelping in self-defense. Hopefully, the hard-won insights he offers will ensure that against the din of outboard motors, excavators, TVs, turbines, and ATVs, nature’s polyphony keeps being heard and efforts to save rich soundscapes will continue.”
—Earth Island Journal 

“[T]houghtful, insightful . . . Haskell presents a clear-eyed thesis on the impact of worldwide environmental destruction and human noise on what we hear . . . With persistent intelligence and understated wit, Haskell uncovers one subtle mystery after another, forming a gorgeous argument for protecting all we long to hear.”
—Booklist

“Haskell’s prose is suffused with enthusiasm and poetic in form. The way in which he loads each sentence with information is so animated, it’s fair to say this is a book that would talk with its hands if it could . . . Where Sounds Wild and Broken truly glows, however, is in the way it invites readers to imagine the listening experiences of others, breaking down the assumption that we all hear alike.”
—BookPage

“Sounds Wild and Broken is a symphony, filled with the music of life. It is fascinating, heartbreaking, and beautifully written.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“Listen to David Haskell: He will transform the way you hear the world. Haskell is one of those rare scientists who illuminates his topic—the magnificent natural sonic diversity of our planet, what we have to gain from its richness, what we have to lose from its diminishment—in lyrical, erudite prose that both informs and inspires. This masterful book is a gift of deep aural understanding and a resplendent read.”
—Jennifer Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way

“A joyous celebration of the music of life . . . Seamlessly melding history, ecology, physiology, philosophy, and biology, Haskell exults in the delightful cacophony created by birds and insects, wind and sea, human voices and musical instruments . . . He mounts a compelling warning about ‘the silencing of ecosystems,’ which ‘isolates individuals, fragments communities, and weakens the ecological resilience and evolutionary creativity of life.’ Like ‘cultural knowledge,’ Haskell asserts, ‘sound is unseen and ephemeral’ and too precious to lose . . . Sparkling prose conveys an urgent message.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“In luminous prose, David Haskell teaches us to hear the beauty and tragedy of the whole history of life on Earth. Sounds Wild and Broken will change the way you listen to nature and to yourself, and may this help us heal our planet before it’s too late.”
—David Rothenberg, author of Nightingales in Berlin and Why Birds Sing

“A stunning call to reinhabit our ancient communion with sound. David George Haskell’s gorgeous prose and deep research meld wonder with intellect, inspiring reverence, delight, and a sense of urgency in protecting aural diversity. The voice of the earth is singing with beauty and need—Haskell shows us the extraordinary gift and responsibility of being available to listen.”
—Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit, and Mozart’s Starling

“In Sounds Wild and Broken, David George Haskell once again expands our sensory universe, revealing not only the grand variety of earthly song, music, and speech but the astonishing ways in which sound originates, evolves, and binds us together. His careful listening will sharpen your ears.”
—Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“This brilliant book will change the way you hear everything. Haskell takes us deep inside the music of human and non-human life, revealing one marvel after another, and makes a powerful case for conservation that not only preserves species, but the sensory experience of life itself.”
—Jonathan Meiburg, musician and author of A Most Remarkable Creature

“This is how scientific writing should be, and almost never is: suffused with wonder and pathos, throbbing with the music of the wild. Haskell conducts a magnificent symphony here. He shows us – no, lets us hear – that we are resonant animals in a thrillingly resonant universe, and that our fulfilment depends on finding the frequency that will make us resonate with everything else. His superb book sent me on my way singing, and trying to join in with the songs I heard on the way.”
—Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast and Being a HumanDavid Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His 2017 book The Songs of Trees won the John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and won the 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies, the National Outdoor Book Award, and the Reed Environmental Writing Award.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 stiff 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.

Unity and Diversity

In the moment of our birth, we are dragged across four hundred million years of evolutionary time. We turn from aquatic creatures to dwellers of air and land. We gasp, sucking the alien gas into lungs previously filled with warm, salty ocean. Our eyes are pulled from the dim, reddish glow of the deep into jabbing brightness. The chill of evaporation slaps our drying skin.

No wonder we wail. No wonder we forget, burying the memory in the soil of the subconscious.

Our earliest and only experience of sound before birth was the hum and throb of an aquatic cocoon. Our mother’s voice found us, as did the sounds of her surging blood, breath flowing in lungs, and churning digestion. Fainter were the sounds of the world beyond our mother, from places then unimaginable to our mostly unformed brains. High tones were attenuated by the enclosing walls of flesh and fluid, and so our first sonic experiences were low and often rhythmic as her body pulsed and moved.

In the womb, hearing develops gradually. Before twenty weeks, our world is silent. At about twenty-four weeks, hair cells start to signal through nerves running to rudimentary auditory centers in the partly developed brain stem. Cells tuned to low-frequency tones mature first, and so our hearing starts with bass throbs and murmurs. Six weeks later, furious growth and differentiation of tissues result in a frequency range of hearing similar to that of an adult. Sound flows from mother’s fluids into ours, directly stimulating the nerve cells in the innermost part of our ears, unmediated by ear canals, drums, or middle ear bones.

All of this gone, in a moment.

Birth removes us from our watery surrounds, but our final aural transition to air happens hours later. The fatty vernix that swaddles us at birth lingers in the ear canal, muffling airborne sound for a few minutes or, for some, days. Soft tissues and fluid likewise recede over hours from the bones of the middle ear. When these vestiges of our fetal selves finally dissolve, our ear canals and middle ears are filled with the dry air that is our inheritance as terrestrial mammals.

Yet even in adulthood the hair cells of our inner ears are bathed with fluid. We keep a memory of the primal ocean and womb inside the coils of our inner ear. The rest of the ear’s apparatus-pinnae, middle ear chamber, and bones-delivers sound to this watery core. There, deep inside, we listen as aquatic beings.

I lie belly-down on the wooden dock. The splintery boards toast me with the stored heat of the summertime Georgia sun. In my nose, the sulfurous, ripe aroma of salt marsh. The flowing water under the dock is turbid, a mud soup sweeping past on a falling tide. IÕm on Saint Catherines Island, a barrier island whose eastern shores face the Atlantic. Here, on the western side of the island, ten kilometers of salt marsh separate me from the flood-prone piney woods of the mainland. In the humid air, these woods are mere haze on the horizon. Salt marsh grasses, interrupted by narrow, twisting tidal creeks, cover the intervening distance. These grasses grow knee or waist high on all the mudflats, as thickly packed and as deep green as lush fields of young wheat.

The marshes seem monotone, their uniform verdure spiced only by snowy egrets stalking the creek edges and the pumping wing beats of glossy ibises passing overhead. But these are the most productive habitats known on Earth, capturing and turning into plant material more sunlight per hectare than the lushest of forests. Marsh grasses, algae, and plankton thrive in the happy confluence of fertile mud and strong sun. Such abundance supports a diverse animal community, especially of fish. More than seventy fish species live in these tidal marshes. Ocean-dwelling fish also swim here to spawn. Their larvae grow in the protection and plenty of the marshes, then catch a ride to adulthood on an outbound tide.

For all terrestrial vertebrate animals, rich salt water such as this was our original home, first as single-celled creatures, then as fish. About 90 percent of our ancestry was underwater. I clamp headphones over my ears and drop a hydrophone from the dock. I’m taking my ears back to where they came from.

The heavy capsule, a waterproof rubber and metal ball containing a microphone, sinks quickly, pulling the cable after it. I wedge a cable loop under my knee, holding the hydrophone above the creek bottom’s mud and debris, about three meters down in the opaque water.

When I first release the hydrophone, all I hear is the high gurgle of streaming water. As it descends, the swirling sounds fall away. Suddenly I’m plunged into a pan of sizzling bacon fat. Sparkles surround me, a sonic shimmer. Every glistening fragment is a fleck of sunlit copper, warm and flashing. I’ve arrived in the acoustic domain of snapping shrimp.

This crackling is common in tropical and subtropical salt waters worldwide. Its sources are the hundreds of species of snapping shrimp that live in seagrass, mud, and reefs. Most of these animals are half the length of my finger or smaller, equipped with one hefty claw for snapping and a lighter one for grasping. I’m hearing a chorus of claws.

As the claw snaps shut, a plunger slams into a socket, shooting forward a jet of water. In the wake of this jet, water pressure drops, causing an air bubble to pop into existence, then collapse. This implosion sends a shockwave through the water, the snap that I’m hearing. The sound pulse lasts less than a tenth of a millisecond, but it is strong enough to kill any small crustacean, worm, or fish larva within three millimeters of the claw tip. Shrimp use the sound as a territorial signal and jousting weapon. As long as they keep a centimeter away from their neighbors, they can spar unharmed.

The combined racket of snapping shrimp is, in some tropical waters, loud enough to befuddle military sonar. In World War II, US submarines hid among the snapping shrimp beds off Japan. To this day, navy spies deploying hydrophones must work around the sonic haze of shrimp claws.US

Additional information

Weight	11 oz
Dimensions	0.9400 × 5.2200 × 7.8400 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09781984881564
ISBN-10	1984881566
Author	David George Haskell
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SCI027000, SCI001000
Subjects	pulitzer prize books, nature lover gifts, Darwin, SCI027000, political books, complexity, birding, science book, national park, geeky gifts, earth day books, science gifts for adults, science books for adults, environmental ethics, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, SCI001000, Pulitzer prize 2023, national parks, nature, sustainability, science, music, environment, environmentalism, pulitzer prize, earth day, politics, wildlife, science books, musician gifts, nature books, gifts for music lovers, sustainable living, science gifts
Format	General Trade