The music itself

Even as I watch, however, I can see things changing. I realize the baby boy is beginning to come together. Already there are hints of small collaborative projects getting under way: his eyes and his hands working together, his face and his voice, his mouth and his tummy. A time goes by, some of these mini-projects will succeed: others will be abandoned. But inexorably over days and weeks and months he will become one coordinated, centrally conscious human being. And, as I anticipate this happening, I begin to understand how in fact he may be going to achieve this miracle of unification. It will not be, as I might have thought earlier, through the power of a supervisory Self who emerges from nowhere and takes control, but through the power inherent in all his sub-selves for, literally, their own self-organization.

Then stand with me again at the rail of the orchestra, watching those instrumental players tune up, The conductor has not come yet, and maybe he is not even going to come. But it hardly matters: for the truth is, it is of the nature of these players to play. See, one or two of them are already beginning to strike up, to experiment with half formed melodies, to hear how they sound for themselves, and -- remarkably -- to find and recreate their sound in the group sound that is beginning to arise around them. See how several little alliances are forming, the strings are coming into register, and the same is happening with the oboes and the clarinets. See, now, how they are joining together across different sections, how larger structures are emerging...

-- Nicholas Humphrey (2002)

Sunlight into sound

“Was it last year or the year before we had the 13-year cicadas?” [David Haskell asks]. “I took my sound pressure meter down to a place where they were really loud, and it came to over 90 decibels. At 85 OSHA says you need hearing protection in your workplace. “Everybody else hates them.” But to him, the noise is biological alchemy, sunlight into sound. “These guys have been feeding on roots for 13 years. And so it’s 13 years of combined Tennessee forest productivity being blasted out.”

Orangutan oratorio

Research indicates that (some) orangutans make wind 'instruments' out of folded vegetation, blowing through it to modulate the sound of their alarm calls (reports here and here). This makes them the only animal apart from humans known to use tools to manipulate sound.

I happen to be researching (and attempting to write about) the origins and significance of human music at the moment, so especially enjoyed this. As Robert Shumaker of the Great Ape Trust says, "It's really, really nice to see an example [of tool use] that has absolutely nothing to do with food."


(see also the funky gibbon)

The naming of parrots

Research in spectacled parrotlets, Forpus conspicillatus, has shown that each parrot has its own signature call -- a unique sound that is used only for recognising that particular individual. Basically, each parrot has its own name. Interestingly, similar to human culture, members of each parrot family have names that sound more like each other than like those for other parrot families.

-- Grrl scientist

The evening and the morning

I have often thought, as I have passed by it, that one day, under a special dispensation, I should received from this little pool of water, from this small, green stoup of lustral water, a whisper as to the secret of life. It will be revealed to me, I have thought, as surely and as naturally as the presence of dew makes itself felt on folded twilight flowers found suddenly damp to the touch after the dry butterfly periods of a summer's day.
     Always hoping for this hour of grace, I have loitered by the pond's edge at every season...It was on a soft evening of this last September that there came to me the breath of the knowledge that I sought...All was silent, all was expectant. The messenger for who I had awaited was at last revealed.
     It was a hare. I saw her from far away and did not so much as venture to move a finger...Nearer and nearer she came. Was she actually intending to drink?...The stillness of the evening was so profound that the fur of a field mouse's jacket brushing against the stems of its grassy jungle would have been audible, while against the sky, infinitely remote, the moon hung in utter calm.
     I was suddenly awakened from my rapture. I had heard a sound, a sound sensitive and fresh as soft rain upon a leaf. It was the hare drinking.

-- Llewelyn Powys

Geophony, biophony, anthrophony

What happens when [the animal] orchestra is disrupted by the anthrophony: chain saws, leaf blowers or highway traffic? If an indiscriminate sound like a loud motorcycle competes with the stridulation of an insect, the croak of a frog or the song of a bird, the affected animal may no longer be able to send its signal to mates or competitors. The voices of creatures in the choir may be drowned out. And mates and competitors will no longer be able to hear them. The integrity of the biophony is compromised...

...If you listen to a damaged soundscape — an expression of infirmity or extinction — the sense of desolation extends far beyond mere silence. The community has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.

-- from The Sound of a Damaged Habitat by Bernie Krause

Thin ice

It's reported that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of collapse and a paper in Nature [1] offers clear evidence that Antactica is warming in step with the rest of the world (BBC, NYT) [2].

Wally Broecker's climate "monster" may be stirring [3].

Barry Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams before present rapid changes in the Polar climates were well understood. [4] But Lopez was haunted by unease at the role of industrial man, alluding to the Eskimo terms ilira, fear that accompanies awe, and kappia, fear in the face of unpredictable violence.

As late as the early industrial period (the early nineteenth century), creatures such as the Greenland right or Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) still resonated with something of the monstrous that had fascinated and appalled earlier Europeans.

A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the [British whaler] Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right [whale], a 57 foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work. [5]

But, Lopez shows, when you pay attention to the remarkable nature of this animal it is men's actions towards them that now seem monstrous:

The skin of [the Greenland right whale] is slightly furrowed to the touch, like coarse-laid paper, and is a velvet black color softened by gray. Under the chin and on the belly the skin turns white. Its dark brown eyes, the size of an ox's, are nearly lost in the huge head. Its blowhole rises prominently, with the shape of a volcano, allowing the whale to surface in narrow cracks in the sea ice to breathe. It is so sensitive to touch that at a bird's footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined. (In 1856, a harpooner on the Truelove reported a whale that dived so furiously it took out 1200 yards of line in three and a half minutes before crashing into the ocean floor, breaking is neck and burying its head eight feet deep in the blue black mud.) [6]

Today our "monsters" lurk elsewhere. Ilira kappia stabs us not from behind but from within our own shadows.

Footnotes

1. Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 by Eric Steig et al (doi:10.1038/nature07669). In State of Antarctica: red or blue? at Realclimate, two of the authors try to pre-empt misinterpretation.

2. (Added 27 Jan) Melting ice could push Emperor penguins to extinction

3. See also Attribution of polar warming to human influence by Nathan P. Gillett et al (doi:10.1038/ngeo338).

4. The discovery in 1985 of the "ozone hole" above Antarctica shocked many people into increased awareness of the potential of human activity to substantially affect whole earth systems on a short time scale. It helped pave the way for greater acceptance of the case for anthropogenic global warming. (See Breaking into politics 1980-88 in The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart). Arctic Dreams was published in 1986. I have recently gone back to if for the first time in many years thanks, in part, to a prompt by JML.

5. From the prologue of Arctic Dreams. In Waiting for Salmon (2006), Lopez writes of the fury of many of his compatriots at the idea that nature is anything but a warehouse to be emptied prior to a rapturous departure:

To speak of large-scale changes in the natural world that might be traced to human activity is anathema to people still furious at Darwin for suggesting that 'nature' included man...[In] America, mainstream politics is uninformed by, event hostile to, biology.

6. Lopez quotes the Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross as 'cautiously' suggesting that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. 'A sound estimate of the size of the population today [1986] is 200.' 90% of the indigenous human population may also have died as a result of European incursion and infectious diseases.

Ice singers

This clip brings to mind a similar experience in Svaalbard in 2003.

Through a hydrophone in the sea comes a series of long whistles that start high and descend, very gradually – ever so slowly – right down the scale. They sound like a cross between The Clangers and fireworks or artillery, but more gentle and sweet. It is bearded seals. This sound is suspended in a deep, vast, echoing underwater world, where crustaceans rustle and click in the far distance.

The sounds made by 'our' seals -- (Arctic) bearded seals rather than (Antarctic) Weddell seals -- were more fluted and song-like.

(Herzog clip via Zooillogix)

Re-tuning the sphere

[Peter Brewer and colleagues] calculated how much [the drop in ocean pH by 0.12 during the 20th century] would affect the absorption of sound waves at 0.44 kHz – the note "A" used to tune an orchestra. They found that by the early 1990s, sound was being absorbed 15% less than in the late 19th century.

Some studies predict ocean pH could drop by an average of 0.3 before the end of this century...The team calculates that this would cause a 40% decrease in the absorption of sounds below 1 kHz. More...

Sphinx

The sound was out of place. "Here we were, far from the sea in the middle of the rain forest, and through the great trees came a sound like waves drawing across a massive pebbly beach". It was, Lee White soon saw, a big troop of Mandrills sorting through the leaf litter in search of food. The encounter set him on a path of research and discovery that helped to revolutionize understanding of these colorful monkeys and do more to protect them. [1]

Now, as a representative for the government of Gabon, White tries to negotiate the best deal for his country not to fell the forests where the Mandrill and other amazing species live [2] by getting those forests recognised as carbon stocks within the UNFCCC. [3]

Carbonize your wildlife. Charles Darwin called the adult male mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx, “the most vividly colored specimen in mammaldom.”

Nearly 2.3 million square kilometres of rainforest in the Congo basin countries are estimated to contain carbon equivalent to about 15 years worth of anthropogenic emissions at current rates, and be 'worth' about US$1.25 trillion at current market prices. [4] To a non-market fundamentalist the logic and the numbers may seem surreal.

Gabon is relatively fortunate in being more sparsely populated and better governed than some of its neighbours.  [5] Its rainforests may be quite robust under some climate change scenarios. One of the 'nightmares' would destruction that arises as a consequence of greater climate change elsewhere: if, for example, some decades from now millions or tens of millions of people try to escape a West African dust bowl by migrating this way. [6]

A Fang Ngil mask.

Footnotes

[1] Mandrills live very differently from baboons, whom they superficially resemble, in groups that can be more than 600 strong.

[2] The range of species still hanging on in the Congo basin is vast. In Gabon it includes the Sun-tailed monkey (one of those names that definitely sounds better in French: Singe au queu de soleil), a survivor in what was a forest refugium during the Pleistocene.

[3] (added 22 March): See, for example, 'Crunch year' for world's forests.

[4] The calculation goes roughly as follows. There 227,600,000 hectares of forest averaging 125 tonnes of carbon per hectare. That makes 28,450,000,000 tonnes of carbon, or 104,411, 500,000 tonnes of CO2. The carbon price is given as $12 per tonne.

[5] (added 18 May) The country's relatively intact biodiversity persists in some of its coastal areas too.  The 'world's largest' colony of Leatherback turtles has recently been found there.

[6] There has been substantial human migration in the past. Bantu peoples equipped with iron tools, banana plants and oil palm seeds swept down this way about 2600 years ago. The population crashed more than a 1000 years ago, and huge mahogany forests now grow in places that were extensively settled. But the size of a human migration in the 21st century could be greater might by two or more orders of magnitude.

'The music of knapping'

For hundreds of thousands of years we have made stone tools: people sitting together under the trees, chipping and tapping and knapping their flint, their obsidian, their jasper. And their multiple rhythms, together with the sound of cicadas, and birdsong, would have been musical.

-- from Time in Stone by Emily Young.

Nature and the neurotypicals

There's a great big, beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folk are just barely taking in. It's like dogs hearing a whole register of sound we can't. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can't, or don't.

-- Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation.

Right whale

Twenty-seventh in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 18: Right whale

page 268: epigraph from The New York Times. But many whales do continue to suffer in the North Atlantic, notably through entanglement in fishing gear which can cause a lingering death over six months.

page 268: musician...recorded...long whistles. The musician was Max Eastley. A sample recording is here. My account of the expedition is here

page 269: not presence but absence. The degradation of terrestrial soundscapes is noted by Bernie Krause. See here or here.

page 269: true songs.  Complex songs have now been observed in a number of whale species besides humpbacks. Bowheads whales, for example, jam like Hendrix for months.

page 278: roar of machines. See deafening and A rising tide of noise is easy to see. Listen to the Deep links underwater observatories across the oceans with the aim of creating a global picture of noise and its effects in order to inform future policies intended to reduce noise. Whisper of the Wild describes the emerging field of terrestrial soundscape ecology.

page 279: Toni Frohoff's words were first published is Watching Whales Watching Us by Charles Siebert.

In 'Voyager, Chief', an essay published in Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie writes that whales' eardrums  (pictured above) were greatly prized by whalers:

I've heard it said that...they were the only things to emerge from the final furnace the whales' carcasses were put through - the left-over bits that is. I've read - frankly, I've read as much as I can bear about whaling -- how the whalemen, slithered and groped in the whale-gore, seeking those ear drums...I find [the eardrums] beautiful and sad and complete; all that can be said about sea-waves and sound-waves, song and utterance, is rolled together in these forms.
     ...What did they hear...? They heard us coming, that's what.

P.S. In Right Whales Decoded Julia Whitty reports on recent findings that Southern right whales are slowly repopulating New Zealand waters from which they were eliminated in the 19th century.

Syrinx

The thrush's song flows from the syrinx buried deep in his chest. Here membranes vibrate and squeeze the air that rushes out of the lungs. These membranes circle the confluence of the bronchi, turning a toneless exhalation into sweet music that ascends the trachea and flows out of the mouth. Only birds make sound this way, using a biological hybrid between the flute's swirling tube of air and the oboe's vibrating membranes. Birds change the texture and tone of their song by adjusting tension in the muscles that wrap the syrinx; the thrush's song is sculpted by at least ten muscles in the syrinx, each one shorter than a grain of rice.

-- David George Haskell

A laugh is quite catching, you see...

The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their “play face” (as the laugh expression is known), their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.

...That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s “shoes.”

-- Frans de Waal

The limits of human senses

Our vision is limited to a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, where wave frequencies in their fullness range from gamma radiation at the upper end, downward to the ultralow frequency used in some specialized forms of communication. We see only a tiny bit in the middle of the whole, which we refer to as the “visual spectrum.” Our optical apparatus divides this accessible piece into the fuzzy divisions we call colors. Just beyond blue in frequency is ultraviolet, which insects can see but we cannot. Of the sound frequencies all around us we hear only a few. Bats orient with the echoes of ultrasound, at a frequency too high for our ears, and elephants communicate with grumbling at frequencies too low.

Tropical mormyrid fishes use electric pulses to orient and communicate in opaque murky water, having evolved to high efficiency a sensory modality entirely lacking in humans. Also, unfelt by us is Earth’s magnetic field, which is used by some kinds of migratory birds for orientation. Nor can we see the polarization of sunlight from patches of the sky that honeybees employ on cloudy days to guide them from their hives to flower beds and back.

Our greatest weakness, however, is our pitifully small sense of taste and smell. Over 99 percent of all living species, from microorganisms to animals, rely on chemical senses to find their way through the environment. They have also perfected the capacity to communicate with one another with special chemicals called pheromones. In contrast, human beings, along with monkeys, apes, and birds, are among the rare life forms that are primarily audiovisual, and correspondingly weak in taste and smell.

-- E O Wilson

Photo: Alistair Lee

Hunters and hunted

This post follows a few traces from traditional aboriginal whaling and its echoes. [1]

Bowheads are among the longest lived animals: Nalutaliq, a white-headed bowhead, has been sighted off Baffin Island for more than a hundred years. In 1995 a crew of Iñupiat whalers from Wainwright, Alaska, found two stone harpoon blades in the blubber of a whale they were butchering. Stone points had not been used for more than a century -- not since commercial whalers brought metal tools to the Arctic and traded them to the natives. [2]

A favoured hunting craft was the Baidarka, "a living vessel whose skin caressed the shape of the waves." [3] But in the hunt for the whale, the bodies of smaller animals could become vessels of death:

In some hunts, the bladders of narwhals, walruses and seals were used as floats to the harpoon. Sometimes entire seals, skinned through the mouth with all orifices and wounds sewn shut, were used as drogues. Inflated through a bone tube, each seal float created a drag of about 100kg, exhausting the whale and reducing its chance of escape.

In Inuit mythology, Agloolik, a spirit that lives underneath the ice, gives aid to fishermen and hunters.

Another spirit, Wentshukumishiteu, sometimes terrifies the hunters away:

The Innu say [this] evil creature...is able to travel anywhere on the water and under the water and it is able to break through the ice. It can also travel under the ground and through rocks.

Joe Roman continues:

After the whale was killed, the biggest challenge was the tiresome chore of towing the enormous quarry ashore. Nuu-chah-nulth whalers employed charms...; some tied hummingbirds to the line, others turtles.

A chant from south-west Alaska contains this:

You are dying but your death will no be forgotten.
We will strip your bones of flesh, but we will send them back to the sea
that you may live again, so fear not. [4]

Following a sucessful hunt, writes Roman, communities from Kamchatka to Vancouver Island had a period of ritual mourning of about three days, as long as that for a man.

Footnotes

[1] Aboriginal whaling continues today, but with modern tools. This post follows an earlier one which refers to early modern European hunting of the bowhead.

[2] Joe Roman, citing John J. Burns in the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals (2002)

[3] The anthropologist Margaret Lantis, notes Roman, suggested that a whale hunting cult extended from Kamchatka to Hudson Bay, and from Point Barrow, Alaska to the coast of Washington State. The cult may even have extended as far as Japan and Greenland (The Alaskan Whale Cult and its Affinities, 1938). According to T. T. Waterman (1920), the Makah whalers of the Olympic Peninsula in what is now Washington State imitated the grey whale quarry before each hunt, diving down deep into the water and staying down as long as possible. Each time they surfaced, the hunter would spout a mouthful of water towards the center of the lake, trying to sound like a whale. The most determined were reported to surface with blood trickling from their ears.

[4] Recorded by Vinson Brown in Peoples of the Sea Wind (1977), and cited by Roman.

Spirits with Legs

The idea that gods and spirits got their start as a supernatural version of people encounters one obvious objection: In hunter-gatherer societies, aren’t some supernatural beings thought of as animals, not humans? And aren’t some supernatural beings—especially the ones anthropologists call “spirits”—too vague a life form to qualify as either human or animal? Why should we, along with [Edward] Tylor, talk of personified causes when Tylor’s own terminology—animated causes—would fit better?

For starters, however unlike a human a “spirit” may sound, when anthropologists ask people to draw pictures of spirits, the pictures usually look more or less like humans: two arms, two legs, a head. Similarly, a great god of the ancient Chinese was called Tian, or “heaven,” which sounds quite unlike a person—yet the earliest written symbol for that god is a stick figure: two arms, two legs, a head.

Even when a supernatural being looks like an animal — as those snowmaking birds of the Klamath presumably did — it doesn’t act like an animal. It may have wings or fur or scales, and it may lack various parts of a normal human being, but it won’t lack the part that explains why human beings do the things they do. As the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has observed, “the only feature of humans that is always projected onto supernatural beings is the mind.”

-- from an appendix to The Evolution of God by Robert Wright.

Island life

Daily, our sense of time slowed, days expanded like a wing. The days were long in the best, high-summer sense; at night we put up storm shutters on the bothy to make to dark enough to sleep. Time was clouds passing, a sudden squall, a shift in the wind. Often we wondered what it would do to your mind if you were born here, and lived your whole life within this small compass. To be named for the sky or the rainbow, and live in constant sight and sound of the sea. After a mere fortnight I felt lighter inside, as though my bones were turning to flutes.

-- from On Rona, a small masterpiece by Kathleen Jamie

Quviannikumut

Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical the following scene, from her observations in Lancaster Sound. "On one occasion a group of five narwhals consisting of two adult males, one adult female, one [calf] and one juvenile were moving west with the males in the lead. The group stopped and remained on the surface for about 30 [seconds]. One male turned, moved under the [calf], and lifted it out of the water twice. There was no apparent reaction from the mother. The male then touched the side of the female with the tip of its tusk and the group continued westward."

-- from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (1986). I've had the good fortune to reread parts of this book over the last couple of days.