The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that a life without music would be a mistake. I agree, but I would expand the scope to include a wide variety of other human and non-human sounds. For me, the world is often auraculous or “ear-wonderful” – full of sounds that, to quote Caliban in Shakespeare’s The storm,“give joy and do no harm”.
One of my earliest memories as a small child is of the sound, one summer evening, of a loud church bell echoing off the hills around the Hampshire village where my grandparents lived. In the years since, I have become fascinated by sounds of almost all kinds – although I exclude a few, such as some of the genres of music known as “noise”, which a friend tells me he finds soothing but which I find about as welcome as sticking my head in a circular saw.
A few years ago I went to watch a group of knots (birds in the wading bird family) flying over the mudflats of the Norfolk coast. The birds flitted in and out of view as they synchronously turned and spun. It was a wonder to watch, but more than the sight it was the sound of thousands of pairs of flapping wings as they flew overhead that amazed me.
The sound thousands of pairs of flapping wings made as they flew over us amazed me
That sound is hard to describe. It was a bit like the roar of an airplane propeller, without the sound of the engine that drove that propeller. And it was a bit like a bull-roarer – one of those old musical instruments, sometimes called aerophones, that have a sacred association in some traditions. But it was softer, deeper and more powerful than either.
The experience made me feel fully alive and present. It also made me think about how little I actually knew about the natural and human history of sound and its supposedly darker twin, noise. I decided to dig a little deeper and began to research the science and culture of sonic wonder as far as I could.
Start at the beginning. About 13.7 billion years ago, in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, acoustic waves reverberated through the super-hot and super-dense medium. The cosmos rang like a bell, and the peaks of the acoustic waves became a focus for what became galaxies.
There is a sense in which matter itself is musical. An equation derived by Erwin Schrödinger to describe the behavior of atoms is very similar to an equation describing the acoustics of a musical instrument.
The intergalactic void is silent, but some black holes project very deep notes—in one case, B-flat, 57 octaves below middle C—into the surrounding plasma as they spin. And in some planetary systems orbiting distant stars, the silent paths of their respective orbits are in ratios that can be expressed as near-perfect musical fourths, fifths, and octaves. Our own solar system is full of sounds, too. On Mars, the sound of the wind, first recorded in 2021, is more desolate than any frozen desert on Earth.
But when it comes to sonic beauty and diversity, nothing yet discovered can match the sounds of the living Earth. A dawn chorus circles the entire planet relentlessly as the dawn moves from east to west and birdsong begins on every continent and island. Meanwhile, in the global ocean, a vast front of tiny clicks and pops moves at 1,000 mph from east to west as phytoplankton begin to synthesize and release tiny oxygen bubbles to the surface. Meanwhile, the tides—pulled by a moon that is slowly descending from Earth—push and suck on rocks and beaches, causing sand to hiss and pebbles to clatter.
Sound travels faster and farther underwater than in air, and many of the creatures that live beneath the waves have evolved to take advantage of this. Before humans disrupted the seas with noise pollution, the songs of baleen whales would have been carried across entire ocean basins via what is known as the deep sound channel.
However, humans should not be underestimated when it comes to hearing the sounds of nature. Our ears can detect small variations in air pressure: the softest sounds a healthy young adult can hear will move the eardrum less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. And yet we can also hear a nearby clap of thunder without becoming permanently deaf. And our hearing is fast and sensitive. Light travels almost 900,000 times faster than sound, but our brains typically process many sounds faster than they process images. This is why sprinters react faster to a starting pistol at the start of a race than to a visual cue like a flag.
Researchers are increasingly discovering that sound is also an important means of communication for thousands of species of fish and other marine organisms, and that sound may play an important role in the ecology of coral reefs.
On land, some of the largest and smallest animals are the most alert to sound and the most adept at using it. African elephants can identify small changes in frequency and also sense subtle vibrations in the ground, thanks to extremely sensitive touch cells in the soles of their enormous feet. They can sense the pounding of heavy rain on the ground up to 80 miles away.
Bats weighing no more than a dime can scream at 138 decibels, the same volume as a jet engine. The reason we don’t go deaf is that the sounds they make are far above the upper end of our hearing range. They avoid deafening themselves by contracting the muscles of their middle ear in precise synchrony with each call, and relaxing them just in time to hear each echo.
Birdsong is a common pleasure for millions of people. A blackbird giving its all on a dark February night when I take out the trash is a guaranteed pick-me-up for me, but what do the songs do for the birds themselves? The ancestors of all songbirds evolved from common ancestors that lived in Australia tens of millions of years ago. Their ability to sing may be one reason for their success: they now make up about half of the world’s approximately 10,000 bird species.
The nightingale’s song is, to quote the poet Louis MacNeice, “crazier and more than we think, incorrigibly multiple.” Of its European names, the Finnish satakieli – “hundred voices” – is perhaps the most apt. Their brains, like those of many other songbirds, can process sounds about 10 times faster than ours, allowing them to follow complex sequences of different tones where we hear only a blur.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to music, but I’ve discovered that regularly participating in making it, even as a total amateur, has yielded benefits I could hardly have imagined before I started doing it regularly. I’ve sung in a community choir for almost a dozen years. On the surface, there are paradoxes to what we do. We have an excellent leader, but there’s also a sense of radical sameness. We do our best—and we improve a little—but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s about making noise, but it’s also about learning that making better noise is largely about listening better.
Over the years we have supported each other through difficult times, separation and loss. Recently one of our longest serving members passed away. This was totally unexpected as he seemed perfectly healthy. We sang at his funeral and listened to a few recordings, including one of a series of conversations during the Covid lockdowns. In the recording he made a fundamental point: “It’s about the harmonies.”
Every now and then, when we sing together in the choir, the harmonies fall into place almost perfectly
Every now and then, when we sing together in choir, the harmonies fall into place almost perfectly and the overall sound seems to become clearer, richer, fuller. It’s as if the space between them is filled with warmth and brilliance. There’s a sense of flow. My body seems to glow as it resonates. Author Diane Ackerman likens the effect to an internal massage.
It’s not just choirs like mine. Singing together, in harmony or unison, can benefit both young and old. The Singing Mamas, a grassroots movement in the UK that includes new mothers, clinicians, musicians, teachers and others, are working together to improve wellbeing through singing. For later life, projects such as music therapy cafes, where older people are guided in singing and playing musical instruments, can bring joy and better outcomes. Following a pilot study, a number of these projects will be rolled out in Greater Manchester from October, involving more than 1,000 people with dementia.
Singing together is fun and good for you. It is a surprisingly direct way to connect both with the people around you and with the great, sonorous and sometimes harmonious cosmos – and its symphony of noise – of which we are a part.
A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous by Caspar Henderson is published by Granta for £16.99. Buy it for £14.95 at guardianbookshop.com