tattoo of parrots on her left arm. She admitted she was more of a city
person than a nature person, but, as she put it, “one doesn’t have to be
in nature to be interested in it.” I met her last summer for tea in the
courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, an excellent example
of a restorative urban space. She opened her laptop, where tracks of
birdsong were sandwiched between The Sopranos and a soul mix.
In her lab, she plays birdsong and asks subjects how they feel.
“The overarching thing I’m finding is that people perceive bird
sounds to be restorative, but it depends on the person, and it depends
on the bird.” Not all birds are loved equally. Many people dislike the
raspy calls of jays and the brashness of crows and vultures. Ratcliffe
launched into a disquisition the way an oenophile speaks of grapes.
“Certain acoustic sounds, quiet, high pitch, bright and smooth are
more restorative than loud and rough,” she said. “The typical
songbird, tweet tweet, the green finch or blackbird, robin, wren, have
musical high trills. They are quite complex and melodious. It might
help distract people from their troubles, but it’s balanced between
distraction and overwork. You want a bird that’s not aggressive but
submissive. Magpies are not restorative.”
RATCLIFFE BELIEVES THAT sound can be restorative, and she’s glad it’s
finally getting some attention in the research, but it’s likely not the
secret weapon of the nature cure. We’re visual creatures, after all, and
staring at a wall listening to headphones can take us only so far. Still,
the lessons of sound can be translated in useful and creative ways.
The city of Phoenix closes iconic South Park to vehicles one day a
month for Silent Sunday. When I was in Korea, I’d gone for a walk
along the Cheonggyecheon stream. “Stream” is a bit of an overreach.
It’s a stream in the way that Orange Julius comes from a tree or the
Space Needle reaches space. The Cheonggyecheon used to be a ragtag
underground ditch until it was unzipped to the world in 2005 as part
of a greening initiative launched by Seoul’s former mayor Lee