80 Scientific American, March 2022
RECOMMENDED
Edited by Amy Brady
Illustration by London LaddSounds Wild
and Broken:
Sonic Marvels,
Evolution’s
Creativity,
and the Crisis
of Sensory
Extinction
by David
George Haskell.
Viking, 2022 ($29)In the beginning was silence. The big
bang made not a whimper, let alone a
bang. That is because the universe was
born in a sea of nothingness without the
space and time where sound can exist.
In the end, the universe will be reduced
again to silence, either collapsed into a
singularity or expanded into cold, flat uni-
formity. But now, suspended between the
beginning and the end, Earth sings and
rings and warbles: a musical planet,
maybe the only one in the universe. As
David George Haskell tells it in his capti-
vating new book, Sounds Wild and Broken,
it is astonishing good fortune—and a fear-
some responsibility—to be given this
music and the ears to hear it with.
At first stone, water, lightning and
wind sang alone. After 3.5 billion years
came the tremolo of cilia on the earliest
cells. Eventually insects joined the swell-
ing chorus, with “rasping mouthparts,
wheezing air tubes, drumming abdomens,
and wings shaped to crackle and snap as
they fly.” Lacking a syrinx, dinosaurs could
not exactly sing, but they still shook the
Cretaceous forests with rubbing scales,
snapping jaws, whip-cracking tails and
a sound like the “strangled belch of ruddy
ducks.” The asteroid that brought that ca-
cophony to a cataclysmic end made room
for the expansion of fluting birds. “In bird-
song,” Haskell writes, “we hear the evolu-
tionary legacy of renewal after great loss.”
And what a renewal it was: roaring
whales, bellowing elephants, tootling
children and moaning freight trains. The
whole Earth shimmered with sound.
The science stories in Sounds Wild and
Broken offer one delight after another.
What a joy to know that elephants can
“hear” with special sensory pads on their
feet, picking up the rumbling voices in the
ground, and that birds in cities sing at
pitches higher than those of their country
cousins, choosing frequencies less masked
by the city’s dull roar. Humans’ teeth,
which once met in a predator’s vise, slid
into an overbite as people turned to the
softer foods that agriculture provided,
shaping sounds such as “farm,” “vivid,”
“fulvous” and “favorite.” We hear Earth’s
sounds with ears that evolved from repur-
posed fish gill bone, sometimes in theaters
designed to match the acoustic properties
of forests. But why don’t worms sing?
“Predation is a powerful silencer,” Haskell
explains. “Animals whose lives are seden-
tary or slow and whose bodies lack weap-
onry are voiceless.”
Earth’s musical variety show testifies
to the boundless creativity of evolution.
As with improvisational jazz, order, narra-tive, complexity and beauty emerge from
the interacting voices of Earth and its
creatures. Here, in the bittern’s croak,
in the turtle’s cluck and whine, in Miles
Davis’s trumpet, is “evolution drunk on its
own aesthetic energies.” Music returns us
to direct experience—a time before lan-
guage, before tools, before humans began
to imagine themselves as separate from
Earth’s community and outside its limits.
We are enticed by beauty to listen to the
sounds that remind us of our membership
in the intricate, interactive orchestras.
As the book develops, it becomes
clear that all this sonic science is not
merely reporting. It is bearing witness
to a terrible moral and ecological crisis.
With lives powered by sequential explo-
sions of gas and oil, humans make deafen-
ing noise. In our industrial empires, we
are constantly assaulted by whirring tires,
booming woofers, pounding engines and
“a smeared canopy of airline noise.” The
burden of noise pollution in cities is un-
justly distributed, reinforcing race, class
and gender inequities. The cacophonies
indirectly and directly harm animals, of
course, interfering with their reproductive
patterns, reducing their habitats, frag-
menting their communities and some-
times killing them outright. Haskell cites
the U.S. Navy’s high-intensity sonar
blasts, which panic whales: “Sound bleeds
them to death from within.”
Reckless human enterprise is killing
Earth’s wild songmakers at alarming
rates, using poisons, bulldozers, forest-
clearing fires and industrial-scale pillage
of prey species. Readers who are at least
50 years old live in a world that is less
than half as song-graced as when they
were born. In that half a century, a third
of North American songbirds have disap-
peared. Ninety percent of large fish are
gone. Sixty percent of bellowing, squeak-
ing mammals are extinct. All lost, in our
lifetimes, on our watch.
What do we lose when we lose their
songs? Listening to the song stories of
other species can make us better mem-
bers of life’s community, Haskell argues.
They signal interdependence and resil-
ience, deep kinship, shared beginnings
and likely a shared fate. So they are the
“foundations not only of delight,” he
writes, “but of wise ethical discernment.”NONFICTION
Tending Our
Musical Planet
What do we lose when the diversity of Earth’s noise
is drowned out by humans?
By Kathleen Dean Moore