Tthe philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that life without music would be a mistake. I agree, but I would expand the frame to include a wide variety of other human and non-human sounds. To me, the world is often auraculous or “over-wonderful” – full of sounds, what, to quote Shakespeare’s Caliban. The storm, “gives joy and does not hurt”.
One of my earliest memories as a small child is the sound, on a summer’s evening, of a peal of church bells echoing off the hills surrounding the village in Hampshire where my grandparents lived. Over the years since then, I’ve been intrigued by sounds of almost every kind – though I exclude a few, such as some of those in the music genre known as “noise”, which a friend says he finds soothing, but which I find about as welcome like putting my head in a buzz saw.
A few years ago I went to see a flock of kestrels (birds in the wader family) flying over mud flats along the Norfolk coast. The birds flashed in and out of sight as they twisted and turned in sync. It was a wonder to behold, but more than the sight it was the sound made by thousands of pairs of flapping wings as they passed over my head that amazed me.
That sound is hard to describe. It was a bit like the roar of an airplane propeller, without the noise of the engine driving that propeller. And it was a bit like a bull-roar – one of those ancient musical instruments, sometimes known as aerophones, which have sacred associations in some traditions. But it was softer, deeper and more powerful than both.
The experience made me feel completely alive and present. It also got me thinking about how little I actually knew about the natural and human history of sound and its presumably darker twin, noise. I decided to investigate a little deeper and researched the science and culture of sonic wonder as far as I could.
Start near the beginning. About 13.7 billion years ago, in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, acoustic waves reverberated through the superhot and superdense medium. The cosmos rang like a bell and the peaks of the acoustic waves became a focal point for what later 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 much like one that describes 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 circling distant stars, the soundless paths of their respective orbits are in ratios that can be expressed as almost perfect musical fourths, fifths, and octaves. Our own solar system is also full of sounds. On Mars, the sound of the wind, first recorded in 2021, is more bleak than the sound of any frozen desert on Earth.
When it comes to sonic beauty and diversity, nothing else discovered so far rivals the sounds of the living earth. A dawn chorus constantly circles the entire planet as dawn sweeps from east to west and birdsong begins in turn over each continent and island. Meanwhile, in the global ocean, a great front of tiny clicks and pops passes from east to west at 1,000 mph as phytoplankton begin to synthesize and release tiny bubbles of oxygen to the surface. All the while, the tides – drawn by a Moon that is falling, ever so slowly, away from Earth – push and suck on rocks and beaches, sending sand flying and pebbles crashing.
Sound travels faster and farther underwater than it does in air, and many of the creatures that live beneath the waves have evolved to take advantage of this. Before humans disrupted the ocean with noise pollution, the songs of baleen whales would have carried across entire ocean basins through what is known as the deep sound channel.
However, humans should not be underestimated when it comes to hearing nature’s soundscape. Our ears can sense small variations in air pressure: the quietest sounds a healthy young adult can detect will move the eardrum by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. And yet we can also experience a thunderclap nearby without being permanently deaf. And our audience is both quick and sensitive. Light travels almost 900,000 times faster than sound, but our brains usually process sounds much faster than sights. This is why sprinters respond more quickly to a starting pistol at the start of a race than to a visual cue such as a flag.
Researchers are increasingly finding that sound is also an important means of communication for thousands of species of fish and other marine organisms, and can play an important role in the ecology of coral reefs.
On land, some of the largest and smallest animals are among the most attentive to sound and the most skilled at using it. African elephants can detect small changes in frequency and also feel subtle vibrations in the ground, thanks to extremely sensitive touch cells in the soles of their large feet. They can sense the rumble of heavy rain on the ground as much as 80 miles away.
Bats weighing no more than a coin can scream up to about 138 decibels, the same volume as a jet engine. The reason we are not 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 ears in precise synchrony with each call, relaxing just in time to hear each echo.
Birdsong is a regular joy for millions of people. A blackbird giving it its all on a dark night in February when I put out the drums is a guaranteed boost 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 of the reasons for their success: they are now responsible for around half of the approximately 10,000 bird species worldwide.
The nightingale’s song is, to borrow from the poet Louis MacNeice, “crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural”. Among its European names, the Finnish satakieli – “one hundred votes” – might be the most appropriate. 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 only hear a blur.
I’ve always loved listening to music, but I’ve found that actually participating in it on a regular basis, even as a total amateur, has yielded benefits that I could hardly have imagined before started doing regularly. For almost a dozen years I sang with a community choir. Superficially there are paradoxes in what we do. We have an excellent leader, but there is also a sense of radical equality. We try quite hard – and we improve a bit – but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s about making a noise, but it’s also about learning that a better noise is largely about listening more carefully.
Over the years we have sustained each other through hard times, separation and loss. Recently one of our oldest members passed away. This was completely unexpected as he appeared to be perfectly healthy. We sang at his funeral and listened to some 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 lock into place almost perfectly and the overall sound seems to become brighter, richer and fuller. It is as if the space in between is filled with warmth and radiance. There is a sense of flow. My body seems to glow as it resonates. The author Diane Ackerman compare the effect to a massage on the inside.
It’s not just community choirs like mine. Singing together, whether in harmony or unison, can benefit young and old. The Singing Moms, a grassroots movement across the UK that includes young mothers, medics, musicians, teachers and others, is working together to improve wellbeing through song. For later life, projects such as music therapy cafes, in which the elderly are guided to sing and play musical instruments, can offer joy and better outcomes. Following a pilot study, a number of these will be rolled out across Greater Manchester from October, with more than 1,000 people living with dementia.
Singing with others is fun and good for you. It’s a surprisingly direct way to connect both with those immediately around you and with the awe-inspiring, 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 at £16.99. Buy it for £14.95 guardianbookshop.com
