Science & Math
Nature & Ecology
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Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
A finalist for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"[A] glorious guide to the miracle of life's sound." -The New York Times Book Review
A lyrical exploration of the diverse sounds of our planet, the creative processes that produced these marvels, and the perils that sonic diversity now faces
We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution's creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animal groups and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution.
Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets, and shows that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, just, and beautiful. The appreciation of the beauty and brokenness of sound is therefore an important guide in today's convulsions and crises of change and inequity.
Sounds Wild and Broken is an invitation to listen, wonder, belong, and act.
"[A] glorious guide to the miracle of life's sound." -The New York Times Book Review
A lyrical exploration of the diverse sounds of our planet, the creative processes that produced these marvels, and the perils that sonic diversity now faces
We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution's creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animal groups and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution.
Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets, and shows that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, just, and beautiful. The appreciation of the beauty and brokenness of sound is therefore an important guide in today's convulsions and crises of change and inequity.
Sounds Wild and Broken is an invitation to listen, wonder, belong, and act.
Editorial Reviews
"Haskell's own joy of discovery makes it irresistible to tune in . . . [he] is spot on that sensory connection can inspire people to care in ways that dry statistics never will . . . Haskell's previous books [...] suggested the emergence of a great poet-scientist. [Sounds Wild and Broken] affirms [him] as a laureate for the earth, his finely tuned scientific observations made more potent by his deep love for the wild he hopes to save."
-New York Times Book Review
"Earth sings and rings and warbles: a musical planet, maybe the only one in the universe. As David George Haskell tells it in his captivating new book, Sounds Wild and Broken, it is astonishing good fortune-and a fearsome responsibility-to be given this music and the ears to hear it with . . . Sounds Wild and Broken offer[s] one delight after another."
-Kathleen Dean Moore, Scientific American
"[Haskell] is something of an idiosynchratic genius . . . [his] previous works leveraged two tools that established him as one of America's premier nature writers: his Zen-like ability to pay granular attention to what most people ignore and a lyrical writing style few scientists can muster . . . As he did in The Songs of Trees, Haskell enlivens the science by taking us on a journey, hopping from continent to continent. He wanders the mountains of southern France, treks Ecuador's Amazon jungle, and noses about eucalyptus forests in New South Wales, all to illustrate the connection between sound and place."
-Outside
"A moving paean to Earth's fraying soundtrack . . . [Haskell] traces, beautifully and brilliantly […] all the infinite serial interactions between communication and reception . . . [Sounds Wild and Broken is] a reminder that the narrow aural spectrum on which most of us operate, and the ways in which human life is led, blocks out the planet's great, orchestral richness."
-The Guardian
"A soaring panegyric not just to the human ear but also to the auditory equipment of every living being . . . It's beautiful, Haskell's devotion to his ears . . . Haskell wants us, above all, to listen, to use our glorious ciliary hairs for g...
-New York Times Book Review
"Earth sings and rings and warbles: a musical planet, maybe the only one in the universe. As David George Haskell tells it in his captivating new book, Sounds Wild and Broken, it is astonishing good fortune-and a fearsome responsibility-to be given this music and the ears to hear it with . . . Sounds Wild and Broken offer[s] one delight after another."
-Kathleen Dean Moore, Scientific American
"[Haskell] is something of an idiosynchratic genius . . . [his] previous works leveraged two tools that established him as one of America's premier nature writers: his Zen-like ability to pay granular attention to what most people ignore and a lyrical writing style few scientists can muster . . . As he did in The Songs of Trees, Haskell enlivens the science by taking us on a journey, hopping from continent to continent. He wanders the mountains of southern France, treks Ecuador's Amazon jungle, and noses about eucalyptus forests in New South Wales, all to illustrate the connection between sound and place."
-Outside
"A moving paean to Earth's fraying soundtrack . . . [Haskell] traces, beautifully and brilliantly […] all the infinite serial interactions between communication and reception . . . [Sounds Wild and Broken is] a reminder that the narrow aural spectrum on which most of us operate, and the ways in which human life is led, blocks out the planet's great, orchestral richness."
-The Guardian
"A soaring panegyric not just to the human ear but also to the auditory equipment of every living being . . . It's beautiful, Haskell's devotion to his ears . . . Haskell wants us, above all, to listen, to use our glorious ciliary hairs for g...
Readers Top Reviews
Avid Reader
An interesting book tracing the origins of sound and certainly the latter chapter on the impact of our sound on animals is sobering. Worth a read.
Grammy Pammy
I love reading Haskell's books. It always make me think about things differently. What things? Seems like everything. A great read. You need to take it slow and easy. Need time to think about what you are learning. Don't go into it with any expectations. Just read it, you'll be amazed at where it will take you.
forever young
David Haskell is a deep thinking scientist that writes like a poet. I’ve read all 3 of his books. You will not look or perceive “ nature” the same after reading him. Highly recommend any of his works. He should win a Pulitzer for his groundbreaking research and writing
Larry DeemerS.R.
Loved (!) this author's earlier two books - both superb reads! I have told so many people to read those books. I feel this book gets bogged down in the details of the science. I feel uncomfortable saying this because his science is good. The overall tone of this book is on a different level of technical detail than the other two books. Not bad, just harder to digest the details and stay focused on the bigger story he's aiming for.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Part I
Origins
Primal sound and the ancient roots of hearing
At first, sound on Earth was only of stone, water, lightning, and wind.
An invitation: listen, and hear this primal Earth today. Wherever life's voices are hushed or absent we hear sounds largely unchanged since Earth cooled from its fiery start more than four billion years ago. Pressing against mountain peaks, wind yields a low and urgent roar, sometimes twisting into itself with a whip crack as it eddies. In deserts and ice fields, air hisses over sand and snow. On the ocean shore, waves slam and suck at pebbles, grit, and unyielding cliffs. Rain rattles and drums against rock and soil, and seethes into water. Rivers gurgle in their beds. Thunderstorms boom and the surface of the Earth echoes its reply. Sporadic tremors and eruptions of the underworld punctuate these voices of air and water, sounding with geologic growls and bellows.
These sounds are powered by the sun, gravity, and the heat of the Earth. Sun-warmed air stirs the wind. Waves rise as gales strafe the water. Solar rays lift vapor, then gravity tugs rain back to Earth. Rivers, too, flow under gravity's imperative. The ocean tides rise and fall from the pull of the moon. Tectonic plates slide over the hot liquid heart of the planet.
About three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. Today all living voices, save for a few rock-eating bacteria, are animated by the sun. In the murmurs of cells and the voices of animals, we hear solar energy refracted into sound. Human language and music are part of this flow. We are acoustic conduits for plant-snared light as it escapes to air. Even the growl of machines is animated by the burn of long-buried sunlight.
The first living sounds came from bacteria that sent infinitesimally quiet murmurs, sighs, and purrs into their watery surroundings. Bacterial sounds are now discernible to us only with the most sensitive modern equipment. A microphone in a quiet laboratory can pick up sounds from colonies of Bacillus subtilis, a species of bacteria commonly found in soils and mammalian guts. Amplified, these vibrations sound like the hiss of steam escaping from a tight valve. When a loudspeaker plays similar sounds back into flasks of bacteria, the cells' growth rate surges, an effect whose biochemical mechanism is as yet unknown. We can also "hear" bacteria by balancing them on the tip of a microscopic arm. This bacteria-coated strut is so small that every shudder from their cell surfaces makes it quiver. A laser beam directed at the arm records and measures these motions. This procedure reveals that bacteria are in constant shimmering motion, producing tremulous sound waves. The crests and troughs of the waves-the extent of the cell's vibratory movement-are only about five nanometers, one-thousandth of the width of the bacterial cell, and half a million times smaller than the deflections in my vocal folds when I speak.
Cells make sound because they are in continuous motion. Their lives are sustained by thousands of inner streams and rhythms, each one tuned and shaped by cascades of chemical reactions and relationships. Given this dynamism, it is not surprising that vibrations emanate from their cell surfaces. Our inattention to these sounds is puzzling, especially now that technologies allow our human senses to extend into the bacterial realm. Only a couple of dozen scientific papers have so far examined sound in bacteria. Likewise, although we know that bacterial membranes are studded with proteins that detect physical movement-shear, stretch, touch-how these sensors function with sounds is unknown. Perhaps there is a cultural bias at play here. As biologists, we're immersed in visual diagrams. In my own training, not once was I asked to use my ears in a lab experiment. The sounds of cells exist not only on the edge of our perception, but of our imagination, shaped as it is by habits and preconceptions.
Do bacteria speak? Do they use sound to communicate with one another just as they use chemicals to send information from one cell to another? Given that communication among cells is one of the fundamental activities of bacteria, sound would at first seem a likely means of communication. Bacteria are social beings. They live in films and clusters that are so tightly woven that they are often invulnerable to chemical and physical attacks that easily kill solitary cells. Bacterial success depends on networked teamwork and, at the genetic and biochemical levels, bacteria are constantly exchanging molecules. But to date, there are no documented examples of sonic signaling among bacteria, although their increased growth rates when exposed to the sounds of their own kind may be a form of eavesdr...
Origins
Primal sound and the ancient roots of hearing
At first, sound on Earth was only of stone, water, lightning, and wind.
An invitation: listen, and hear this primal Earth today. Wherever life's voices are hushed or absent we hear sounds largely unchanged since Earth cooled from its fiery start more than four billion years ago. Pressing against mountain peaks, wind yields a low and urgent roar, sometimes twisting into itself with a whip crack as it eddies. In deserts and ice fields, air hisses over sand and snow. On the ocean shore, waves slam and suck at pebbles, grit, and unyielding cliffs. Rain rattles and drums against rock and soil, and seethes into water. Rivers gurgle in their beds. Thunderstorms boom and the surface of the Earth echoes its reply. Sporadic tremors and eruptions of the underworld punctuate these voices of air and water, sounding with geologic growls and bellows.
These sounds are powered by the sun, gravity, and the heat of the Earth. Sun-warmed air stirs the wind. Waves rise as gales strafe the water. Solar rays lift vapor, then gravity tugs rain back to Earth. Rivers, too, flow under gravity's imperative. The ocean tides rise and fall from the pull of the moon. Tectonic plates slide over the hot liquid heart of the planet.
About three and a half billion years ago, sunlight found a new path to sound: life. Today all living voices, save for a few rock-eating bacteria, are animated by the sun. In the murmurs of cells and the voices of animals, we hear solar energy refracted into sound. Human language and music are part of this flow. We are acoustic conduits for plant-snared light as it escapes to air. Even the growl of machines is animated by the burn of long-buried sunlight.
The first living sounds came from bacteria that sent infinitesimally quiet murmurs, sighs, and purrs into their watery surroundings. Bacterial sounds are now discernible to us only with the most sensitive modern equipment. A microphone in a quiet laboratory can pick up sounds from colonies of Bacillus subtilis, a species of bacteria commonly found in soils and mammalian guts. Amplified, these vibrations sound like the hiss of steam escaping from a tight valve. When a loudspeaker plays similar sounds back into flasks of bacteria, the cells' growth rate surges, an effect whose biochemical mechanism is as yet unknown. We can also "hear" bacteria by balancing them on the tip of a microscopic arm. This bacteria-coated strut is so small that every shudder from their cell surfaces makes it quiver. A laser beam directed at the arm records and measures these motions. This procedure reveals that bacteria are in constant shimmering motion, producing tremulous sound waves. The crests and troughs of the waves-the extent of the cell's vibratory movement-are only about five nanometers, one-thousandth of the width of the bacterial cell, and half a million times smaller than the deflections in my vocal folds when I speak.
Cells make sound because they are in continuous motion. Their lives are sustained by thousands of inner streams and rhythms, each one tuned and shaped by cascades of chemical reactions and relationships. Given this dynamism, it is not surprising that vibrations emanate from their cell surfaces. Our inattention to these sounds is puzzling, especially now that technologies allow our human senses to extend into the bacterial realm. Only a couple of dozen scientific papers have so far examined sound in bacteria. Likewise, although we know that bacterial membranes are studded with proteins that detect physical movement-shear, stretch, touch-how these sensors function with sounds is unknown. Perhaps there is a cultural bias at play here. As biologists, we're immersed in visual diagrams. In my own training, not once was I asked to use my ears in a lab experiment. The sounds of cells exist not only on the edge of our perception, but of our imagination, shaped as it is by habits and preconceptions.
Do bacteria speak? Do they use sound to communicate with one another just as they use chemicals to send information from one cell to another? Given that communication among cells is one of the fundamental activities of bacteria, sound would at first seem a likely means of communication. Bacteria are social beings. They live in films and clusters that are so tightly woven that they are often invulnerable to chemical and physical attacks that easily kill solitary cells. Bacterial success depends on networked teamwork and, at the genetic and biochemical levels, bacteria are constantly exchanging molecules. But to date, there are no documented examples of sonic signaling among bacteria, although their increased growth rates when exposed to the sounds of their own kind may be a form of eavesdr...
