A book of noises

Noise by David Hendy, Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell, An Immense World by Ed Yong, The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker and The Musical Human by Michael Spitzer. I have also greatly enjoyed the warmth and range of The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives by Jude Rogers

clips of wild sound, a different one each day, posted at earth.fm.

Recordings made by the Perseverance Rover and beamed back to Earth in March 2021 reveal it to sound pretty much as you might imagine: an empty gusting in one of the most desolate places imaginable

as The Harmony of the World, a jazz musician and a geologist turned it into an album. Willie Ruff and John Rodgers

Spitzer Space Telescope, Kimberly Arcand, Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida created ‘Sounds from Around the Milky Way’.

a science-art outreach group called SYSTEM Sounds has rendered them as a tight, but quite funky, pattern of drumbeats.

Johanna Beyer titled a pioneering 1938 electronic work The Music of the Spheres.

In ‘Supernova’ (2017), Trevor Wishart converts the light spectrum of a giant stellar explosion and the spectra of the new elements it generates into sound. William Basinski’s On Time Out of Time (2019) is composed with data from gravitational waves emitted during the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago

More than 160 kilometres (100 miles) away, the sound of Krakatoa was measured at around 172 decibels

Perkin has written a piece that portrays Laine’s quest and discovery. In Alta for Two String Trios and Electronics, shimmering harmonies on the strings build slowly to a point when recordings of the auroral sounds break and crack over their surface like celestial percussion. The piece was first performed early in 2020 in the Northern Lights Cathedral in Alta, Norway – a building in which tall, slim, irregularly placed windows light up the wall behind the altar in a way that resembles the aurora

Infrasound Laboratory at the University of Hawai’i. The lab’s primary mission is to listen out for human activity that would break the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty,

. A visualisation created by the Seismic Sound Lab at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory called the Seismodome shows how most earthquakes ripple out in concentric circles, setting the Earth ringing like a bell

Similarly gentle sounds were heard at the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland during its eruption from spring to autumn of 2021

Kw-Uhnx-Wa, Hé-no, Yopaat, Xolotl, Chibchacum, Tupã, Shango, Amadioha, Xevioso, Sudika-mbambi

thunder makes a sharp crack or loud bang. More distant thunder rumbles and ripples longer and lower because the listener is hearing more from along the line of the lightning and because higher frequencies in the original noise are absorbed more quickly by the intervening air.

At rest, the rate can fall below fifty per minute. During exertion or fever, it can exceed 200. The range corresponds quite closely to the range of tempos in music and dance. Researchers

the quietest audible sounds move the eardrum by a distance of less than one picometer – that is, a thousandth of a nanometer, or about a sixtieth the diameter of a hydrogen atom

Thanks to this capacity, we can distinguish between two sound sources three to seven centimetres apart from each other and two metres away from us

But auditory processing in the brain can do better than this, detecting time differences of as little as ten to thirty microseconds (millionths of a second). cats up to 80,000

the 1990s, scientists at Sandia Labs in New Mexico (where the normal business is making parts for nuclear weapons, but where there was presumably some downtime) created a full-size replica of this appendage, and discovered that it made a splendid noise. Pitched at around thirty hertz, or just below the bottom note of a piano, the timbre has been compared to a trombone, and because of this Parasaurolophus is sometimes called the trombone dinosaur.

According to the botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, the xylem and phloem that transport vital fluids inside trees may be especially long in old-growth forests, and resonate in ways that birds find attractive, encouraging them to nest

It turns out that plants such as the beach suncup, or beach evening primrose, do hear the sounds of animal pollinators.

tests in the 1970s did at first seem to suggest that corn germinates more rapidly when exposed to music of any kind, whether Mozart or Meatloaf, than to silence. But this finding turned out to be wrong too. It was actually warmth from the loudspeakers that was making the difference.

treehoppers make vibrations that pass through the plant they are standing on and up the legs of other treehoppers. These vibrations are inaudible to humans, but can easily be converted into sound by electronic means. A library of recordings compiled by the biologist Reginald Cocroft contains songs by different species of treehopper that sound, variously, like a scratchy didgeridoo, a hooting monkey combined with mechanical clicks, and the warning noise that a truck makes when it’s reversing, combined with a drum.

They gorged themselves, and flourished: one in every five species of mammal alive today is a bat

The biologist Leslie Orgel once said that ‘evolution is cleverer than you are’. He didn’t mean this to be taken literally, of course: evolution doesn’t have a mind in the sense we normally use the word. The point, rather, is that evolutionary processes give rise to forms and capabilities that few if any of us would have been able to think up.

New Songs of the Humpback Whale

George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)

psybient, a genre that mixes psychedelic trance and ambient, suggests that whales and humans

Giuseppe Severini gives a sense of their fluency and potential in a clip you can find online. And in 2017 the flautist Anna Friederike Potengowski released an album of full-length re-imaginings

The archaeologists David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that there is a tendency in our culture to underestimate the diversity and complexity of social and political systems which our distant ancestors created, and their willingness to experiment with new forms of organisation, including ones that are much less hierarchical than many people today typically imagine.

Density 21.5, a 1936 composition by Edgard Varèse

Glacier, a 2010 piece for Western bass flute, is likened by its composer Dai Fujikura

The drone, or continuing underlying tone, in Indian classical music is sometimes regarded as a manifestation of Nadha Brahma, a term from the Vedas that translates as the ‘sound of God’: the vibration that runs through everything

sound can do a lot of damage even without finding a critical resonance. Above 150 decibels, which is the intensity of a jet engine nearby, it can burst human ear drums, and above about 185 decibels it can kill by causing an air embolism that travels to the heart.

Charles Kellogg dreamed that his flame-extinguishing method might be used to fight fires, and showed it to fire departments in cities across the United States. He failed to convince any of them, but his dream did not die. In 2015 two engineering students named Seth Robertson and Viet Tran demonstrated an acoustic device that could reliably put out small fires with sounds in the bass range of thirty to sixty hertz. They suggested that there might be applications everywhere from kitchens to spacecraft.

Number stations, which broadcast sequences of digits that can only be decoded through a device known as a one-time pad,

World War One. They have a clear purpose as secure channels for military communication and espionage, and they are still in use in some circumstances today

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which had first been screened in the Soviet Union in 1979 and went on a limited release in the UK in the early 1980s, is a cryptic science-fiction story about a journey into a forbidden and dangerous ‘Zone’ where there is a room in which your deepest wish supposedly comes true.

In the new field of soil ecoacoustics, biologists have found that simple metal nails pushed into the earth can become upside-down

antennae when connected to sensors. With these they can listen to the movements of worms, grubs, springtails, mites and many other life forms as they hunt, eat and slither past, or drum, tap and sing to get one another’s attention. Even plant roots make noises as they push through soil, and by tracking these noises the soil acousticians hope to better understand hitherto unanswerable questions such as whether roots grow at day or at night, or only after rain.

NASA, 2021, ‘Audio from Perseverance’, https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-captures-video-audio-of-fourth-ingenuity-flight

NASA, 2018, ‘Sounds of the Sun’, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/sounds-of-the-sun

NASA (undated), ‘In Depth: Titan’, ‘Solar System Exploration’, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/titan/in-depth/

NASA, ‘New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix’, 4 May 2022, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/new-nasa-black-hole-sonifications-with-a-remix.html

University of Southampton, ‘The Sounds of Mars and Venus Are Revealed for the First Time’, Phys.org, 2 April 2012, https://phys.org/news/2012-04-mars-venus-revealed.html

Russo

Richter, Max, 2020, CP1919, https://www.maxrichtermusic.com/albums/journey-cp1919-aurora-orchestra/

Russo, Matt, with Santaguida, Andrew, and Tamayo, Dan, 2018, ‘The Sound of Jupiter’s Moons’, ‘Trappist Sounds’, ‘K2–138’, https://www.system-sounds.com/k2–138/

NASA (undated), ‘What are the Contents of the Golden Record?’, https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/

Lidén, Signe, ‘The Tidal Sense’, A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3, 21 March 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sycw

Hempton, Gordon, ‘The Ocean is a Drum’, 8 November 2016, https://www.soundtracker.com/products/the-ocean-is-a-drum/

https://www.isla.hawaii.edu/sounds/earth-sounds/

Blum, Dani, ‘Can Brown Noise Turn Off Your Brain?’, New York Times, 23 September 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/23/well/mind/brown-noise.html

Elephant Listening Project, K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell University, https://elephantlisteningproject.org/

Payne, Roger, 1970, Songs of the Humpback Whale, Capitol Records

New Songs of the Humpback Whale, 2015, recordings by Salvatore Cerchio, Oliver Adam, Glenn Edney and David Rothenberg, https://importantrecords.com/products/imprec433

Anon., ‘Discovery of Sound in the Sea: Sperm Whale’, https://dosits.org/galleries/audio-gallery/marine-mammals/toothed-whales/sperm-whale/

Bayaka Pygmies, recorded by Louis Sarno, ‘Flute in Forest’, in Song from The Forest, www.songfromtheforest.com

Akhtar, Navid, 2021, ‘An Introduction to Sufi Music’, https://sites.barbican.org.uk/sufimusic/

Fiorella, Giancarlo, ‘How to Maintain Mental Hygiene as an Open Source Researcher’, Bellingcat, 23 November 2022, https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2022/11/23/how-to-maintain-mental-hygiene-as-an-open-source-researcher/

Goldmanis, Māris, ‘Explaining the “Mystery” of Numbers Stations’, War on the Rocks (blog), 24 May 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/05/explaining-the-mystery-of-numbers-stations/

Ap Myrddin, Llywelyn, ‘Russian Bells’, BBC Radio 4, 9 October 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0978ndz

Eno, Brian (undated), ‘The Big Here and Long Now’ (blog post), https://longnow.org/essays/big-here-long-now/

Enfield, Lizzie, 2022, ‘Dunwich: The British Town Lost to the Sea’, BBC Travel, 27 February 2022, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220227-dunwich-the-british-town-lost-to-the-sea