Birds do it, especially in spring, bees do it, more or less incessantly, whales do it, sometimes over vast distances, and humans do it, too, some more melodiously than others.
In fact, read this book and you’ll come away with the impression that there isn’t much – animate or otherwise – that doesn’t do it. Make noise, that is. Or sound, if you prefer – Caspar Henderson uses the two terms interchangeably.
His exploration of the world of sound/noise is a catalogue of curiosities that ranges across the sounds of space, of the northern lights, volcanoes and thunder, birdsong, insects, plants (yes, roots make noises as they push through the soil, though you’ll need some technology to hear them), musical instruments, song, bells and much more.
Rather than following a beginning-to-end approach, A Book of Noises is very much a collection for dipping into, starting wherever takes your fancy. Many of the sounds will be familiar: the aforementioned birds, bees, whales and humans, for example. Many others are beyond the realm of direct human experience, such as the sounds of deep space.
Actually, space is one of the least promising places to go hunting for sounds. Once you get beyond 100km or so above Earth, there is a vast zone with almost no sound at all, “Except, perhaps,” observes Henderson, “for the occasional billionaire shouting ‘Whee!’”
But there is sound on stars and planets, including on the sun, which seems to be not just an uncomfortably hot place but an unpleasantly noisy one as well.
Nearer to home, below the Earth’s surface, there is also no lack of sound, thanks to the grinding and gurgling of tectonic and volcanic activity.
It’s volcanic activity that causes the loudest sound, and for which we have earwitness accounts, says Henderson. When Indonesia’s Krakatoa erupted in 1883, a ship’s captain about 65km away reported that half his crew were left with ruptured eardrums. More than 160km away, the sound was measured at 172 decibels, “about four times as loud as a jet engine when you’re standing right next to it”.
On the animal front, there’s lots about the extraordinary noise-making – and detecting – abilities of some creatures. When your dog cocks an ear and looks thoughtfully into the distance, for example, she may be hearing a sound that’s twice the frequency of anything you can detect. Cats can go twice as high again.
And that bee isn’t buzzing because it’s full of the joys of spring; some bumblebees use bursts of high-frequency sound to loosen otherwise-inaccessible pollen. On the other side of the bee/flower exchange, some plants can react to the sound of a bee by quickly boosting the sugar level of their nectar, thus increasing their chances of attracting the pollinator’s services.
Near the other end of the animal size scale, elephants are also champions of sound, with a 10-octave vocal range and the ability to hear, not just with their ears, but through the soles of their feet. “It is thought they can feel rain thrumming on the ground as much as 240km away,” writes Henderson.
Bigger again, the sperm whale comes equipped with a combination nose, broadcasting aerial, rangefinder and ear, giving it the ability “to project sounds and detect echoes with precision and at distances unmatched by any other living being apart from humans equipped with high technology”.
If all this animal achievement makes humans seem a little puny, Henderson reckons we do have one auditory superpower: rhythm, for which we seem uniquely well-adapted. As far as we know, no other organism is as good at coming up with patterns of repetitive sound – a claim Henderson illustrates with examples ranging from Paul Simon to the Gershwins to Bulgarian folk music (520 beats per minute – which makes even the most frantic electronic dance music sound languid).
Music-making, incidentally, goes back a very, very long way. We can’t know when people started singing, but the oldest purpose-built musical instrument known, says Henderson, is a flute made from a vulture’s wing bone, dated at an extraordinary 42,000 years old.
But not all in the world of sound is sweet birdsong and gentle buzzing. Too much of the wrong sort of noise in the wrong place can cause all sorts of problems. Whales, for example, may no longer be in danger of being harpooned, but ship propellers, seismic surveys and other intrusions have made it much harder for them to communicate with other whales. For some birds, just the sound of traffic can be enough to make their population decline. And too much ambient noise – even at fairly modest decibel levels – can delay children’s reading and language development, and make adults more prone to heart disease and strokes.
So after all that noise, it’s a relief to reach the end and come to the section on that rarest auditory sensation of all: silence.
