Soundscapes and spell songs (part 2)
Dear friends,
Last time, if you missed it, I explored the world of music through ancient myths, soundscape ecology and spell songs.
Now, I want to dive deeper into the idea of the soundscape - and the particularly evocative qualities of sound that we often experience, for example, through music or oral stories.
First and foremost, it bears remembering that we humans are creatures of the natural world - even if in our modern incarnation we tend to forget this. Our aliveness means that wherever we go - including those of us who are deaf or hearing impaired1 - the soundscape envelops us in its rich, interweaving fabric. We are wholly part of it.
As the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause reflects:
‘The sounds of the geophony were the first sounds on earth - and this element of the soundscape is the context in which animal voices, and even important aspects of human sonic culture, evolved. Every acoustically sensitive organism had to accommodate the geophony; each had to establish a bandwidth in which its clicks, breaths, hisses, roars, songs, or calls could stand out in relation to nonbiological natural sounds. Humans, like others in the animal world, were drawn to geophonic voices because they contained fundamental messages: those of food, a sense of place, and a spiritual connection.’
While the geophony describes the non-living elements of the soundscape, the biophony is Krause’s term for the sounds of the living world - the singing of the birds, the croaking of the frogs, the chirping of the insects, the chattering of the monkeys, the purring-growling-roaring of the big cats, and so on.
The storyteller Dylan Pritchett illustrates this in story form, telling a wonderful West African-inspired tale about the rhythmic, collaborative and harmonic process of each animal in the forest discovering its own unique voice and offering that up to the whole:
In her classic A Natural History of the Senses, the writer Diane Ackerman observes that sound orients us to what is going on around us, and anchors us in the logic of our environment. She quotes Helen Keller, who once wrote:
‘I am just as deaf as I am blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus - the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.’
As Ackerman writes, we are immersed in sound from the very beginnings of our existence. It is through sound that we come to know the world and respond to it. A baby nestled in the womb hears the rhythm of her mother’s heartbeat, steady and comforting. But if the heartbeat grows irregular or speeds up, indicating stress or agitation, the baby likewise becomes agitated.
Or, if we are hiking through a forest and hear the steady chirping of the birds along with the other familiar background noise, we relax, sensing that all is well. But if the birds suddenly fall silent or start shrieking their alarm calls, we are alerted to danger and prick up our ears.
In other words, disturbances to the living world register in the soundscape, sometimes dramatically. As a teenager, I once happened to be staying in a rural village in Costa Rica during a full solar eclipse. As the sky darkened in the middle of the afternoon, the farm animals went berserk. For a solid half hour, they screamed, crowed, bleated and lowed at the top of their lungs, raising the most incredible din. Then the sun reappeared, and the disturbance was over just as abruptly as it had begun.
As Krause writes, to those equipped to interpret its densely interwoven voices and sounds, the soundscape reveals the different qualities, relationships and nuances of a living place.
In fact, Krause discovered:
‘… the sound was more illuminating and evocative of a place than was any photograph. The captured ambiences - rich textures that infused the entire frequency spectrum with elegant structures, multiple tempi, and soloists - intensified my experience of the habitat through their luxurious and subtle nuances. They were generated as points of sound transported through the acoustic space. For me, listening with open ears enhanced a sense of extraordinary humility and imparted a sacred gift: a souvenir of living sound from a distinct place at a moment in time. Even now it brings me the greatest satisfaction I know.’
Krause went on to establish and document how the soundscape of a place indicates its ecological health.
Visiting some of the rarest and most gloriously intact ecosystems on Earth, Krause began to notice profound differences between the sound qualities of healthy ecosystems and those of disturbed and degraded lands. Bringing highly sensitive recording equipment to some of the wildest swathes of the Congo Basin and the Amazon, he was able to capture rich and complex acoustic symphonies of sound, and analyse them in fine detail. His recordings captured great multitudes of birds, insects and other animals all harmonizing with one another and modulating their voices to blend within the greater sound tapestry.
Not only do we humans belong within this larger tapestry; but we can only be only fully human when we embrace our deep belonging. So writes David Abram, a philosopher and sleight-of-hand magician, whose book The Spell of the Sensuous was inspired by sojourns in Indonesia and Nepal where he himself imbibed a powerful sense of animacy. He writes:
‘Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth - our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.’
Working closely with local magicians, healers and seers, as he describes it, his own senses began to attune to the rich and pervasive languages of the more than human. As he describes:
‘I began to see and hear in a manner I never had before. When a magician spoke of a power or “presence” lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the roof, illuminating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that the column of light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth, and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room; although I had not consciously seen it before, it had already been structuring my experience. My ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of birds - no longer just a melodic background to human speech, but meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding earth. I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze may flutter a single leaf on a whole tree, leaving the other leaves silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then, been brushed by a magic?); or the way the intensity of the sun’s heat expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets.’
Contemplating such passages, I am left with a tantalizing question: how can I, as a storyteller, harness the full powers of my body, voice and imagination to evoke the fullness of the soundscapes in the stories I tell?
Part of the work of developing a story to tell is to create a world in your imagination. Sound effects are of course a crucial expression of that world. One might clap and stomp, shout and sing during the course of the telling, and weave back and forth between different character voices, shapeshifting between the raspy voice and hunched posture of an old grandmother, the light song and ethereal presence of a rare mystical bird, and the omniscient voice of the narrator.
But how does a single storyteller bring forth that textured, holistic sense of the soundscapes from that rich story world?
The storyteller and musician Odds Bodkin weaves an incredible range of sounds into his stories, using his voice to develop a powerful sense of place. Have a look at (and a listen to!) his telling of the Bantu folktale ‘The Name of the Tree’. (The video has two parts - scroll down to the bottom of this page to find part 2.)
Now I am curious, and inspired, as I develop new stories to perform, to try concentrating as much on building the soundscapes as I do on building visual images: somehow infusing the suggestion of all the hubbub of an ancient city marketplace; the multi-textured symphony of a verdant rainforest; the singing of the icebergs in snow-drifted, wind-scoured Arctic terrain.
Sound is that living texture, so pervasive and immersive that we often not quite fully aware of it, even as we bask in its familiarity. Writing at my desk, I hear the front door burst open and the crashing exuberance of my 7-year-old son’s footsteps in the hallway. The sounds are so utterly and intimately unmistakable.
Noticing the soundscapes - the textures, qualities and relationships of all those different voices that are part of it - and developing this sort of intimate and conscious familiarity with them, I think, is part of reanimating our relationships with the living world through the stories we tell - and through how we choose to tell those stories.
As the title of his book, the Great Animal Orchestra, suggests, the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause has likened the biophony of ecologically rich and intact places to a symphony. He suggests not only that animals may establish certain acoustic frequencies to communicate with one another, but also that the different species interweave their voices with one another, to produce interspecies symphonies every bit as intricate and complex as any that Mozart or any other human maestro could dream of.
This week I am turning my awareness to the soundscapes around me. I am asking: what do I notice in these soundscapes? The noise pollution from machines2; the shouted pleas of an indigent person going door to door collecting old goods; the birdsong and the buzzing of the dragonflies in the reeds; the fierce southeaster wind funneling over Table Mountain in Cape Town; the joyous shouts of the children climbing trees in the park; the music and laughter of our evening family chatter.
I am asking: where are the soundscapes reflecting joy, or pain? Where are the soundscapes reflecting living, ecological relationships?
What do you notice about the soundscapes of your world? If you listen closely, what do they tell you? What stories do they hold? What do they evoke in you? And how do you respond? Let me know. As always, I’d love to hear from you!
With love,
Megan
P.S. I’m thrilled you are here. People are now reading Living Stories on every continent except Antarctica! I am so excited to see Living Stories develop and reach so many passionate and curious people around the world who are committed to storying forth - in our own diverse and various ways - a rich and vibrant living world for humans and non-humans alike. Please spread the word, and invite your networks to read, subscribe and join the Living Stories community. THANK YOU!!
In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman describes how the hearing impaired often perceive sound, for example experiencing joy and beauty from the rich and distinctive vibrations of music.
Krauss, of course, terms this human-generated noise the ‘anthrophony’, and writes at length about the depleting and disorienting effects it has on humans and non-humans alike.