Acoustic space

I have seen an instrument in a science lab that enables scientists to study tiny animals without having to kill them and even make presentations of the study with the animal using lively MTV background. Yes, you can have your favorite boy or girl band in the background in synch with the rhythm of a beetle gnawing at a leaf.

Jennifer Lopez can provide seductive music to mating spiders. I once had to read a journal article on the foraging behavior of Argentine ants and was so tempted to do a presentation on it using that intense heart-wrenching tango music of Argentina. But I had trouble securing the main "actor" in my MTV which was the Argentine ant. Other regular video presentations of animals such as those that we watch in National Geographic or Discovery Channel supply music to accompany solitary animals like the polar bear or marching music to herald packs of wolves or wildebeests. Often these are the images that change the color of our otherwise dull afternoons. Sometimes, they even plant those seeds that would later on burgeon into full-blown travel plans to "be with nature." And alas, when you get there at your great nature adventure site, you see a feast for your eyes but you hear almost nothing of that music you have been conditioned to hearing as accompaniment to nature’s sights. No "Bless the Beast and the Children" in the plains of Montana, no "Under the Sea" in the Caribbean waters, no "Hakuna Matata" in the Kenyan jungle.

Explorers and scientists tune into a different kind of music when studying nature. Natural scientists need to recognize an acoustic space that we humans generally, habitually relegate as peripheral when we experience something. We like to look first, then listen and often not as intently as nature lends itself to us and not as openly as we see. Sometimes, we create our own musical scoring in our minds upon being overwhelmed by the sight itself. While Wagner’s seat-and-heart-dislodging piece "Sprach Zarathustra" (I only knew the title and composer much later when I heard it on CD) played in my mind instinctively, probably to match my first impression of the Galapagos Islands as "outlandish," Darwin encountered and became awash with the main natural scoring he heard there. He found the Galapagos Islands or "Encantadas," as they are also known, a group of volcanic islands, dark and desolate, whose main musical movements consisted of the alternate crashing of the Pacific waves against the rocky shores and cliffs, the multitude and complex sounds of the mind-blowing population of birds there, the hiss of the otherwise muted marine iguana, and the ashen breathing of the giant tortoises.

With some ornithologists (scientists who study birds) in the interior of a subtropical jungle a few years back, I was so charmed by the correctness and the speed at which they identified the birds and turned their binoculars to the direction of where the birds were perched. They did this by listening closely to the unique bird sounds. That is why I think the term "bird-watching" is a misnomer. But already knowing this good technique, I am still a glorious failure at bird-watching. I still rely too heavily on my all too-human tendency to follow a moving object so I look for lots of flapping and swooping and often, that distract me from my own walking and I fall or trip which is why I do not go bird-watching on my own.

The underwater experience is often spoken of as "quiet." But nature writer Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams, Vintage Books, NY 2001) plays for us the acoustic space of the Arctic:

"If you lowered a hydrophone, however, you would discover a sphere of ‘noise’ that only spectrum analyzers and tape recorders could unravel. The tremolo moans of bearded seals. The electric crackling of shrimp. The baritone boom of walrus. The high-pitched bark and yelp of ringed seals. The clicks, pure tones, birdlike trills, and harmonics of belukhas and narwhals. The elephantine trumpeting of bowhead whales. Added to these animal noises would be the sounds of shifting sediments on the sea floor, the whine and fracture of sea ice, and the sound of deep-keeled ice grounding in shallow water."

The Eskimos are known to be among, if not the keenest listeners in the human race. This is because the environment in which they live is uniformly white not just on the ground and mountains but in the air as snow falls, as cold mist encircles the lakes, as it crashes from treetops. So in order to cope with the optical illusion that a world awash in white offers to humans, they turn to sound. They say: "Speak so I may see you." Sound before light. A summon that does not seem to make sense in physics. A few years ago, I was, with others, stranded in a really remote island for over a week. I now have almost no recollection of what the island looked like but the regular high-pitched, sing-song skirmishes (in Vietnamese) among fishermen and women-buyers as to the price of cuttlefish that awakened us before daylight marked that island in my mind for life. Sound heralding light, and my premature "awakening" to the daily reality that lunch was again going to be cuttlefish.

I think there is nothing wrong with creating a musical scoring of our own parallel to the sounds of nature. After all, the music we create are echoes and transpositions of the seemingly discordant harmonies played out in the vast complex world we live in. The important thing I think is to not dominate space with only sight, only sound, only smell, only touch, or only taste. Worse is to think of space in terms of sound, sight, smell, touch and taste calibrated only for a particular race of people, or a particular class or a particular belief. Worst is to define life only in terms of the human senses. To be expansive in our experience is to found a natural grounding for "empathy" that will expand and enlarge our perception to understand or simply wonder at the complex mysteries of life.