A playlist of noises
Some of the music and other sounds mentioned in the book
I’ve started a playlist of music mentioned in A Book of Noises. You’ll find a link below under the heading ‘Anthropophony’, a slightly awkward word for sounds made by humans, but first here are a handful of the non-human sounds explored in the book.
Cosmophony (sounds of space)
There is no sound in a vacuum, but there is sound wherever matter is sufficiently concentrated and in movement. On 22 February 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover recorded the sound of the wind on Mars for the first time. Listen here.
Humans have imagined sounds in space for generations. The idea of a ‘music of the spheres’ has exerted a powerful hold in European culture for well over two thousand years. Here’s the aria Tristes apprêts, from Castor and Pollux by Jean-Philippe Rameau, first performed in 1737. The opera ends with a fête de l'univers (festival of the universe) in which the stars, planets and sun celebrate a decision by the gods to receive the two brothers into the heavens as the constellation of Gemini:
Recently, powerful new tools have enabled researchers, musicians and others to ‘sonify’ astronomical data — turning, for example, images into sound. In the example below, X-rays are rendered as gentle chimes, infrared as harp-like sounds, and visible light the plucking of violins or cellos:
Geophony (sounds of Earth)
Volcanoes are just one set of non-living phenomena that make astonishing noises. Here is a tremor recorded at Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. It has a 1 Hz fundamental and overtones, and has been speeded up to bring it within the normal range of human hearing. Credit: Milton Garcés.
Biophony (sounds of life)
The many sounds of non-human life is another focus for A Book of Noises, which features sonic wonders from plants (yes, plants) and bees to elephants and whales (though it hardly begins to scratch the surface).
Recent research has shown that many animals previously thought to be largely oblivious to sound actually use it in many ways. There are, for instance, at least thirteen different kinds of sounds made by crocodiles, including growls, bellows, coughs, hisses and roars. There are also nonvocal forms of ‘speaking,’ like head slaps on the water, narial geysering (when a crocodile dips its nose beneath the water and spouts water into the air), toots and sounds made by deliberately blowing bubbles.
Anthopophony (human sounds)
Humans make a vast array of sounds besides music, of course, not least noise pollution that damages other forms of life. But on a cheerful note here’s the playlist. It’s incomplete and fragmentary, so if you’re interested please return to it as it’s updated
The last essay in A Book of Noises is about silence. Here is Sanctuaries of Silence: A Listening Journey by Gordon Hempton with Adam Loften & Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
Image: Solar Music by Remedios Varo (1955)