A World of Living Sound

So much has changed about our world, from one century to the next, even from year to year. Just imagine taking someone even from the 1980s and dropping them into the world we live in right now, much less someone from a hundred or two hundred years ago. But all the way back through history, as far back as the dinosaurs and even much further, there are sounds that we’d still instantly recognize today. Let’s take a closer look at that timeless world of sound and what can happen when we start to add our own sounds to it. Composer Pauline Oliveros (pronounced “Oh-lee-vehr-ohs”) defined the word “soundscape” as “all of the waveforms faithfully transmitted to our audio cortex by the ear and its mechanisms.” The soundscape of the Earth can be divided into three layers, and those three layers happen to reflect the history of the world itself and how much it’s changed. First there’s “geophony,” sounds that come from natural forces like rain or wind. It can be as dramatic as an erupting volcano, or as gentle as a stream. These were literally the first sounds in the world. One of the most familiar sounds today started billions of years ago as the Earth cooled and water vapor began to condense into rain. That rain fell for centuries and soon became another familiar sound: the sound of the oceans lapping the shore. Then there’s “biophony,” which is the sound that comes from living things. This is where things get really interesting and complicated. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine a forest without thinking of the birds chirping in the treetops. Whale songs literally fill the ocean, echoing from continent to continent. Just within this past decade we’ve even discovered that mice sing to each other at frequencies too high for our ears to pick up. Check out my blog for a link to a video clip of a male lab mouse literally singing to his mate. https://youtu.be/ZS4Chf9yh8s This makes mice one of the very few mammals to have their own mating song – unless, of course, you count people. That brings us to “anthropophony,” whic