The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (8 page)

The sounds of insects thus form rhythms, both circadian and seasonal, but entomologists have so far not measured these in sufficient detail for the soundscape researcher to be able to derive clear sound patterns from them. Difficulties have also been encountered in the analysis of the precise intensities and frequencies of insect sounds. This is because individual specimens are hard to isolate for recording purposes and also because the sounds insects make are generally complex frequency structures or broadband noises, with harmonics often rising into the ultrasonic range. The locust
Schistocera gregaria
emits a sound of about 25 decibels when recorded very near the source, but the wing beat noise rises to 50 decibels when in flight. The flight noise of the desert locust has been measured as high as 67 decibels at a distance of 10 centimeters from the microphone. The sound output of many moths may be as little as 20 decibels quite near the source; while insects with hard wings and bodies, such as flies, bees and beetles, produce sounds up to 50 or 60 decibels. Since the human ear is more sensitive to sounds in the middle and upper frequency areas, insect sounds in the upper range (an average might be 400 to 1,000 c.p.s.) sound louder to the ear; but no human ear can hear the higher frequencies of the locust’s call, which have been found to contain frequencies of 90,000 c.p.s.—that is, about two octaves higher than the human ear can detect.

For our purposes, however, one general feature of insect sounds is of interest. More perhaps than any other sound in nature, they give the impression of being steady-state or flat-line sounds. In part this may be an illusion, for many insect sounds are pulse modulated or varied in other subtle ways, but despite the “grainy” effect such modulations create, the impression with many insects is of a continuous, unvarying monotony. Like the straight line in space, the flat line in sound rarely occurs in nature, and we will not encounter it again until the Industrial Revolution introduces the modern engine.

The Sounds of Water Creatures
      The sounds of the living are uttered only within a thin shell around the earth’s surface—much less than 1 percent of its radius in width. They are confined to the land surface, the sea a few score fathoms below the surface and the air immediately above. But within this relatively small area the diversity of sounds produced by living organisms is bewilderingly complex. It is not our purpose here to survey all the sounds of nature and we will only touch on a few of the more unusual.

While many fish have no sound-producing mechanisms and no developed organs to hear sounds, many do produce unique sounds and some of these are very loud. Some fish, like sunfish or certain kinds of mackerel, make sounds by grinding or snapping their teeth. Others make sounds by expelling gas or by vibrating the gas bladder. One fish, the
Misgurnus
, makes a loudish noise by gulping air bubbles, and expelling them forcibly through its anus. At least thirty-four genera of fish produce sound by vibrating the gas bladder.

The songs of whales have been a subject of considerable recent study and some recordings of the humpback whale were produced commercially in 1970. The immediate and spectacular attention they received was partially attributable to the poignancy that the singers were an endangered species; but more than this, the songs were hauntingly beautiful. They also introduced many people, who had forgotten that the fish were their ancestors, to the echoing vaults of the ocean depths and united the feedback effects of popular electronic and guitar music with the multiple echoes of submarine acoustics—a subject to which we will return later. The songs of the humpback whale can be analyzed in musical terms. Each song seems to consist of a series of variations on constant themes or motifs, repeated differing numbers of times. Researchers are beginning to wonder if different herds or family groups of humpback whales may have different dialects.

Several of the crustaceans make sounds. The mantis shrimp
(Chloridella)
makes a loud noise by rubbing parts of its tail together, while the Florida spiny lobster makes a squeaking sound by rubbing a special flap on its antennae. Other crustaceans produce snapping, buzzing, hissing or even growling sounds which can often be heard on the seashore.

In the early spring, marshes in many parts of the world are filled with the sounds of frogs and toads. North America possesses a whole orchestra of performers: the narrow-mouthed toad bleats, the barking frog barks, the spring peeper chirps, the swamp cricket frog and the American toad trill, the least swamp cricket frog tinkles like an insect, the meadow frog rattles, the gopher frog snores, the green frog plays the banjo while the southern bullfrog belches.

When Julian Huxley visited America and heard the call of a bullfrog for the first time, he “refused to believe that it could proceed from a mere frog: it suggested a large and rather dangerous mammal, so loud it was and so low-pitched.” Frogs are to North Americans what cicadas are to the Japanese or the Australians. The high resonant stridulations of some species such as the southern toad
(Bufo terrestris)
do indeed resemble cicadas, and sustained trills of the western toad
{Bufo cognatus)
have been recorded lasting as long as 33 seconds. But with the passing of the night, ardor wanes in the swamps; the voice of the bullfrog drops in pitch and the other instrumentalists gradually fade away.

The song of the humpback whale, consisting of distinct themes and variations
.

The Sounds of Animals
      It is impossible to survey all the sounds produced by animals. I will mention only a few on our way to man himself. The carnivores produce the greatest range of individual sounds among animals, and many of these sounds, such as the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves or the laughing of hyenas, have such striking qualities that they impress themselves instantaneously on the human imagination. They present intense acoustic images. One hearing and they will never be mistaken or forgotten in a lifetime. They are among the great sounds that make history. Men who have heard tell of them only from the lips of the bard will still shudder at the thought of them.

Ludwig Koch recorded at least six distinct types of vocal expression in lions. Cubs yelp to obtain the attention of their parents and apparently yelp differently according to which parent they are soliciting. The maternal response is a rumbling sound with a certain grunting quality. There is a “pleasure call” chiefly noticed among lions in captivity, which is initiated by the appearance of the keeper. The feeding sound, when the beast is alone and undisturbed, is a deep, gentle growl. Just when the prey is seized, lions produce a short and terrifying bark of ferocity. Finally there is the true roaring, usually heard at night, rarely heard during daylight. When roaring, lions will sometimes set their mouths close to the ground to assist the resonance and reverberation of their voices.

Lions do not purr. But leopards do and so do cheetahs, loudly. Aside from the hissing and spitting noises that most cats produce when angry, each cat has a repertoire of unique sounds. For instance, the puma has a loud wailing scream which Julian Huxley says could “be mistaken for that of a child,” and the cubs produce a whistling note. Tigers are less noisy animals than lions but they do have a crazy love call, like that of ordinary cats, but greatly magnified.

The howling of wolves is haunting and isolating. Usually the leader of the pack will begin in solo; then the others will join in chorus, howling first, then descending to a ragged yelping bark. In the wolf call we encounter a vocal ritual which defines the territorial claim of the pack to an acoustic space—in just the same way as the hunter’s horn lays claim to the forest or the church bell to the parish.

The sounds made by primates have always interested and amused man. They exist in great diversity, varying from whistling, screaming and chattering to grunting and roaring. Some are very loud. The howler monkey of South America has the strongest voice for its size of any mammal, and it is said to carry nearly five kilometers in open country and three kilometers in dense forest. The animal has a special bellows-like structure in its larynx to assist it in producing such a volume of sound. So far no exact measurements of these animals have been made. We measured Hoo-lack gibbons at a peak level of 110 dBA
^c
outside their cages in the Vancouver Zoo. Julian Huxley tells of a friend having heard gibbons in the London Zoo from Oxford Circus, during quiet early morning hours. That would be a distance of nearly two kilometers.

The gorilla is the only primate to have discovered a nonvocal sound mechanism: it drums on its chest with its fist, producing a loud, hollow sound. This is done both when making vocal sounds and on its own. The gorilla has discovered the property of resonance, independent of the natural mechanism of the voice box. It seems forever on the verge of discovering the musical instrument without being able to make the transition from personal to artificial sound. So far as we know only man has done this.

Man Echoes the Soundscape in Speech and Music
      All the animal sounds mentioned in these pages fall into a few general categories. They may be either sounds of warning, mating calls, exchanges between mother and offspring, food sounds or social sounds. All of these are identifiable also in the vocal utterances of man, and the purpose of the remainder of this book will be to illustrate how they have been worked out in human communities throughout history.

To begin this we should draw attention to the fact that many of the signals communicated among animals—those of hunting, warning, fright, anger or mating—often correspond very closely in duration, intensity and inflection to many human expletives. Man also may growl, howl, whimper, grunt, roar and scream. This, together with the fact that man often shares the same geographic territories with the animals, obviously accounts for their frequent appearance in his folklore and rituals. In these rituals, such as the monkey dance of the Balinese, the voices of the animals are conjured by man in striking imitations. Marius Schneider writes:

One must have heard them to realize how extremely realistically aboriginals are able to imitate animal noises and the sounds of nature. They even hold “nature concerts” in which each singer imitates a particular sound (waves, wind, groaning trees, cries of frightened animals), “concerts” of surprising magnificence and beauty.

We are at that remote time in prehistory when the double miracle of speech and music occurred. How did these activities come about? It would be rash to insist that speech originated exclusively in the onomatopoeic mimicry of the natural soundscape. But that the tongue danced and still continues to dance with the soundscape, there can be no doubt. Poets and musicians have kept the memory alive, even if modern man has acquiesced into bespectacled muttering. Concerning the flattening out of human vocal style, the linguist Otto Jespersen has written:

Now, it is a consequence of advancing civilization that passion, or, at least, the expression of passion, is moderated, and we must therefore conclude that the speech of uncivilized and primitive man was more passionately agitated than ours, more like music or song. … Although we now regard the communication of thought as the main object of speaking… it is perfectly possible that speech has developed from something which had no other purpose than that of exercising the muscles of the mouth and throat and of amusing oneself and others by the production of pleasant or possibly only strange sounds.

Onomatopoeia mirrors the soundscape. Even with our advanced speech today we continue, in descriptive vocabulary, to cast back sounds heard in the acoustic environment; and it may even be that the more sophisticated acoustic extensions of man—his tools and signaling devices—also continue, to some extent, to extend the same archetypal patternings. We have been discussing animals. Among the characters of his speech, man has numerous words to describe the animal sounds which are nearest to him. These are verbs, action words, and most of them are onomatopoeic still:

a dog
barks

a puppy
yelps

a cat
meows
and
purrs

a cow
moos

a lion
roars

a goat
bleats

a tiger
snarls

a wolf
howls

a mouse
squeaks

a donkey
brays

a pig
grunts
or
squeals

a horse
whinnies
or
neighs