The Sounds of Life

It is said that David Attenborough has done more for the environment with his films than any government scheme. For many it has been eye-opening to see that human beings are not the only social beings on our planet. This book takes us one step further by illustrating how animals that we know either make no sounds or do not hear, are nevertheless interacting with each other. They may be using sounds and possibly other modes of communicating in ways which we find difficult to explain unless we turn to quantum physics.

Alongside the technical development of microphones and listening equipment, scientists have developed a whole new discipline; that of bioacoustics, or sounds made by living organisms, and ecoacoustics, or acoustic ecology or soundscape studies, i.e. studies of environmental sounds.

It has been something of a revelation to science to find that animals, who it was assumed could neither make nor register sounds, actually are doing both, often in very organised and specific ways. Using modern listening equipment scientists have discovered, for example: that a degraded ecosystem sounds different from a healthy one, that marine mammals employ different types of sound communication, that killer whale pods have different dialects, that whale babies babble and imitate sounds made by their family when they are a few months old, that some whales use sounds to navigate with echolocation, and that some whales sing in the infrasound range.

But it is not just the oceans that have a soundscape. The author goes on to describe the interactions of other animals which have only recently been understood thanks to new technology. When scientists recorded elephants at increased speeds, they discovered that elephants communicate with infrasound - below the frequency that humans can hear. They were able to document intricate and sophisticated social networks, which extended well beyond the core family group, encompassing scores of elephants across several generations.

It did not stop there. Scientists have also provided evidence that elephants can determine ethnicity, gender and age from acoustic cues. These studies have been so successful that scientists now are using similar tools and Google Translate to create a dictionary in order to communicate with elephants. This constitutes an innovative form of two-way communication with non-humans via AI.

Another area of bio-sound research concerns bats. Bats are capable of vocal learning, and use complex communication to guide social behaviour in a manner similar to humans. As in humans, baby bats learn by vocal imitation of adults. Bat songs, like whale songs, are also culturally transmitted and evolve over time.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper about what it is like to be a bat, to illustrate how difficult it is to see the world from the perspective of a different species. But even if we can’t know ‘what it is like’ to be a bat, the paper gives us some facts about life as a bat: ‘the majority of the bats’ sounds …. arguing over food (the loudest calls), jockeying for preferred positions in their sleeping cluster, protesting mating attempts, and arguing when perched in close proximity….they help one another, remember who does them favours, and perhaps even hold grudges if not treated fairly.’ (p. 130)

Mirror self-recognition is seen as a proxy for self-awareness. For a long time, this has been regarded as a uniquely human ability. But, as the author informs us, recent research has shown that mirror self-recognition is a trait that we share with great apes. elephants and even magpies. So, it seems that as we learn more about the species that share the planet with us, the more we learn that we are not that different after all. For example, animals share linguistic features once thought to be uniquely human: these include previously unsuspected syntax in animal and bird song, and even combinatorial processing in the vocalisations of primates and insects.

The goal in this research field, the author points out, is not to teach other species to speak human languages, but rather to design devices that can communicate with non-humans using their own modalities of communication. Many indigenous scholars also emphasise a notion of nonhuman sentience as a cornerstone of human-nature relationships: animals, plants, and even geological features, like mountains, are known as nonhuman persons – part of an extended family, sharing ancestry and relationships.

In 2017, UNESCO introduced a resolution on the importance of sound in today’s world, which proclaims “the sound environment is a key component in the equilibrium of all human beings in their relationship with others and with the world.” (p. 200).

On an individual level we should all acknowledge that we need to re-think our attitudes to the environment we live in. As the book makes clear, we are not in any way isolated from the world around us. And with the chaos and destruction we see in parts of the world today, we should perhaps also recognise how much we can learn from animals and their way of life: they tend to be much more in harmony with nature. After all, even if we can’t know what it is like to be a bat, reading this book we can easily conclude that there are many similarities in our ways of living. And we have the means, tools and knowhow to change and improve the environment for ourselves, the bats and all other living creatures. We owe it to them to do something before it is too late.