This Week in Sound: Bats, Birds, and the Big Bang
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the September 5, 2023, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.
▰ BATS, MAN: Ed Yong’s book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us is the gift that keeps on giving, because the more people read it, the more he is interviewed, yielding observations such as this one, from his conversation in New Scientist with Christie Taylor: “So, bats famously use sonar to get around. So, they echolocate, they produce these high-frequency calls, and listen out for the rebounding echoes and use those to navigate around the world, to find how far they are away from insects or obstacles. That’s, kind of, an advanced form of hearing, right, you’re just listening out for sounds. But the fact that the bat is always making the sound changes things. It means that echolocation is always an active sense, it’s always exploratory. Without the call, there is no echo for the bat to hear. And in that way, it’s a little bit like touch I think. It’s very similar to the way we use our hands to reach out and explore and grasp and manipulate and feel the world. Bats are sort of doing that with sound, and dolphins are doing the same thing with sound too.”
▰ SKY HIGH: There is a “city-builder” style game called Cities: Skylines, and it has a sequel, called Cities: Skylines II, and apparently the sounds are improved: “Some sounds only appear when you are zoomed in close to the city. Cars emit different engine noises at different speeds. Emergency vehicle sirens match the city theme you choose. And clicking on a citizen or animal will have a small audio cue, which may or may not be a literal bark.” It comes out on October 24 for the PS5, and I may have to give it a go.
▰ LISTEN UP: The excellent bird blogger Bob Dolgan affirms that the Merlin app’s ability to identify birdsong doesn’t serve as an existential threat to the value of birding: “I had a field identification experience that seemed to confirm that Merlin hasn’t completely altered the fabric of birding. There were quite a few raucous Blue Jays around (when aren’t they raucous), and they were making all sorts of calls as jays are wont to do. But there was another call—another species—mixed in. I had Merlin open and listening for birds, but it wasn’t picking up anything other than the Blue Jays. The call was something like a hoarse Red-bellied Woodpecker, which led me to conclude that I was hearing a Red-headed Woodpecker, an uncommon and delightful species in my neighborhood. I checked Merlin again, and it had nothing. Now, there were a few factors at play. The woodpecker was quite distant, so it’s possible it wasn’t in range of my phone and Merlin. The Blue Jays were indeed loud, and there were planes on the approach to O’Hare. But still, it took knowing Red-headed Woodpecker calls and experience with the species and this location to identify the bird. And when I lifted my binoculars toward a big dead tree in the distance, there was indeed a Red-headed Woodpecker at the very top.”
▰ SPACE MEN: “While listening with the antenna in May 1964, two young radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, picked up an eerie and persistent hum from the heavens. For a long time, they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings that had accumulated in the horn. Instead, they eventually learned, they had detected the beginnings of space and time. They were listening to the last sigh of the Big Bang, which birthed the universe 13.8 billion years ago and is detectable now only as a faint, omnipresent hiss of microwave radiation.” The New York Times (gift link) on the history of the Holmdel Horn Antenna in Monmouth County, N.J. (Thanks, Mike Rhode! And the public domain photo is from Wikipedia.)
▰ NIGHT LIFE: Scientific American has a great recent series of podcast discussions about migration and birdsong, which yields material like this from Benjamin Van Doren, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: “Some of the best nights of nocturnal listening that I experienced were when I was in college in Ithaca, N.Y., upstate New York at Cornell University. And so I remember calls from birds every few seconds that were migrating overhead. I found really thrilling because it felt like I was tapping into this vast mysterious pulse of the planet phenomenon that was just so much bigger than me. This was a whole ’nother level of experiencing something that was hidden to so many other people.” And this, from Jacob Job, Associate Director of Colorado State University’s Bird Genoscape Project: “In fact, it wasn’t until the late 19th century that we had our first documented evidence of nocturnal flight calls. In 1896 amateur ornithologist Orin Libby tallied nearly 4,000 such calls near his home in Wisconsin. Ever since then, scientists have been working night and day to decode this sort of nocturnal Morse code. What they’ve learned so far is that the phenomenon of migration is happening on a scale far larger than we once thought. But also that scale is shrinking as migratory bird populations decline to record low numbers.” (Thanks, Lotta Fjelkegård!)
▰ QUICK NOTES: Baby Steps: Mozart is, apparently, good for pain reduction “in relieving acute pain in term newborns undergoing minor painful procedures” (via proto.life) ▰ Fresh Hell: “a cutting-edge scam attempt that has grabbed the attention of cybersecurity experts: the use of artificial intelligence to generate voice deepfakes, or vocal renditions that mimic real people’s voices.” Dark Passage: William Denton revisits a 1947 episode of the radio show Suspensestarring Agnes Moorehead: “sounds drive a guilty woman to madness and confession.” Those sounds include then-contemporay chamber music. ▰ Canon Fodder: Are games like Starfield creating a new generation of classical music fans? ▰ Green Thumbs Down: West Sussex complaints about noise pollution from a nearby factory have a uniquely British quality: “so bad they have been unable to use their gardens in summer.” ▰ Bombs Away: Alerts about wartime explosions in Ukraine are aided by “infrasound sensors that can detect sound waves typically inaudible to humans.” ▰ Something Fishy: “There is a dam in the Netherlands where migrating fish get stuck, since it rarely opens in spring. The solution: an underwater camera linked to a website where viewers can press a button when they spot fish” (via Next Draft).
