Where we got our music

After about half an hour, the wind began to funnel down from the high southern pass, gaining force with each passing moment. A Venturi effect caused the gusts passing upstream through the narrow gorge to compress into a vigorous breeze that swept past our crouched bodies, the combined temperature and windchill now making us decidedly uncomfortable. Then it happened. Sounds that seemed to come from a giant pipe organ suddenly engulfed us. The effect wasn't a chord exactly, but rather a combination of tones, sighs, and midrange groans that played off each other, sometimes setting strange beats into resonance as they nearly matched one another in pitch. At the same time they created complex harmonic overtones, augmented by reverberations coming off the lake and the surrounding mountains. At those moments the tone clusters, becoming quite loud, grew strangely dissonant and overwhelmed every other sensation... 

[Our guide Angus Wilson, a Nez Perce Indian] took us a cluster of different length reeds that had been broken off by the force of wind and weather over the course of seasons. As the air flowed past the reeds, those with open holes at the top were excited into oscillation, which created a great sound -- a cross between a church organ and colossal pan flute... 

Seeing recognition in our faces, Angus then took a knife from the sheath at his belt and...selected and cut a length of reed from the patch, bored some holes and a notch into it and began to play...[Then] he turned to us and, in a measured voice, said: "Now you know where we got our music. And that's where you got yours, too."

from The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause

Thanks, Andrew Ray, for the reminder of this.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis 1911, wikipedia

A roar on the other side of silence

You only have to imagine being in a desert to realise the variety of sounds a microphone on the surface of Mars could record – and how they can be interpreted. First of all, the wind, whistling across the planetary landscape – how fast is it travelling? How often does it vary in speed or direction? What does a dust devil sound like? Or a dust storm? What about the crack of thunder associated with a lightning bolt? Or the variation in pressure during an electric storm? Once the wind drops, the gentle sounds that break the silence can be heard: the settling of dust grains disturbed by the wind.

– from What does the solar system sound like? by Monica Grady.

In a review of Trevor Cox's delightful Sonic Wonderland, I invited meditation on: the sound from black holes (B flat 56 octaves below middle C); reverberations through loops in the Sun's outer atmosphere; and a wind shuffling rock grains through the Martian air.

Sound waves from the great storm that is the red spot on Jupiter may be the cause of heating in its upper atmosphere.

A creative interpretation of the old idea of  the 'music of the spheres.'  , which I have come across thanks to Stephon Alexander's The Jazz of Physics is an interpretation of Johannes Kepler's The Harmony of the World by Willie Ruff and John Rogers.


Image via APOD

A million bombs all the time

The glory of the sun is violent and uninflected; its features are all flames and its sounds are all explosions. The Sun is so loud, like a million bombs all the time, that fine-spun sounds cannot be heard, like birds wading or figs tumbling or the muttering of mathematicians.

Things That Are by Amy Leach (2012)

But the energy density of life is greater by a factor of 10,000.

Image from Mundus subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher (1665)

Mass ends in B flat

In 2003, [astronomers] discovered the longest, oldest, lowest note in the universe — a black hole’s song... Although it is too low and deep for humans to hear, the B flat note, 57 octaves below middle C, appeared as sound waves that moved out from explosive events at the edge of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 1275. 

The notes stayed in the galaxy and never reached us, but we couldn’t have heard them anyway. The lowest note the human ear can detect has an oscillation period of one-twentieth of a second. This B flat’s period was 10 million years.

Joanna Klein An Earthling's guide to black holes

Supermassive black holes — a million to a billion times more massive than our sun — exist only in the center of a galaxy. At the center of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from Earth, scientists are hoping to make an image of Sagittarius A*, which is believed to be our own supermassive black hole, with the mass of four million suns.

Image from Utriusque Cosmi by Robert Fludd (1622)

In the desert

The more I tried to listen, the more I realised that my ears were accustomed to ignoring and blocking out sounds, and that they rang faintly all the time when it was quiet. I assumed it was damage from loud music and cities. Then I went out into the desert, at Chuck’s suggestion, and spent five days there on foot. After three days in that immense austere silence, broken only by the occasional owl hoot, coyote yip, gust of wind hissing through cactus needles, crunch of hiking boot, the ringing in my ears was gone. On the fourth day, lying there in the shade of a stunted palo verde tree, waiting out the afternoon heat, with the air perfectly still, and all the birds and animals motionless in the shade, I became aware of a very faint rushing sound coming from my body, similar to what you hear in a seashell. As far as I can determine, it was the sound of my blood circulating. 

After three days in the desert, all the senses start to blossom into life, and the most dramatic change takes place in the eyes.

from an essay by Richard Grant about Charles Bowden

Image: by Wars via wikipedia

Sounds of wonder

Early yesterday morning I was at RSPB Snettisham to watch thousands of knots, oystercatchers and other birds fly to the onshore lagoons as a spring high tide raced over the mudflats where they usually feed. Lovers of wildlife and the outdoors celebrate the beauty of a flight of knots (can we call it a ‘murmuration’ or is that only for starlings?) in winter plumage. The shifting shape made by thousands of these creatures, wheeling and turning in unison as if they were one enormous sky organism, appears to flash on and off, in and out of existence, as the light alternately reflects off their lighter feathers and is swallowed by their darker ones. [1]

Philip Fisher argues that wonder is “a relation to the visible world” and “an outcome of the fact that we see the world” [because] “only the visual is instantaneous, the entire object and all its details present at once.” [2]

I only agree in part. Yes — of course! — vision is a dominant sense for human beings, and plays a central role in many experiences of wonder. But there are other channels too. One of the things that seized me most strongly and unexpectedly yesterday was the sound of the knots as hundreds and thousands of them flew very fast just a few feet above my head. I cannot, at present, find the words to say exactly what this sound was like. It was not completely unlike the roar of an aeroplane propeller absent the noise of the engine driving the propeller. And it was not completely unlike some kinds of bullroarer — aerophones with sacred associations in some ancient cultures. But it was not very like them either. It was like nothing except itself.

I am starting on a section of the book about sounds, and dug up a couple of paragraphs from my review of Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox:

…for those with ears or other means to hear, the universe is full of, if not exactly sounds and sweet airs that give delight, then certainly hums, thuds, moans and much besides. Black holes project the B flat 56 octaves below middle C across the intergalactic cloud. Sound waves reverberate through loops in the Sun's outer atmosphere. A keen wind shuffles rock grains through the thin air on Mars. There is a roar on the other side of silence. 

Our own planet never stops making noises. Microphones placed by the Dutch artist Lotte Geven almost six miles deep in Bavaria's KTB borehole reveal a rich audioscape of echoes and crunches. Sand dunes near Al-Askharah in Oman sing notes of every frequency from 90 to 150 hertz, or F-sharp to D. Across the world's oceans, rumbles, cracks and echoes of eruptions, rockslides and tectonic movements carry for thousands of miles. For billions of years green-blue algae have produced tiny bubbles of oxygen that click and pop as they rise to the surface...

P.S.  It turns out that this week the wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson has a series on BBC Radio 4: Soundstage. Today it's the Kalahari, barking geckos and all.  On 25 March he is presenting sounds from The Wash.


Notes

[1] See this description by Robert Macfarlane

[2] This is from Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (1998). Much of the time I find myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with Fisher. “The object of wonder must be unexpectedly, instantaneously seen for the first time.” Well, yes; but wonder can also deepen with greater understanding, or with return after absence. “For wonder there must be no element of memory in the experience.” But experience only exists within a theatre of consciousness where memories of various kinds are heavily involved in humping the stage machinery into place. “Wonder in its first moment stands outside will.” Yes


Image: Bogbumper via wikimedia

Hearing things

The cochlea is a biological system that effectively decomposes a sound into its constituent frequency components. It converts instantaneous changes in air pressure into components that stimulate the hair-like filaments along the inner ear’s basilar membrane, which aids in translating sound vibrations into electrical signals. The activated filaments produce electrochemical signals that are transmitted to the auditory cortex. The individual components of an individual sound are re-integrated and perceived as a singular event—in part by nature of their harmonicity (that is, their constituent components are related in integer ratios), and, in part, by their temporal synchronicity, which integrates many components into a perceived individual event.

from Jonathan Berger on the necessity of musical hallucinations

Image from here

Sirens

Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence never.

from The Silence of the Sirens by Franz Kafka, quoted by Marina Warner in an essay for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014)

Image: Siren XXXV by David Parker

"At around 200 milliseconds conscious awareness begins..."

Magnetoencephalography scanners pinpoint [the] almost impossibly small magnetic fields [inside our brains] with amazing accuracy. They have shown us that only fifteen milliseconds after hearing a sound an impulse has reached the brainstem, and only a few milliseconds later it’s in the cortex. But the computation involved in understanding sounds is much slower: it takes sixty to one hundred milliseconds before large assemblies in the auditory cortex are activated, essentially “looking up” each sound. If the sound is familiar this process is quicker and generates less of a ripple, because the brain does less work to comprehend it. At around two hundred milliseconds conscious awareness begins, but isn’t lexically understood until after more like three or four hundred milliseconds. When we consider languages worldwide, we find that syllables last between 150 and 200 milliseconds—a constant that appears related to the physiology of the brain. It takes us almost six hundred milliseconds—over half a second—to recognize unexpected words, discordant tones in music, or make the looping connections necessary to make sense of discourse.

— from a review by Gavin Francis of I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth.

Francis writes that when he took a degree in neuroscience in the the mid-1990s, the neuronal plasticity responsible for learning was thought to occur at the level of the synapse. As technology improved so did the resolution of discoveries. It is now suspected that learning occurs at the level of dendritic spines—tiny portions on the receiver tendrils on each neuron.


Image: howwemontesorri.com