From soothing nature sound playlists to soporific podcasts played on noise-cancelling headphones, we are spending less and less time listening to the sound of where we are. How did we become so dependent on this always-in audio buffer and what are the costs of our alienation from our sonic environment?
Text by Guy Mackinnon-Little
Put on a David Attenborough documentary and mute the sound mid-viewing. A living, buzzing, tweeting, panting, thrumming, clicking, crashing, humming, crunching, moaning world goes suddenly silent. Where once there was immersion, there is now only a succession of flat images. This is the fastest way to gain an appreciation of the work of Attenborough’s favoured sound recordist, Chris Watson. After co-founding the industrial band Cabaret Voltaire in the 1970s, Watson became more interested in the sounds of the natural world than the noisy muck of humans. Since then, he has worked on the aural background for almost every Attenborough film since 1998’s The Life of Birds.
Chris Watson records the sound of alligators relaxing. Photograph by Jo Stevens
Like life itself, most nature documentaries begin in silence. Telephoto lenses, time-lapse recording, drones and helicopters make it near impossible to capture usable sound while filming in the wild, and all manner of post-production ingenuity is enlisted to fill the gap. A wobbling slinky stands in for a spider jetting across a web. A tangle of bicycle tires becomes a mushroom sprouting through the earth at impossible speed. The sound of cinematic nature is for the most part entirely artificial, as fake as the jungles of James Cameron’s Avatar. But Watson is a champion of on-location sound, dangling his microphones deep beneath the Svalbard ice to record the songs of bearded seals, or mounting several within the branches of a single tree to form a vocal booth for the dawn chorus. Such is his commitment to the specificity of sound that he claimed in an interview published in experimental music newsletter “Tone Glow” to be able to hear the difference between waves in the Pacific Ocean (“It’s really rich harmonically, and it has a musicality to it and it’s not particularly loud, but it really has this deep, sort of life-affirming quality to it, a richness to it”) and the Atlantic Ocean (“The surf there had this sort of harsh, more abrasive quality to it. Pacific surf doesn’t really sound like that. It’s much softer.”). Attenborough challenged Watson on the claim at a bar in the Galapagos Islands after a day spent filming sea iguanas. In response, Watson burned him a CD full of recordings demonstrating the obvious difference between the sounds of the two oceans.
Marketed as “applied psychology device[s] in recorded form … designed to counteract the damaging effects of noise-pollution”, Irv Teibel’s environments recordings were among the first commercial products linking the sound of nature to psychological wellbeing. Pictured here is the Japanese edition of Lapping Water Of A Caribbean Lagoon / Country Stream (1974).
Watson’s self-mythologising about the different oceans impresses because it twists at the doubled meaning of the word soundscape. A soundscape can be all the acoustic information nestled within a given place or the soothing looped audio we play on our AirPods to avoid having to deal with it. There is the soundscape we encounter if out mountaineering and the one that is a common feature on meditation apps. One denotes a specific relationship to place, while the other distracts us from this relationship with an immersive yet indistinct simulacrum, promising an escape from wherever we are. When most of us think of a soundscape, what we have in mind is something like the opposite of Watson’s ocean: not this ocean, but the ocean – pleasant in its non-particularity. Waves breaking on an empty beach; the slow trickle of a distant stream; the crackling embers of a dim campfire; dense rain falling on a tin roof. These are placeless sounds, chosen like desktop screensavers for their innocuous anywhereness. The sonic idioms through which we parse the world are hopelessly vague, smoothed-at-the-edges ideals absent of the details that make a place sound like where it is. Pressed on what everything around us really sounds like, the best we can come up with are bad haikus.
YouTube is replete with playlists of ambient videos simulating the soundscapes of serene environments. Video still from Calmed By Nature, Winter Snowstorm Ambience in Fire Lookout Tower with cracking [sic] fire, wind, & blizzard sounds. Courtesy Calmed by Nature/YouTube
This might be because we are spending less and less time listening to the actual world and more and more time immersed in a vast ocean of generic artificiality. In his book Hush, sound-studies scholar Mark Hagood charts the recent proliferation of media devices that enable us to control and customise our sonic environment: noise-cancelling headphones, white-noise machines, smart sound-filtering apps that make an office sound like a meadow. What unites these tools for Hagood is how they provide a placating buffer between our private selves and an unpredictable external reality riddled with danger and distraction. Beyond these overt audio-filtering tools, we might include in this buffer the breathy and tactile sound design of made-for-AirPods ASMR pop like Billie Eilish, the parasocial intimacy of the Manhattan podcast circuit and the immersive soundscapes that have become a staple of blockbuster art experiences, all of which combat the disorientation of the actual world with a calming sense of proximity and rootedness. The more we rely on these technologies and media, the less we are able to tolerate the world beyond them. Going for a walk without the soothing stimulation of a podcast or carefully curated playlist is now a weird-trick-lifehack on a par with starting the day with a cold shower or putting butter in your coffee.
This sonic mood-regulation is in keeping with the broader tendency towards pre-emptive retreat and personal signal-noise filtering in the face of an increasingly volatile world – expressed through private group chats, social-media blockers, finstas, “do not disturb” mode, cosy LED room lighting and so on – but is unique in its ability to counter this volatility with a more immersive and enchanting alternative. The first time science-fiction writer William Gibson took a walk through Vancouver with the soothing stimulation of a Sony Walkman, he came up with his idea of cyberspace as a technologically mediated “consensual hallucination”. “I recognised the revolutionary intimacy of the interface,” he told the New York Times in 1999. “For the first time I was able to move my nervous system through a landscape with my choice of soundtrack.” More recently John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus VR, has described VR headsets as “headphones for your eyes”. Always-in audio immersion is not like a networked brain interface that plugs you into a virtual metaverse, it is in fact its precedent.
Gibson, Carmack and Watson are all clued up on the potential of sound not only to block out reality as it is, but also fill the gap with another reality entirely. We increasingly approach our own worldly experience as nature-documentary sound designers approach their source material: muting the noisy distraction of a technology-filled world, but then also overdubbing it with another sonic reality that provides a far better sense of “really being there” despite its artificial nature. By plugging into these virtual soundscapes, we are not only evading reality, but expressing our longing for it, in search of a sonic quality of “place” seemingly absent in the actual world.
Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause also produces playful music using sampled sounds from the natural world. Bernie Krause & Human Remains, Gorillas in the Mix, 1989
Why are we increasingly turning to sound untethered from our immediate environment to feel tethered to it? Part of this can be put down to the familiar diagnosis of neoliberal atomisation and alienation: isolated from all forms of collective existence, we retreat into self-soothing coping mechanisms and grow intolerant of the friction and uncertainty of the world beyond ourselves. Recent years have seen a rise in diagnosis rates for misophonia, a disorder characterised by a panicked, repulsed response to certain trigger sounds – commonly chewing, breathing or speaking – which one scientist suggested stems from a fear of sufferers that the sounds of other people are entering into their bodies. Sound has also entered the realm of paranoid conspiracy in the form of the “Hum”, an unexplained drone on the threshold of human hearing – apparently similar to the sound of an idling truck engine – which roughly 4% of the world’s population across the globe purports to have heard. Proposed causes range from mass hysteria to microwave emanations from UFO crash sites, but whatever its origin the effects of the Hum are decidedly real: “hearers” complain of sleep disturbances, headaches, nausea and nosebleeds, and the sound has been linked to at least one suicide.
“A theoretical logic flow map for Worldwide Hum researchers and interested scientists” by thehum.info forum member Henrik.
Yet our aversion to the sound of the world is not just a pathology of neoliberal psychology. In seeking out virtual sonic places into which to retreat, we are also correctly registering an absence of “placefulness” in the actual world. There are important ways in which the sound of a living forest and all the meaningful signals of opportunity and threat it contains differ from the discontinuous and sensorily cluttered soundscape of today. In his book Voices of the Wild, soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause writes that natural soundscapes are not just pretty and soothing, but “provide exceptionally instructive perspectives through which to connect with the living planet”. Krause posits that for most of the Earth’s existence sounds evolved in much the same way that species do, the complex outcomes of repeated cycles of interdependent adaption. Just as life has to fit well with other life to persist, so too do sounds.
The first sounds on Earth were those of the planet itself: the smooth cycles of tides and weather patterns punctuated by intense eruptions of tectonic activity. Krause calls these sounds the “geophony”. For billions of years, these sounds went unheard. Then the first sound-making organisms emerged and brought with them unique acoustic signatures loud enough to be heard against the ambience of the Earth, sending information to each other using staccato pops and clicks. This was “biophony”, the sound of life in its totality. As these organisms grew more numerous and complex, so too did the sounds they produced, generating an ever-more intricate and interrelated sonic tapestry. Every sound life makes is a signal, and for this signal to work it must be distinguishable from the sounds of other life and the planet on which it exists. Evolution works as a mixing engineer for the whole sound of the natural world, ensuring each one is adequately differentiated by timing, volume or frequency. Most of what Krause terms “anthrophony” – or the sounds produced by humans – is severed from this deep evolutionary history and so absent of its organised structure. Nature sounds are neither random nor incidental, but something akin to a vast planet-sized orchestra, the information-rich outcome of epochal cycles of adaption and transformation.
An ability to harness this information was crucial for our early human ancestors. Biophonic signals provided us with not only an index of threat and sanctuary as complete and complex as the biosphere itself, but also endowed us with a sense of being rooted in the world that has embedded itself in our neural architecture. A study conducted by researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School monitored brain activity in a range of participants as they were played “natural” and artificial sounds. When listening to the natural sounds, participants’ brain activity demonstrated an “outward” focus of attention, while artificial sounds produced an “inward” focus akin to states associated with anxiety, depression and PTSD. Neuroscientist Seth Horowitz has observed how pattern-rich sounds such as rain, birdsong, speech and the buzz of insects capture the brain’s attention, while sounds to which we typically have an adverse reaction – chalkboards being the classic example – lack this mathematical regularity. Horowitz also points out that the vertebrate brain doesn’t just process sounds, but literally resonates with the patterns they produce: if you place an electrode on a frog’s auditory nerve, you can hear what it hears from the nerve activity alone.
Season is an upcoming PlayStation game where the player collects field recordings in order to document the sounds of cultures and creatures before they are destroyed by a looming cataclysmic event. Image courtesy PlayStation
The lions of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave paintings in southeastern France decked out in AirPods. Courtesy Twitter/@__andrew_m
Sound is also tied to our apprehension of the sacred. A general correspondence exists between prehistoric rock art and echo-rich locations, the reverberant sound of which archaeologists suspect prehistoric humans took as the cries of spirits within the stone. At Lascaux in southwest France, for example, archaeologist Steven Waller has noted that the deepest caves with the loudest echoes were painted with horses, bulls, bison and deer, while shallow chambers with dull acoustics were adorned only with light-footed cats. Others have taken this hypothesis further. A paper by a team led by linguist Shigeru Miyagawa advances the theory that painting the echoes we heard in ancient caves – an activity in which image, sound and action coincide – is a form of “externalised symbolic thinking” that set in motion the development of language: “pieces of externalised language may turn out to be hidden among the art forms produced by our early modern human ancestors.” Our neural architecture is mirrored in the acoustic architecture of the Earth. If we can calm ourselves down by listening to soothing nature soundscapes, it is because our minds are fundamentally coextensive with the planetary soundscape in which they emerged.
Our desire for virtual sonic immersion is not just then empty longing for a more tranquil pre-modern idyll, but an attempt to restore this connection between mind and acoustic space through the same technologies that have scrambled and even severed it. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has recently spoken of “reality deprivation” while advancing an argument against the dystopian bleakness of our increasingly virtualised existence:
A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. […] Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege – their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.
The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build – and we are building – online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of Reality Deprivation they find themselves in.
Andreessen is correct that our retreat from the quote-unquote real world (of which the self-soothing use of sound is one instance) is a response to its growing deficiency, but like other user-focused technocrats, he forgets that the world and the billions of years of accumulated information it contains exists beyond our individual experience of it. The looped audio of placeless sound – designed for passive, disengaged listening – quells our sense of reality deprivation with a crude replica of the IRL soundscape, but lacks its relational character and the emotional, psychological and cognitive resources that sculpted our listening mind in the first place.
Several experimental composers and soundscape ecologists have devised rituals that combat reality deprivation by re-enchantment rather than retreat. Our soundscapes might be damaged and displaced by the din of handheld drones and notification sounds and the sensory torpor of our digital-prime existence, but they have not yet vanished entirely. Inspired by her experience descending over four metres into the Dan Harpole underground cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, to make a field recording in 1988, composer Pauline Oliveros developed a set of practices grouped together under the header of “deep listening” as a way of sharpening our relationship to our auditory environment, examples of which include taking a walk at night and stepping quietly enough that the “bottoms of your feet become ears”, listening to a sound until you no longer recognise it, singing along to the sound of a partner’s body and making and playing back a field recording of a familiar space to see what unfamiliar details emerge. Composer R. Murray Schafer – instrumental in popularising the concept of a “soundscape” – suggested finding a public stairwell and trying to distinguish the sounds of the people walking up the stairs from the sounds of the people walking down. These exercises have all the new-age sheen of the meditation-app soundscapes, but differ fundamentally in that they rely on the slow work of expanding our awareness rather than quick-fix escapism, resisting disorientation by refocusing on what remains intact beneath the rootless delirium of our contemporary sensory environment. Maybe one day we will develop a technological interface that matches our own evolutionary hardware’s capacity to attune to the other-than-human world, but until then we would do well to learn to listen better. ◉
Beats Electronics’ “Hear What You Want” advertising campaign.