{"id":10419,"date":"2023-08-08T15:03:20","date_gmt":"2023-08-08T13:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=10419"},"modified":"2023-09-01T06:17:44","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T04:17:44","slug":"ludek-certik-ponoreni-ve-zvucich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/ludek-certik-ponoreni-ve-zvucich\/","title":{"rendered":"Lud\u011bk \u010cert\u00edk: Immersed in sounds"},"content":{"rendered":"
Listen. Take the wild music of the Earth into your body. You are not alone.<\/em>\nKathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
David Rothenberg once asked me what sound I had never heard before, regardless of its origin, I would most like to record. I admit that the question caught me off guard and I had to think about it for a while. After a long (already slightly embarrassing) silence, I managed to pull out the only decent thing that came to mind at that moment: the hiss or sputter of the aurora borealis. But it was more of a slur than an answer I would stand by steadfastly, even if I were to record the atmospheric sounds of the aurora borealis, recently confirmed scientifically<\/a>, undoubtedly heard and recorded with pleasure. I could have said anything else: the whimpering of a snow leopard in a remote mountain gorge, the rustling of migrating monarchs' wings, the thunderous crash of a glacier's loose face, spiders drumming on dry leaves (or any other example from the insect and arachnid vibrospheres<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, as I pondered David's question, I realized why it had taken me so by surprise and why it had been so difficult for me to find a satisfactory answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What interests me long-term and passionately is not individual or isolated sounds, sounds in themselves. When I imagine what I would like to hear and possibly record and then share with others (I never record just for my own pleasure), in most cases it is not a solitary sound. Sure, the centerpiece of an imaginary sound portrait (listener) could be a chorus of frogs, the stridulation of cicadas, the honking of an elk, the hooting of siamangs, the whistling of ground squirrels or the echolocation of dolphins, but always, if only a little possible, as part of the surrounding soundscape: the environment that shaped the aforementioned voices and which their presence helps to shape, to which they lend an inimitable sound identity<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hearing an Indian lion in a zoo is one thing, but hearing it in the environment that shaped and shaped its voice, that gave it its majestic sound, is another. fullness<\/em>, is another matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not, of course, that I do not from time to time set out into the countryside in search of a particular sound or voice, often with the intention of immortalizing it. I still vividly remember how for several weeks I fancifully traced all the old beech forests of South Bohemia in the hope of hearing, even for a few fleeting moments, the song of the lesser woodpecker: a small, July-like songbird that winters on the Indian subcontinent and can, at least from my listening and observation, boast one of the most melodious bird songs. (That Lejsko's sweet and painful song<\/a> (It has always been a bit of a mystery to me why she doesn't appear on the lists of the best Central European bird singers. Perhaps it's because many people have never heard her.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the center of my listening interests are so-called soundscapes, i.e. the complete acoustic imprint of a place. In other words, I am interested in How does it sound specific?<\/em> <\/em><\/strong>places<\/em> and figuratively, how all their noises, rumbles, murmurs, screeches, rattles and pulsations coexist, how they react to each other, how they influence each other over time (and how they influence us, the interested listeners) \u2013 in short, well relations between them<\/em>... Also, of course, how they express and reflect the local relief and climate, geological and atmospheric conditions, which especially concerns the vocal expressions of living creatures, including human voices (which I do not want to classify in a special category and thereby deepen the artificially created gap between us and the world).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every voice has (and knows) its place<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sounds and voices that sound around us are never isolated, disjointed, they always have some context that helps to explain them, from which they grow and which they also co-create. The song of the same nightingale will sound significantly different in the same place after rain or in the dry and dusty air of high summer, it will be different between bare and leafy trees and so on. And it will therefore also be different for us to address<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I blindfolded you with an opaque tape and led you by the hand through different environments, at different times of the day, you would easily be able to tell whether we were in a coniferous forest or in the middle of cultivated fields, whether it was morning or evening, just by looking at the way the birdsong changed on that particular stretch of the path \u2013 without being able to name even a single vocalizing songbird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is because every landscape has its voice, every place, every habitat has its voice. And even: that every voice has (and knows) its place<\/em>.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
These are not just poetically impressive images. As the acoustic niche hypothesis suggests, the voices of living creatures in a certain type of soundscape are not randomly grouped together, but have co-evolved in interaction with each other so that they do not compete in the shared sound field. Healthy ecosystems, tuned over hundreds or thousands of years, are characterized by having more or less all frequency bands occupied, sound niches<\/em>. On a spectrogram, a visual representation of sound, such a mature environment (say, an African savanna, a coral reef, a redwood or a tropical rainforest) will appear to you as full, populated, with a rich texture overflowing with detail. The same ecosystems, but somehow fundamentally disrupted (again, for example, a coral reef, this time affected by fading and the gradual decline of living beauty), on the contrary, reveal noticeable gaps, are sonically disjointed, incomplete, torn, full of sonic garbage: empty spaces are a sign that someone is missing, silent, someone has (in)voluntary left (in this case, most of the reef fish).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I record bird or insect voices (in the case of insects, even underwater ones: in ponds or pools), I want to capture them with everything that was audible at a given time and place, that surrounded and comprehended them. I cannot and will not separate them from their home, tear them from their roots, from the world that gave them timbre, pitch, meaning, shape. That gave them bodies<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The voices that sound around us, including our own, always react in some way to what is happening around them, they reveal (and co-communicate) some broader story, the threads of which spread out to all corners of the world, past and future, growing one into another. They are always intended for someone and most of the time someone also reacts to them (or at least, with one intention or another, listens attentively), if they are not themselves a response to other messages or the presence of another creature (like the warning voices of birds, sometimes revealing a lurking cat or snake, sometimes the flight of a falcon or kestrel, sometimes the arrival of a clumsy mushroom picker or sound hunter). Each of these voices has a story behind it that is firmly connected to the body-story of the Earth and other forms of resonant life, inseparable from the body-story of the Earth \u2013 like the patterns on the wings of the yellow-winged sorrel or the black-and-white lines in the concentrated facial mask of the caracal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Simply put, every sound in this sound world is open event<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lessons from inseparability<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the moonlight I listen to the nightingales, the wind has calmed down<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Context (embedded in the earthly bow<\/em>happening: becoming and passing away in a network of reciprocity) is what makes any portrait of a soundscape unique as a whole, what animates it and what it animates and inflames us with when we listen to it. That is why I never rid my recordings of disturbing human influences, if they happen to appear \u2013 such as the long-range noise of a jet plane (often affecting the landscape for kilometers away) or the honking of a motor train. This too is part of a certain earthly story that we must not turn our backs on: the story of the (self-)destructive human dependence on fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The inseparability of an individual voice from the context-embrace of a place, its profound kinship with it, is also evidenced by the way in which certain places, the sound qualities of these places, they print<\/em> into the form of singing or vocal expression of its inhabitants across a long evolutionary time. I will borrow an instructive example here from David G. Haskell's excellent book The Sounds Wild and Broken <\/em>(2022), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Haskell describes singing in one of the early chapters grass buntings<\/a> (lark sparrow) and fiery tanagers<\/a> (summer tanager), two small North American songbirds, and their different musicality shows how perfectly each of them reflects the preferred environment in which these songbirds have been living for millennia, with which they have a dialogue: its acoustic character, acoustic getting lost.<\/em> In the case of the bunting, a prairie species, the song is full of sharp trills, syncopations, jumping and piercing tones, perfectly tuned to the wide-open landscape, where it blows without ceasing, where the winds swallow every carefully uttered song. And in the case of the tanager, a species tied to mixed deciduous forests, on the contrary, the song is loose and melodically rounded, modeled both by the aesthetic preferences of countless previous generations of tanagers (the birds' own creative contribution can never be overestimated), and also by the cadmium of the forest environment, where sounds are easily lost in the thicket of absorbing and reflective surfaces, from trunks and branches to a million leaves of all shapes and sizes, which also produce their own specific rustles and noises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same influences (acoustic barriers) naturally shape bird voices in our country and elsewhere in the world. When I listen to the song of the blackbird or the song thrush, iconic inhabitants of European mixed forests (although blackbirds are more likely to be encountered on city streets today), I hear a deciduous forest set to music, an environment adapted in scale, tempo and structure, where high notes and complicated trills do not reach too far through the dense foliage, trunks and branches. (In the song of some blackbirds, and this also applies to urban ones, we can now and then hear a faithful imitation of the mournful call of the black woodpecker. I imagine that this too is an echo of the blackbird of forest origin.) On the other hand, when I listen to the skylark, the black-headed potato warbler, the meadow bunting or the grey heron, species that prefer open or steppe and rocky landscapes, I hear in their chirping, squeaking, creaking and rhythmically complicated wind songs meadows, pastures and plains set to music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And of course, we don't have to stop at so-called non-human life. We can also hear different types of climate, different landscape characteristics, or topos in the intonation and rhythm (prosody) of human speech: the relative number of consonants, vowels, sibilants, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every voice is an inseparable part of the story of the Earth, the landscape, the place between places, it is fused with the Earth, shaped by its relationship to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every voice is a form sound deadening<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We had no idea<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening to the soundscape in its fullness\/expanse is, in terms of mechanical sound reproduction, a trend that is barely a few decades old. For many decades, non-human voices, largely due to technical limitations (recording devices were large, heavy and noisy, microphones were desperately insensitive), were published as isolated, torn from the living matter of a place. Moreover, they were mostly the voices of animals kept in captivity. An example is the pioneering recordings of the German \u00e9migr\u00e9 Ludwig Koch from the late 1930s (released in tandem with the biologist Julian Huxley, the author of the accompanying texts), thanks to which the British public of the time could become acquainted with the songs of island birds from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the recording and dissemination of isolated animal voices corresponded to the modern (and still prevailing) way of narrowly focused listening. The change was to come only in the following decades, especially with the birth of the field of acoustic\/sound ecology in the late 1960s (R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp and others), overlapping with the development of other ecological sciences and the awakening of environmental awareness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We can analyze and compare isolated (bracketed) voices as we please (manually, which is considerably more laborious, or using clever, custom-trained algorithms), and thus arrive, for example, at a fine distinction between regional dialects (or dialects of certain ecotypes, as is the case with three different populations of predatory killer whales in the waters of British Columbia), but we will never understand their role in the acoustic ecology of a given place: what sound niche they occupy, what is their origin and purpose, in what relationship-embeddedness they are to the Earth as such. In a certain sense, such a sound is deprived of life, it ceases to be an event-in-connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, on many levels, ties with the world cannot be severed \u2013 in a similar vein to the way I would not miraculously cease to be an ecological being entangled in the web of nourishing earthly relationships if I refused to recycle waste or limited air travel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As soon as we release a sound recording, even one whose acoustic horizon is significantly limited, back into the world from which it was seemingly torn, it immediately begins to sprout new shoots, create new unexpected connections, somehow have an innovative effect on the world and its direction - in a sense, it dives back into the world, like a drop that goes through the water cycle; it evaporates, expires, flows down a river, and returns to the ocean to begin its journey anew, but each time a little differently, in a different rhythm, with a different vigor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps the album best demonstrates this connection. Songs of the Humpback Whale<\/a> <\/em>from 1970, a famous recording that revealed to the world the beauty of humpback whales' ocean songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The album, released by the prominent bioacoustician and conservationist Roger Payne (1935-2023) and his then wife Katy, also a renowned researcher and later (co-)discoverer of elephant infrasound communication, consists of hydrophone recordings of humpback whales made during their own research, supplemented by recordings by marine engineer Frank Watlington, originally recorded during the secret eavesdropping of Soviet submarines off Bermuda in the 1950s. The five audio tracks, totaling just under 35 minutes, had such a far-reaching influence on the cultural and political climate of the 1970s that they led to (or at least strongly contributed to) the declaration of a moratorium on whaling in 1972, but above all, they played a key role in changing the view of whales as such, their inner life, and their culture. Few were immune to the ethereal beauty of whale song\u2014humpback whale songs soon appeared in dozens of musical works, from songs by Paul Winter and Kate Bush to orchestral works by Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhannes (And God Created Great Whales<\/a><\/em>)<\/em><\/strong>, and even went beyond the solar system aboard the Voyager probe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The album's extraordinary commercial success (over a hundred thousand copies were sold in total, and another ten and a half million were distributed to National Geographic readers as a special supplement to the magazine in the late 1970s; something that no other recording with purely extrahuman voices has managed to repeat) and, above all, its resonating social impact to this day, is a vivid reminder of how powerful a tool listening (both bodily and machine, digital) is for conservation efforts \u2013 what archetypal power sound can have on the human heart and mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening gives back a voice to those who have long been denied it, who have been considered mute (and therefore free from all rights<\/em>), the Earth as such. It tells us that we are not alone, that we are not the only creatures endowed with intelligence and voice, the only bearers of songs, and it can often make even the most stubborn people reconsider their own attitudes, sincerely repent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe had no idea, we had no idea,\u201d whispered Kosa Hoketsu, chairman of one of Japan\u2019s largest whaling companies, embarrassedly, when Payne\u2019s collaborator Scott McVay (together they published a groundbreaking study on the structure of humpback whale song in the journal Science) played him one of the released whale songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I go, therefore I listen<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sound context (continuum) of other non-human voices is something that people like musician and sound ecologist Bernie Krause, among others, also the originator of the aforementioned acoustic niche hypothesis, taught us to perceive. <\/strong>However, Krause and his ilk did not discover anything new: they merely resurrected ancient forms of broad listening for Western man, listening to everything and everyone<\/em>, practiced for millennia by a number of extinct and still surviving indigenous ethnic groups, especially in environments where visual orientation is insufficient or misleading (typically in the impenetrable depths of tropical forests). From the point of view of listening, it is ultimately the most natural way of listening, inherent not only to all free-living creatures (because their survival urgently depends on it), but also to small children before they are instilled with listening in the impoverished contemporary sense: by parents, teachers, superiors, i.e. exclusively to other people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you ever step into the forest with a small child, you will soon realize how little you would hear and see without a child guide who will not miss the slightest sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That the message of sound ecologists has been able to reach us is largely due to the fact that their words have found support in evocative and complex sound recordings (especially those by Bernie Kraus are among the best that have been produced in this regard), supported by tools for their neat mathematical visualization. Abstract descriptions of sound sensations, however convincing in themselves, have finally acquired a tangible dimension. However, one cannot ignore the subtle contribution of those who already broke ground for acoustic ecology in the days before the advent of recording technology and the mass distribution of reproduced sound. It is a little-known fact that one such proto-sound ecologist was the New England philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, whose diary entries are replete with extraordinarily detailed descriptions of sound sensations and the emotions they evoke (see the excellent selection from Thoreau's Diaries by Jan Hoke\u0161, published in 2021 by Paseka Publishing). It was Thoreau-the-listener who was the main inspiration for the avant-garde composer John Cage when, in the second half of the 20th century, he opened concert halls to the sounds of the outside world and thus radically expanded the definition of what was musical: for both Cage and Thoreau, music was any audible sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thoreau's life, so tightly bound to the landscape around his native Concord, every flower there, every toad or dueting cardinal, also draws our attention to the equally important connection between listening and walking-wandering as the primary way of knowing and discovering the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening to the world from the cockpit of a helicopter, a Shinkansen compartment, the seat of a snowmobile or an off-road quad bike is practically impossible (the noise of a vehicle mercilessly scares and shatters the world of sounds around us), but walking directly physically encourages listening, creates space for it - walking enlivens, awakens the senses, allows them to spread out around. When walking, I move slowly and quietly enough to hear what is happening around me, what the Earth is thinking about, and there is no solid synthetic material between me and the world that would prevent me from establishing a connection. And if I feel that even walking is too fast or noisy (meaning disrespectful), I can stop at any time, take a breath, to stay with the place<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What can I say about the places I've been? I know nothing about them I saw a glimpse, felt a fleeting breath I had barely stepped on it, it carried me on again<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The turn to broad listening or listening to the world, opening up to the sounds and voices of the non-human world, bringing them from the background to the forefront, is often accompanied in personal life by the renunciation of technologies that produce excessive noise (lawn mowers, chainsaws, racing motorcycles, firearms) and modern ways of moving from place to place (too fast, too noisy, too firmly rooted in predatory economic and political models), in short, technologies that drown out the non-human sound world, exposing it to acoustic violence. One of the positive consequences of this rejection is the return to walking as the oldest and most natural (and also by far the most the most tender<\/em>) a way of moving through the landscape, a dialogue with the world through moderate, peaceful movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If anyone knows the value of silence, he is a pilgrim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I feel good under the ash trees<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Hardy's novel Foresters<\/em> (The Woodlanders, 1887), one of its central characters, the woodcutter Giles Winterborne, can recognize individual tree species in a forest from a distance only by the unmistakable song they make when the wind blows through their crowns. Not that he has any special talent for this. He just stays among the trees long enough (there is a good listener hidden in each one) and, above all, lives at a time when the landscape has not yet suffered from the noise pollution of long-distance transport and growing metropolises. The ability to hear trees in this way (literally to see by listening<\/em>) comes to him somehow of its own accord \u2013 it is given to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is (among other things) a great illustration of the sensitivity to which the practice of broad listening can contribute, especially if it is practiced for a longer period of time and in an environment without significant disturbing influences (the differences in the rustling of trees \u2013 given by the different surface area of leaves or needles, their shape and overall distribution \u2013 are often so subtle that in an urban environment with an unceasing drone of low-frequency noise, in which all subtle sonic details are drowned out, it is difficult to listen to them). I myself have thus discovered that by far the most pleasant to me, even more than the sparkling birches, is the rustling of ash trees, which I have been listening to in the gardens of the B\u0159evnov Monastery for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I feel good under the ash trees when they come to life in the wind<\/em><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The fundamental contribution of broad forms of listening, that is, forms of listening focused on the world (in Jeffersonian terms: lovers out<\/em>), in short, is this: they lead to or contribute to the recognition of how much of our everyday experience (and potentially also what anchors us experientially and physically in a certain space) is made up of the voices and sound manifestations of non-human creatures, even in the sonically hostile environment of big cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone can now easily verify this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look up and step outside your house, into your garden, your yard, or your street. Close your eyes and listen to the soundscape of your immediate neighborhood. Those of you who are\u2014like me right now\u2014in the city, you can certainly hear the noise of traffic, perhaps planes landing and taking off, the sirens of police and fire trucks. You can also hear human voices, perhaps footsteps, dogs barking, skateboard wheels clattering on the asphalt. But you can also, and I'll put my hand in the fire for this, hear the vocalizations of birds. They may not be the most noticeable feature <\/strong>your soundscape (perhaps you don't have enough greenery nearby, or the heat is so oppressive that it silences even the most resilient singers), maybe it's not exactly music, that is, singing, but you can definitely hear some: maybe origami magpies are chatting on your roof, maybe agitated bluebirds are scratching in the tangle of bird droppings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are parts of the year and of the day, especially early spring mornings in the velvety time before dawn, when you are likely to hear nothing but the voices of dozens of birds. You only have to get up a little, especially on weekends, when people are sleeping in after the work week, to catch the soundscape of the city before it is drowned out by all sorts of human activities. In this fragile time, it seems that birds are the only inhabitants of the Earth, that the whole world belongs to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A simple listening (hearing-expanding) exercise reveals that birds are an integral (and often dominant) part of our shared enlightenment, at least on the acoustic level, because many of them are extremely difficult to see without patience and the appropriate know-how (titty warblers or wrens, resting owls, but strangely enough, even tropical orioles, although their striking African colors would seem to make this impossible). Not paying attention to them means ignoring a large part of what co-creates and co-fills our world. And perhaps much more?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By air and oceans<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Few terrestrial animals so well represent the connection with the wider world, but also the connection between various elements, spheres. show<\/em>being \u2013 by air, land and water. In the traditional symbolic repertoire, birds represent the role of messengers, heralds: they carry messages from the gods, favorable or warning, or, conversely, they deliver messages to the gods from the world of mortals (like the ravens Hugin and Munin, who bring Odin, the Norse ruler of the gods, a daily batch of news). In some traditions (the Alaskan Kojukon), birds are even the creators of the world, the forefathers of being. These and similar ideas hide a deep intuition, the truth of which is confirmed by contemporary science and everyday small observations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Birds, especially migratory ones, literally fold the world at our feet: their journeys weave it like a weft in a delicate patterned fabric, holding it together despite artificial borders, walls, barricades, airspaces and high waters. They bring it to our doorsteps without us having to go anywhere ourselves \u2013 much like a jet stream brings moist ocean air to land. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it is the same through their voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listen carefully. In some cases it is obvious: the starling chattering outside the window is playing with sounds it may have heard during the winter months or on its way to Europe. It brings a piece of the world with it, like when you bring a pebble from the beach or a photo from a holiday. In other cases it is more cryptic, rather just a sense of kinship that the bird's voice, its rhythm and timbre, carries and I recognize it intuitively. Like when I hear the voices of Australian flutes in the song of the oriole, to which it is actually, surprisingly, closely related.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the breadth of possible connections does not end there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you get the chance again, listen to the swifts, who, with a screech that the poet Radek \u0160t\u011bp\u00e1nek wrote about as \u201ceasily wounding so that it drives away all other pain for a moment,\u201d whizz around the city buildings where they nest in the summer months. You would probably never think of thinking about cetaceans when listening to swifts, but it may not be as absurd and exaggerated as it might seem at first glance\/listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Swifts, like killer whales and dolphins, are highly social creatures. You rarely see them flying alone \u2013 and when you do, it\u2019s only for a short interlude before they form a loud, announcing flock again. But the greatest similarity between swifts and cetaceans lies in the extent to which they tuning<\/em> to the element in which they live, which they animate and of which they are the animator. Perhaps apart from the seafaring albatrosses, I know of no other bird so perfectly adapted to life in the air \u2013 to the point that they spend most of their lives in the air, including mating and sleeping. When we watch the swifts' rapid acrobatics, it is as if we were watching the wind that has taken on a physical form. So perfect is their union with the air, the sky, the ether. On solid ground, however, they are tragically defenseless and clumsy; on their stunted legs they can barely move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we look at mammals in the waves, it's very similar. If they find themselves on land, they are suffocated and crushed by their own body weight, which is almost nonexistent in the water. Like swifts (and all songbirds), cetaceans are extremely vocal and musical creatures. We may not find another group of living creatures on Earth for whom sound is such an essential element of life, self-expression<\/em>Cetaceans are, as Cosmo Sheldrake sings in a song, creatures loaded with sound<\/em> (bathed in sound). They live in a sound-permeable environment, in which sound travels many times faster than in air (the specific speed of sound waves depends on the relative density, temperature and salinity of the water, but is generally about three times faster than on land) and which often cannot be mapped except by sound, to view<\/em>Cetaceans use sound to communicate with each other, often over distances of thousands of kilometers, but also as a form of vision \u2013 thanks to an exceptionally developed sense of echolocation. As researcher Alexandra Morton writes in her autobiographical book Listening To Whales<\/em> (2002): \u201cTo us, the underwater world seems like a dark and impenetrable place; to whales, every sound can illuminate it with flashes of three-dimensional detail. (\u2026) Not only can the whale, thanks to its remarkable echolocation, \u2018see\u2019 in the darkness of the ocean; it can even peer into the bowels of objects, including other whales.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, there are other ways to do this surprising thing. harmony<\/em> between birds and cetaceans to reveal. More conclusive, if you will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Birds and cetaceans live at opposite ends of the metabolic spectrum: the former generally lead extremely fast lives (the tiny hearts of hummingbirds, close relatives of swifts, can beat up to 1,260 beats per minute during physical exertion), the latter generally lead extremely slow lives (the fin whale reduces its heart rate to two beats per minute when diving). At least that's how it seems to us humans, somewhere in the middle. However, if we take a recording of a bird's song, say a nightingale or a black-headed warbler, and slow it down significantly, we get something that is strikingly reminiscent of the deliberate song of a humpback whale. Conversely, if we speed up the song of a humpback whale, we get something that is strikingly reminiscent of the song of a nightingale or a black-headed warbler. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This, of course, leads to a reasonable suspicion that we are dealing with related forms of musicality, which are quite possibly governed by similar laws: they are just realized on a different temporal and existential axis. Such an assumption is also supported by the fact that both cetaceans and songbirds must learn their songs from their parents or other members of the community, otherwise they will be practically mute. In other words, cetaceans and songbirds transmit their songs culturally. And in both groups of songbirds, regional dialects also arise, songs change over time, and other manifestations of cultural transmission and inevitable cultural transformations. Perhaps this is why bird voices are one of the predominant elements of the sound ecology of land, and cetacean voices \u2013 on a scale from the infrasonic song of the fin whale to the playful whistling, squeaking, clicking, and whining of dolphins and porpoises \u2013 on the contrary, that of the underwater one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So not only can listening to bird calls reveal a little about a completely different group of living beings (beings inhabiting a diametrically different sphere) show<\/em>being, show<\/em>creativity), but even to uncover some of the laws of extrahuman musicality. And we have barely scratched the surface of possible correlations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beings immersed in sounds<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
What can you take away from all this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That distances \u2013 in landscape and between species, geographical and biological \u2013 are relative. That the world can be seen in a grain of sand, but also, William Blake forgives, heard in a single bird's stanza. That sounds (and especially the voices of living creatures, live voices<\/em>) can tell us a lot about the world around us, its interconnectedness and ubiquitous rhyming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listen to how countless sounds and voices anchor us in the world, how they draw us into it, how they speak of the movement of the planet around the Sun, of distant and difficult-to-understand events. Listen to how traces and echoes of the ancient history of the planet and life sound all around us. In the roar of waterfalls or the surf of the sea, in gusts of wind or in the thunder of a storm, distant eons reach us, when the Earth still lacked the voices of life, when there was no one to listen to, only the Earth itself. From the rhythmic song of any grasshopper, cicada, cricket or locust, the descendants of prehistoric, long-vanished insects speak to us, which introduced the world to the first terrestrial songs, breaking the silence that lasted billions of years. And don't we hear in the songs of songbirds, in their winged music, to which we have such (un)surprisingly well-tuned hearing, something of the origins of our own language?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are all, to some extent, beings immersed in sounds, and therefore beings immersed in the world, co-creating the world. The sounds and voices around us influence who we are, how we feel, alter our mood and behavior (some calm us, others stress us or even cause us pain). And we are not alone. Consider trees, which respond to the level of vibrations in their surroundings by forming stiffer and harder cells, reinforced with added cellulose and lignin. Trees in the city, growing along busy intersections and roads, where the traffic of cars and trucks shakes the ground incessantly, are not the same as their counterparts in quiet forests. Even city tits do not sing in the same way as country ones: their songs are louder and gradually lose frequencies that do not penetrate banal noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Be curious and ask: What can I deduce from the voice I hear? What story? Can it transport me to another continent? Can I recognize another place, hundreds and thousands of kilometers away, by listening to one place? Where does a song originate, what does it carry, foreshadow, and what is it silent about? And why does this particular song become successful among others and another one quietly, without witnesses, disappear? What role do we, the makers of mechanical noise, but also of hymns and love songs, play in all of this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am thinking of the wood warbler, which I listened to and recorded this spring on an extinct Tertiary stratovolcano, Vina\u0159ick\u00e1 hora near Kladno. The warbler rarely performed her song in its entirety; even when she sang for hours on end, seemingly without fatigue, her singing was fragmentary, incomplete, as if she was afraid to develop it, as if she had nowhere to go, for whom, why. Was it just because it is a widespread phenomenon among Czech (or perhaps only Kladno) warblers, a manifestation of a sense of variation, playfulness, and a unique taste? Or, on the contrary, because in her youth she had no one to teach her singing in its ideal, fully blossomed form?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every sound, because it is part of the world, grows out of the world, can be a path to understanding it. It is up to us whether we listen to it. And how widely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want a heart, but a sound one I want vision, but a piercing one I want to hear everything on earth and everything under water and everything in the clouds<\/em>\nthe whole resounding world<\/em>\n\n\n<\/pre>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Listen. Inhale the wild music of the Earth into your body. You are not alone. Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music David Rothenberg once asked me what unheard sound, regardless of its origin, I would most like to record. The question, I admit, caught me off guard and I had to think about it for a while. After a long (already slightly\u2026 Continue reading Lud\u011bk \u010cert\u00edk: Immersed in sounds<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-10419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-ludek-certik","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10419"}],"version-history":[{"count":99,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10749,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10419\/revisions\/10749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}