The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that life without music would be a mistake. I agree, but I’d expand the frame to include a wide variety of other human and non-human sounds. For me, the world is often auraculous or “ear-marvellous” – full of noises, which, to cite Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “give delight and hurt not”.
Among my earliest memories as a small child is the sound, on a summer evening, of a peal of church bells echoing off the hillsides around the village in Hampshire where my grandparents lived. Over the years since then I have been intrigued by sounds of almost every kind – though I do exclude a few, such as some of those in the genre of music known as “noise”, which a friend says he finds soothing, but which I find about as welcome as putting my head in a buzzsaw.
A few years ago I went to see a flock of knots (birds in the wader family) flying inshore over mudflats off the Norfolk coast. The birds flashed in and out of view as they wheeled and turned in synchrony. It was a wonder to see, but more than the sight it was the sound made by thousands of pairs of fluttering wings as they came overhead that amazed me.
That sound is hard to describe. It was a little like the roar of an aeroplane propeller, without the noise of the engine driving that propeller. And it was a little like a bull-roarer – one of those ancient musical instruments, sometimes known as aerophones, which have sacred associations in some traditions. But it was gentler, deeper and more powerful than either.
The experience made me feel completely alive and present. It also got me thinking about just how little I actually knew about the natural and human history of sound and its supposedly darker twin, noise. I decided to investigate a little deeper and started to research the science and culture of sonic wonder as far as I could.
Start near the beginning. About 13.7bn years ago, in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, acoustic waves reverberated through the superhot and superdense medium. The cosmos rang like a bell and the peaks of the acoustic waves became a focal point for what later became galaxies.
There’s a sense in which matter itself is musical. An equation derived by Erwin Schrödinger to describe the behaviour of atoms is very like one that describes the acoustics of a musical instrument.
The intergalactic void is silent, but some black holes project very deep notes – in one case B flat 57 octaves below middle C – into the surrounding plasma as they turn. And in some planetary systems circling distant stars, the soundless paths of their respective orbits are in ratios that can be expressed as almost perfect musical fourths, fifths and octaves. Our own solar system is full of noises, too. On Mars, the sound of the wind, recorded for the first time in 2021, is more desolate than the sound of any frozen desert on Earth.
When it comes to sonic beauty and diversity, however, nothing else discovered so far rivals the sounds of the living Earth. A dawn chorus circles the entire planet continuously as daybreak sweeps from east to west and birdsong begins across each continent and island in turn. Meanwhile, in the global ocean a vast front of tiny clicks and pops passes at 1,000mph from east to west as phytoplankton begin to synthesise and release tiny bubbles of oxygen to the surface. All the while, the tides – pulled by a Moon that is falling, ever so slowly, away from the Earth – push and suck on rocks and beaches, making sand swish and pebbles clack.
Sound travels faster and further underwater than it does in air, and many of the creatures that live beneath the waves have evolved to take advantage of this. Before humans disrupted the seas with noise pollution, the songs of baleen whales would have carried across entire ocean basins through what is known as the deep sound channel.
However, humans should not be underestimated when it comes to hearing nature’s soundscape. Our ears can sense tiny variations in air pressure: the quietest noises that a healthy young adult can detect will move the eardrum by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. And yet we can also experience a thunderclap nearby without being permanently deafened. And our hearing is quick as well as sensitive. Light travels nearly 900,000 times faster than sound, yet our brains typically process many sounds more quickly than sights. This is why sprinters at the start of a race react faster to a starting pistol than to a visual cue such as a flag.
Researchers are increasingly finding that sound is also an important means of communication for thousands of species of fish and other marine organisms, and may play an important role in the ecology of coral reefs.
On land, some of the biggest and smallest animals are among the most attentive to sound and the most adept at using it. African elephants can identify tiny changes in frequency and feel subtle vibrations in the ground, too, thanks to exquisitely sensitive touch cells in the soles of their huge feet. They can sense the thrumming of heavy rain on the ground as much as 80 miles away.
Bats that weigh no more than a coin can scream at up to about 138 decibels, the same volume as a jet engine. The reason we’re not deafened is that the noises they make are far above the upper end of our hearing range. They avoid deafening themselves by contracting the muscles of their middle ears in exact synchrony with each call, relaxing them just in time to hear each echo.
Birdsong is a frequent joy for millions of people. A blackbird giving it everything on a dark night in February when I’m putting out the bins is, for me, a guaranteed boost, but what do the songs do for the birds themselves? The ancestors of all songbirds evolved from common ancestors that lived in Australia tens of millions of years ago. Their ability to sing may be one of the reasons for their success: they now account for about half of the roughly 10,000 species of bird worldwide.
The song of the nightingale is, to steal from the poet Louis MacNeice, “crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural”. Among its European names, the Finnish satakieli – “hundred voices” – may be the most appropriate. Their brains, like those of many other songbirds, can process sounds about 10 times faster than ours, enabling them to follow complex sequences of different tones where we hear only a blur.
I’ve always loved listening to music, but I have found that taking part on a regular basis in actually making it, even as a total amateur, has delivered benefits I could scarcely have imagined before I started doing it regularly. For almost a dozen years I have sung with a community choir. Superficially, there are paradoxes in what we do. We have an excellent leader, but there is also a sense of radical equality. We try quite hard – and we improve, a little – but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s about making a noise, but it’s also about learning that making a better noise is in large part about listening more closely.
Over the years, we have sustained each other through hard times, separation and loss. Recently, one of our longest-standing members died. It was totally unexpected, because he had seemed to be perfectly well. We sang at his funeral, and listened to a few recordings, including one from a series of conversations during the Covid lockdowns. In the recording, he made a fundamental point: “It’s about the harmonies.”
Every now and then when we sing together in the choir, the harmonies lock almost perfectly into place and the overall sound seems to become brighter, richer and fuller. It is as if the space between is filled with warmth and brilliance. There is a sense of flow. My body seems to glow as it resonates. The writer Diane Ackerman likens the effect to having a massage on the inside.
It’s not just community choirs like mine. Singing together, whether in harmony or unison, can benefit both young and old. The Singing Mamas, a grassroots movement across the UK that includes young mothers, medics, musicians, teachers and others, work together to improve wellbeing through singing. For later life, projects such as music-therapy cafés, in which the elderly are guided to sing and play musical instruments, can offer joy and better outcomes. Following a pilot study, a number of these will unroll across Greater Manchester from October, involving more than 1,000 people living with dementia.
Singing with others is fun and good for you. It is a surprisingly direct way to connect both to those immediately around you and to the awesome, sonorous, and occasionally harmonious cosmos – and its symphony of noise – of which we are a part.
A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous by Caspar Henderson is published by Granta at £16.99. Buy it for £14.95 at guardianbookshop.com