November 5, 2023 • 46 mins
Welcome Home Everybody!
In this episode, the first of two parts, Martin interviews acoustician and naturalist Michael Stocker. Drawing inspiration from Michael's wonderfully free-ranging and rich book, Hear Where We Are, the conversation, and accompanying audio extracts, explore the myriad themes within Michaels book and relate these to the experiences of the HomeSounds project. The book examines how humans and other hearing animals use sound to establish relationships with their surroundings. It does this by examining sound in incredible scientific detail and mixing this with stories of everyday human experience and emotion. As well as enriching our understanding of sound, the book is inspired by a desire to shed light on seemingly illogical and self-destructive human behaviour, so often unconsciously and profoundly influenced by sound.
With an extensive background advising on and designing sound environments for clients including the National Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., George Lucas's 'Skywalker Ranch', the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, Mexico City's children's musuem 'El Museo Papalote', and numerous Hollywood sound and film studios, Michael is now the director of Ocean Conservation Research, an organisation seeking to understand the impacts of human generated noise on marine life, a theme touched on in both our conversation, and the sound extracts selected by Michael and I.
LINKS
Homesounds
Ocean Conservation Research
Hear Where We Are
HomeSounds Show Supporters Club
In this episode, the first of two parts, Martin interviews acoustician and naturalist Michael Stocker. Drawing inspiration from Michael's wonderfully free-ranging and rich book, Hear Where We Are, the conversation, and accompanying audio extracts, explore the myriad themes within Michaels book and relate these to the experiences of the HomeSounds project. The book examines how humans and other hearing animals use sound to establish relationships with their surroundings. It does this by examining sound in incredible scientific detail and mixing this with stories of everyday human experience and emotion. As well as enriching our understanding of sound, the book is inspired by a desire to shed light on seemingly illogical and self-destructive human behaviour, so often unconsciously and profoundly influenced by sound.
With an extensive background advising on and designing sound environments for clients including the National Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., George Lucas's 'Skywalker Ranch', the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, Mexico City's children's musuem 'El Museo Papalote', and numerous Hollywood sound and film studios, Michael is now the director of Ocean Conservation Research, an organisation seeking to understand the impacts of human generated noise on marine life, a theme touched on in both our conversation, and the sound extracts selected by Michael and I.
LINKS
Homesounds
Ocean Conservation Research
Hear Where We Are
HomeSounds Show Supporters Club
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:36):
Welcome home, everybody, and welcometo the Home Sound Show. My name
is Martin and I'm a field recordistantteacher. I'm the creator of the Home
Sounds Project and your co host forthe show along with Rob. Hello everybody.
My name is Rob and I'm aneducator and naturalist. I work for
the Vesceral Trust at Sheringham Park inNorfolk as part of their Children and Young
(00:59):
People Hub. The Home Sound Showinvites everyone to become active environmental listeners.
In this episode, the first oftwo parts, I interview accoustician and naturalist
Michael Stocker, Drawing inspiration from Michael'swonderfully free ranging and rich book Here Where
We Are. The conversation and accompanyingaudio extracts explore the myriad themes within Michael's
(01:23):
book and relate these to the experiencesof the Home Sounds Project. The book
examines how humans and other hearing animalsuse sound to establish relationships with their surroundings.
It does this through incredible scientific detailmixed with stories of everyday human experience
and emotion, as well as enrichingour understanding of sound. The book is
(01:47):
inspired by a desire to shed lighton seemingly illogical and self destructive human behavior
so often unconsciously and profoundly influenced bysound. With an extensive background advice and
designing sound environments for clients, includingthe National Holocaust Museum in Washington, d
C. George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch,the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Mexico City's Children's
(02:12):
Museum and Museell Papallotte, and numerousHollywood sound and film studios. Michael is
now the director of Ocean Conservation Research, an organization seeking to understand the impacts
of human generated noise on marine life, a theme touched on in both our
conversation and the sound extracts selected byMichael and I. I can hear you
(02:40):
just fine, okay, okay,yeah, it sounds good. So to
start with, I wonder whether youcould give us a bit of background to
yourself and how you got you know, a bit of history as to how
(03:01):
you got into the field, andhow you're kind of you know, why
you've begun to specialize in the areathat you have and you're in your kind
of main interest. Really yeah,okay, it's kind of a securitist story.
(03:21):
Starts out pretty early when I wasa youngster, just a pop.
I started taking piano lessons when Iwas about four years old, and I
was really in love with nature.We were in a kind of a suburban
setting, but there was a lotof nature around, and I was particularly
enamored with ocean, you know,the beach. My mom would take me
(03:42):
to the beach and drop me intoa tide pool and then she was done
for the day. She could justcrack a novel and not be pestered.
I would be tooling around on thetide bulls for all, you know.
And so I was really and youknow, by the time I was ten,
I had all these aquariums all overthe houses. You know, it's
just saltwater and freshwater quariums. Ijust really loved gritters, you know,
(04:05):
and I wanted to be a marinebiologist. At that time, a lot
of us, kind of at myage, were impressed by Jacques Cousteau,
who had his under the Underwater Worldof Jacques Cousteau. But he called it
the Silent World, which unfortunate becauseI think he really set us back a
(04:28):
lot. But you know, whenI was again about that age, nineteen
years old, we used to takea vacation up in mid central coast to
California, a place called Morro Bay, and they had an aquarium there that
had, among other things, theirlocal fish, you know, wolf eels
and Moray eels, and they havethese rockfish there, and they had a
(04:49):
hydrophone in this aquarium, and youcould just hear these rockfish, you know,
chortling away. And I was totallyfascinating. And you know, when
I got home from that, Iwanted to get a hydrophone for one of
my aquariums. And my mom said, oh, you won't hear anything.
I think she was still subject tothis. You know. Turns out there
(05:13):
were actually a lot of fish Idid have that would have made you know,
picked us cats. Really they wouldhave made noises and corridors and an
event. But I probably also wouldhave heard the noise of the of the
pump as much as anything else.But that being said, you know,
it kind of set me off onthis idea. And then I got into
high school and I had this biologyteacher who had this unbelievable talent of making
(05:38):
biology tedious. You know, hewas a real worrying guy. And so
I said, if by all thesethat, I don't want to do it.
So I fell back into into music. I started working in the music
industry in recording studios and realized earlyon that the people who got paid most
reliably were the technical people. SoI started studying electronics and and acoustics and
(06:00):
studio design and things like that.So I got my vocabulary app around physics
and acoustics and and was doing that, you know, for I did some
big jobs. I would do soundinstallation, design installation for museums like the
Holocaust Museum Washington, d C.And mozip Aapa lot Delino. We did
(06:20):
put together an amazing soundscape. Iwas working with the Academy Studios and they
built a seventy five foot tall,you know, twenty five meter tall tree.
It was a rainforest, it wasa fcus and they had all these
animals in it. And we madea twenty six channel soundtrack for it,
and we can pressed twenty four hoursof jungle sounds into you know, basically
(06:46):
a little over an hour and ahalf and you know, rain, rain,
thunderstorms and all these different critters.And so we kind of replicated that,
which was nice because we got togot to the jungles recorded, and
you know, it was a itwas a nice fun fun. Yeah,
and then I I ended up herein northern California. I was managing the
installation of Skywalker Ranch, the techbuilding up there, which is all sound
(07:11):
recording tech building. We have puteight hundred miles a wire in the walls.
Wow, it was pretty pretty amazing, and they take soundtracks and you
know, all kinds of folly studiosand things like that. Yeah, that
was a good job. So Icontinue to do that contracting work. But
it was shortly after that job thatthe Navy was proposing this onsonification of the
(07:31):
entire ocean basin uh mostly sorry,what was that the proposing boat? Sorry,
they were going to insonify. Theywere going to sense sounds across the
ocean base. It was an acoustictomography of ocean climates, and and Walter
Monk was, you know, abrilliant physical oceanographer. But they were talking
about putting you know, sound inthe ocean that was loud enough to travel
(07:54):
between you know, California and Hawaii. And I thought, you know,
the animal, I'm not like that. You using the ocean as a as
a communication channel. Really. Wow. So there was a lot of environmentalists
who were concerned about it, butyou know, two to one. They
didn't really well, there was therewas one Lindy Wildgart actually was a scientist
on our side of this thing.But outside of that, nobody really understood
(08:16):
the science behind the stand physics didunderstand biology. They just knew it was
a bad idea. And so Iended up becoming kind of a translator because
I knew the math, I knewthe science and physics behind it, but
I also understood the biology. Sothere was a fairly sharp divide between people
who were into physics and people wereinto biology back in the nineties, and
(08:41):
finally after after maybe two thousand andtwo thousand and two, they started coming
together and they used different math.I mean, biologists used statistics and physicists
used you know, calculus and youknow, vector nals and stuff like that.
So they they don't trust each othergenerally, So I was kind of
(09:01):
acting as a go between between thetwo different And also when I talked to
the public, I don't use numbersbecause people don't understand it. I use
metaphors that people can understand. Butthat's kind of, you know, that's
kind of how I got involved init. Our clients advisor for a small
nonprofit for the early two thousands.I had been doing applied physics for a
(09:22):
biomimicry company for about seven years,and they paid me enough that I could
actually donate my time to this nonprofit. But when it really came down to
brass tax in two thousand and seven, I really needed to focus on the
things that I thought were important forthis particular issue, and a lot of
(09:43):
it was metrics, because I puttogether a paper I was looking at essentially
auditory thresholds of marine mammals and offish. It was a lit review,
and I was going through all thisliterature to try to find if there was
a correlation between the sound perception andthe kind of the noise curves that tradition
(10:03):
are typically found in the ocean.And there was a correlation there. But
what I also found is there arenine different metrics that which we use to
express noise exposure and in three differentdimensions. And it was just totally nuts.
It's like, you know, Ihad to do a lot of translation
and I had to throw a lotof stuff out because the metrics didn't make
any sense. So I realized therewas a real need to to kind of
(10:26):
unify the way we talk about noiseexposures from a quantitative standpoint, and so
I started working with the International StandardsOrganization and also the American ANZI National Standards
Institute to try to get clear definitionsof what we were going to use underwater.
(10:48):
I mean, there's a the decibelwas that was really contentious back in
the early two thousands because people thoughtthe decibel was actually you know, like
a quantity, and it's not.It's it's used for comparison. And because
decibels in air are set to humanauditory thresholds, we use as a zero
(11:09):
d B twenty twenty dB I mean, excuse me, twenty micropassals and underwater
you use one micropass call because it'snumerically convenient and it has a hearing underwater
has nothing to do with human hearing. So there was already a you know,
a numerical difference when you started talkingabout you know, some a noise
(11:31):
in the ocean at one hundred andtwenty five dB, Well that's you know,
that's the threshold of pain for humansin air, but in water it's
you know, it's just typical,you know, it's what the ocean is
about, that that loud because there'sjust a lot of different coupling issues and
numeric issues. So those are thetypes of things I was straightening out,
trying to straighten out with the conversation, but that's kind of how I got
(11:54):
to where I am right now.And we're still doing metric stuff, but
I'm also doing a lot of otheryou know, understanding how sound impacts animals.
I mean that we use the thresholdsthat we use here for regulatory thresholds
are predicated on exposure to sinusoids orband limited pink noise, and the difference
(12:16):
between you know, a fingernail scratchingand a blackboard and in terms of you
know, you get the same volumeof somebody playing a violin, it might
have the same frequencies in it,but one sounds horrible, one sounds good.
So you know, I've been doing, you know, developing this metric
based on you know, on thatcretosis, which is essentially a statistical analysis
of sound right that expresses, youknow, the difference between nasty sounds and
(12:41):
not nasty sounds. So that's kindof so those are the types of things
that I've been working on. It'sa little abstract, you know, it's
not really fuzzy and warm. We'renot going out taking you know, turtles
out of fish, you know,fishnets and things like that. But it's
it's necessary. What's the easiest wayto describe the difference in terms of sound
(13:01):
between underwater and in the air,you know, what's the kind of what's
the easiest way that you describe itto an uninformed, you unaware audience.
Well, the ocean is you know, it has three three thousand times of
density. Water is three times youknow, approximately three thousand times a density
of air, and so it couplessound a lot better, so you get
(13:26):
sound intensity is a lot higher.And to get an idea of what this
means, if you reach your handout and kind of scratch your fingernail on
your desk in front of you,you might be able to vaguely hear it,
but if you put your ear onthe desk, you can hear it
really loud. So sound transfers throughsolids a lot through gas, right,
(13:48):
and so you can make a soundyou know, in the water that you
can hear three thousand miles away.And whales do it all the time,
the great whales, you can theyand they use it for navigation, communication,
what have you. If you madea sound that you could hear three
thousand miles in uh you know,if you made a sound in London that
(14:09):
you could hear in Berlin, youknow, you have them explaining to do
so. So that's kind of theway and there's a consequence of that.
I mean, the ocean is reallya very superb acoustical environment and animals adapted
to it in amazing ways, youknow, through both pressure grading as well
(14:30):
as what they call particle motion.And particle motion is kind of the kind
of the atomic level of oscillation that'shappening, and that you know, when
you're scratching on the tabletop, you'reactually creating a vibration that all of the
little you know, particles of materialare moving, and so there's you know,
(14:50):
they sense that. I mean,you take a fish's body is you
know, approximately the same density ofwater, so it's transparent to sound.
Sound goes right through the fish's body. But they have organs in their body
that sense that, you know,so they're not just hearing with years,
they're hearing you know, through senseorgans both the lateral line as well as
(15:13):
they have these accelerometers. Not allfish different, but generally, you know,
there's a fairly common you know whattell you as fishes have these accelerometers
in their ears, who are basicallya mass that their body moves against and
they proceed sound through that. Soother I mean, who are the loud
(15:39):
the loud guys in the ocean andwho are the quiet guys? And is
it is it kind of obviously relatedto size, you know, the whales
the loud guys and small guys quietor were there got lots of variations between.
There's variations on it because the environmentis so adapted to that. I
mean, you know, the loudestsound in the oceans comes from the at
least in terms of energy density,comes from the snapping shrimp. And it's
(16:03):
a dinky little guy. It's youknow, maybe ten centimeters is a big
one, so it's six to tencentimes and they snap their claw and they
have this interesting uh device where thesnap so fast they get this cavitation bubble
that pops and creates this little tickyou know, but it is so loud
(16:26):
that it stuns its prey because theyeat basically you know, small zoaplankton.
So they're making these clicking sounds andthen just harvesting all the the zoaplankton that
gets shocked by that sound in frontof them, or other fish, little
fish and things like that. Soyeah, so they're very loud, but
and you can hear it pretty muchin any temperate water if you stick your
head into a wall, hear thiskind of popping or clicking, or I
(16:49):
can I can send you some snappingshrimp when we make a building that here,
they will send you the sound ofit. But it's ridiquitous actually,
and so my notes here. Yeah, yeah, so you can, you
(17:17):
know, you can hear it soundslike popcorn a little bit or sand moving
around, depends on how dense theyare. But then you have uh uh,
sperm whales make these incredibly loud pops. How do they make those sounds
(17:47):
of spum whales? Well, thethe cetaceans have these things they call monkey
lips. Because they're underwater, they'renot blowing like you know, we we
need a passage of air through ourvocal cords of trachia to make sounds.
They have these muscles that kind oflook like I don't know if I can
see it, like kind of likethis a little They call the monkey lips,
(18:10):
but yeah, and they kind ofkind of blow air through it.
They have these different air cavities intheir in their you know, in their
breathing system. They managed to movethe air back and forth between these cavities
and create in the case of thesperm whale, these pops and also the
biosnar They use these kind of clicks. So the popping is one thing,
(18:33):
is a communication social sounds, andthen they have the biosonar, which is
you know, at the dolphin's useand what have you. But then you
have more elaborate animals like the humpbackwhale, which is very you know,
it's it's very song like stuff.People are, you know, fall in
love with that sound. The soundsthat we'll hear from the Arctic are are
(19:00):
the bowhead whales and they have alsothat's found that they have songs like humpback
song. The humpbacks have these youknow, these epic songs that they sing
through a season. It's a youknow, it's a real define structure and
form. Well, they've found recentlythat the bowheads do the same thing.
They have the song that they singthrough the season. And I don't I
don't know if they've if they're individuatedsongs, or if they if they group
(19:25):
songs. The thing that's reable ormarvelous about this about the humpbacks is all
of the humpbacks sing the same song. All the males in one clade,
one area of breeding area, theywill sing the same song with the same
and the same kind of patterns toit. Really, wow, that's incredible.
I've heard somewhere that that there issome level of individuation in terms of
(19:47):
understanding. Is it is it possiblethat they can identify individual whales from coles
like that a mother could identify theiryoung for example. Well, I mean,
the songs are these epic songs,they're like stories, and they all
sing these same songs. But thenthey have these social sense But any animal,
(20:08):
you know, like any human,can be identified by characteristics of their
of their song or their voice.The challenge that we have is most of
the time when people are doing analysison this, they're using what they call
fast forward. You transform, soyou get a spectrogram and you can see
the shape, but it's so distortedin the time domain. That's all you
(20:32):
really get is a visual representation ofthe of the frequencies that are being represented
in the amplitude. We're working withanother technique called wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis
essentially it has an easy way toexplain is if if you we're throwing a
(20:55):
ball at the wall, as aflat wall, the ball would come bounce
back to you, but it wasn'tthere the same way. But if there's
an interference in the wall, thenit would bounce off in another direction.
So you take a set signal andyou basically move it across the data that
you have, the sound data inthis case, and it really highlights the
differences in the time domain. Soyou get these really seriously different visualizations if
(21:22):
you're you know, if you're havingit represented visually, that help you individuate
from one animal to the next muchin the same way humans do. I
mean, you know, somebody couldI haven't spoken with in twenty years can
call me on the phone. Ican recognize immediately who it is. That's
because there's there's in the time domain. There there's fidelity, there's you know,
(21:44):
coastic sonic fidelity. And even evenif your voice changes you get older
and you know, your vocal courrentsget a little looser and what have you
get more crackically voiced. You canstill identify things because of where certain components
nuances within that. Yeah, yeah, right, And it's not just uh
you know, it's it's things likewhen harmonics begin mm hmm. It's not
(22:07):
just you know, the way yousay certain words. Uh huh. So
we're using the wavelet analysis for that. And in that case, yeah,
you can ident you can uh identifyindividuals by there by the sounds of their
voices. H h h lay da. I say, how d D D
(28:12):
M you time you us could weI'd like to talk a little bit about
(29:59):
some sections in your book, ifthat's okay. There are, particularly in
relation to the work that I dowith the project that I run here.
There are a couple of well,there's I mean, there's so much in
your book is so much too,which is relevant, But there are a
couple of things particularly which I feltwere I wanted to kind of ask a
couple of questions about. And thefirst one of those was you talk about
(30:26):
the idea of acoustic community communities.I wonder whether you could whether you could
expand you know, give a bitof an introduction to people what you mean
by that, And yeah, kindof elaborate on the idea of an acoustic
acoustic community, because I mean youcan get people that might have a good
idea about what that might means.You can recognize place by sound, for
(30:48):
example, but you know, justto give more bit more background to that
as a concept. Yeah, yeah, well I'm think of a biological standpoint.
How I got onto this is Iwas it was a hot summer day.
I was at my backyard and therewas these cicadas that were buzzing along.
It's like zz and all of asudden, one side of the yard
(31:10):
went silent for whatever reason, andI got just a very small snap of
vertigoes. So I had actually entrainedto that. And the frequency that that
that that sense of of uh spatialityhappens in humans is you know between you
know, one and two and ahalf, you know, two point five
killer hurts, And so obviously theseanimals had somehow synked up at this high
(31:36):
frequency. So I took a coupleof microphones out and put them up in
the trees, and I looked atthe manasylloscope and these animals were buzzing away
and they were sinked all the wayup to four killer herts. So they
were the buzz was only at fourteenhertz, you know, so that it
sounded like but there they were harmonicallysynchronized up to filler. Okay, that
(32:02):
says a lot because now they havea very fine pitch relationship to each other.
Yeah, yeah, how do theyHow do they do this? So
because of the if if this guyis buzzing here his and his ears are
right on his legs right there,he could be basically masking his own sound,
(32:22):
So how's that happen? What endsup happening is when they buzz,
they have a neurological damping that dampensuh at their own buzz frequency. So
let's take it down to the crickets. Because his crickets do the same thing.
They're chirping away, chirp, chirp, chirp, and they have this
neurological blanking that blanks out that chirp. So when they're their wings are creating
(32:44):
the you know, the sounds,they don't hear anything and everything's perfect with
their cricket. So it makes alot easier to synchronize with other crickets across
because if you're hearing a sound,you're not in sync. So you basically
adjust your sound so everybody's in sync. And then when the whole communities and
sync together, nobody's hearing anything.So it'd be like going to a football
(33:05):
match or you know, or asoccer match or whatever, and every and
sort of everyone looking around, nobeing able to being able to hear anybody
else. But then everybody creating asound. Is that right? I wouldn't
because the negative the blanking creates anegative target, right, Okay, So
uh so now you have these animals, they're all creaking away and everything's fine,
(33:28):
and then I encroach on one ofthem, get too close, and
he slows down a little bit.Now everybody goes something's going on over there.
And there's one of the reasons whyyou know, you'll all of a
sudden hear you know, crickets orfrogs will stop because there's a threat.
But are they calling? Are theyAre they making that sound all the time.
It's kind of positive. Yeah,they're making all the sound sound all
(33:50):
the time that they're feeling safe.So they create a group ear if you
will, and they you know,same thing with the cicadas. You know,
if I encroach on them, theycan here. I mean, but
they if you haven't, you're talkingabout four killers. You're talking about very
pretty, pretty fine wavelengths. Herethey can sense, you know, if
the wind is blowing because the densityof the wind is changing, so they
(34:13):
can get a sense of their surroundingsin terms of where each other is.
But also if the wind is blowingor if the sun is shining over here
and not over here, so theyget a they can get a temporal sense
of their surroundings by that. Sothat's an acoustic community. And I think,
you know, most remarkably, peopleare familiar with the murmuration of starlings.
You've seen it before, okay,so it's it always baffles me how
(34:37):
they portray that as being you know, essentially set theory with you know,
with group behavior from a visual standpoint. It's not visual at all. It's
auditory. And essentially these animals aresensing the pulsing of their wings beating,
but also sensing the pressure gradients ofthe wind around them. So that's why
they create these things that look likethe wind. And if you fire off
(35:02):
you know, a starting gun orsomething like that in the middle of that
job pranks really fast and then I'llget back together again and you see this
with fish. You know, ifyou're swimming in a in a school of
anchovies and they're all sync together andyou snap your fingers, they're all pulse.
So they are starlings are literally movingwith the wind. They are part
(35:22):
of sort of part of the windif you like the wind, and also
each other's mutual wing beats, thepressure gradients of their wing beats. So
what Yeah, and you will talkabout it in relation to sort of emotional
safety from a from a human pointof view, you say, sound marks,
(35:43):
the sound marks in our landscape ofsecurity and emotional safety. We feel
safe where we are within the encompassof these sounds. I mean, could
you talk about it from the humanperspective to what degree we we use that
or employ that as a Yeah,we're kind of getting unfortunately a little bit
torn from that because everybody has theirindividual earbuds and they're creating their own repertoires
(36:10):
sounds that they're comfortable with. Butin you know, in rural landscapes,
you know where you hear the churchbell at you know, at noon,
you'll hear the sound of certain carsgoing by that you're familiar with, and
they're not racing they're just kind ofgoing and or the sound of you know,
(36:31):
with somebody who's in my neighborhood's gota rooster, and every morning I
hear this rooster. It's a funnyrooster. It's not it's got an interesting
kind of a downsweeping call. Butyou know, I mean, everybody's got
this repertoive sounds that they're familiar with, and when things are going well,
the tones are fine. So whathappened to me, I mean recently and
(36:52):
well not recently and over the pastten fifteen years. You know, it
used to have this you could depictkind of depend upon the crickets cricketing at
night on warm summer nights and bombysummer nights. The cricket you know,
the insect population is being decimated rightnow in over the past ten fifteen years
of crickets that haven't been showing up. And initially I was like, the
(37:14):
first nights that I didn't hear,crickets was keeping me awake, the sun
was keeping awake. And I've gottenhabituated to it now. But it's creepy
because you know, we're all thecrickets that used to make sound I mean
back fifteen years ago, I couldhear I could identify three different species of
crickets in my backyard, and nowat night there's none, and we've done
(37:35):
something to them. There was aninteresting go ahead. No, no,
So, I mean essentially, youknow, the less you hear of,
you know, the natural world,the sounds of the natural world around you,
the less you hear it, theless habituated you are to it,
and the more sort of almost threateningit, because it becomes when you are
exposed to Because that's kind of whatwe've found with when we start to long
(38:00):
sessions of listening with particularly the youngpeople, is that they they almost react
as if they're under threat when youput them in. If you listen to
a long soundscape for a long periodof time, you know, forty forty
five minutes of just sort of quietlistening, their response is often one of
like they're a little bit threatened.You know, they don't know what to
do with themselves. I mean,so it's very it's very interesting that that
(38:22):
that that point of crossover, andyou're talking about a natural soundscapes that they
haven't heard before. Yeah, Yeah, natural soundscapes they haven't heard before.
Yeah, And they feel threatened.Interesting. Yeah, well, they sort
of react, they're sort of it'sboth. It's not like they're not sort
(38:44):
of it's more like an emotional response. You can see that they are that
they're unused to it, and theysort of and they feel in of see,
they feel in slightly vulnerable in thatsituation. You know, you'd be
listening for a long time to quitewithout somebody human contributing or you know,
(39:05):
chipping in with a bit of conversation. They just listened to a natural soundscape
for forty to forty five minutes.It's not that they you know that particularly
they find it so uncomfortable they haveto leave or you know, it's desperately
uncomfortable. It's just that they thatthere's a sense of them being, you
know, feeling vulnerable. Yeah.Well, I mean getting anybody, youngsters
(39:27):
particularly to sit quietly for forty fiveminutes is that is remarkable. Yeah,
I mean what I don't know.These soundscapes are these sounds of water with
birds and yeah, things like that. But they we would put in live
streaming microphones at sites around locally towhere we were, so there would be
a mix of sort of fairly youknow, a bit a heavy mix of
(39:52):
man made sound and naturally occurring sound, but not full packed full of wildlife.
It was not like a full Amazonrainforest or some thing. You know.
I kind of a very you know, European kind of soundscape, lots
of lots of occasional jets, youknow, lots of wind rush through trees
and grass and stuff like that.Even that, for a long time seemed
(40:14):
to be quite overwhelming interesting. Yeah, well, it used to be one
of those things if you're walking downthe road and again and I'll balmy summer
night and the crickets are creeking andall suddenly stop, you'd go, oh,
you know, what's going on.Yeah, But because it's so now,
I don't think people have made thatassociation anymore. But I'm really interested
(40:37):
and fascinated by you know, there'sa lot of expectation for people to engage
with nature. You know, wewant people to engage with nature a lot,
and yet there's very little sort ofappreciation of the impact and relevance of
sound in that engagement. There's obviouslya big visual coach of culture. You
(40:58):
know, look at this pretty animal, look at this lovely landscape, look
at you know, look at thisbut in terms of the importance of sound
in the world that I see.It's it's very it's very limited, and
it's it's very hard to kind ofwe're trying to get that message across of
of why where the disconnect? Youknow, people always talking about and wanting
(41:19):
to reconnect with nature and stuff,But what is the disconnect in terms of
the sound thing and how how wecan explain it? You know clearly why
there is this this disconnect. Andit was interesting when you said earlier about
there being people having creating their ownindividual repertoires sound that they feel comfortable with
us. So many implications of thatfor sort of you know, communities working
(41:42):
together, or you know, childrenbeing able to relate to each other,
or to be able to relate toadults, of relate to their environment in
any way. If there if you'resort of siloing everybody into small little little
pockets, that's that's that's so wherewe live in right now. I had
a friend was an author who shelived in in Berkeley, California, which
(42:05):
is the college town here, andshe when she raised her kids, her
kids were out in the front lawn, you know, playing dress up or
market or you know, you couldtell there's chalk all over the sidewalks because
they're doing this stuff. And youknow, her kids grew up and kind
of went off to school and whathave you. And then she had a
neighbor who had been living there foryou know, a long time. And
(42:28):
she saw her neighbor pull up ina van, open up the back of
the van and grab a girl bythe hand, who was like nine years
old, and drag her into thehouse. And she said she had no
idea that there was a little girlliving next door, because the mom was
so afraid of having a kid outsidethat she you know, made sure she
(42:50):
was in the house all the time, and she wasn't out playing dress up.
She would So the sounds of childrenplaying and laughing and things like that,
stuff that I grew up with,that's not there. I mean,
all these the kids are inside lookingat screens and so all these sounds that
would otherwise let us know that we'rein the safety of a community. Yeah,
children playing, you know, adultschatting away. I mean, this
(43:15):
is particularly bad in America because wehave we you know, we live in
a culture of fear here. Youknow what fear is one of the dominant
mediators of our of our cultural vocabularyin America, you know. And it's
not just guns. It's like thingsare falling apart. We don't have control,
(43:36):
you know. I found, youknow, in a certain place,
like you know, when I wasworking on this UH project, a sacred
architecture project, I was going followingthese kind of numbers, sacred architecture back
from the you know, fourteenth centuryon back to pre dynastic h Egypt.
(43:57):
But when I was in the MiddleEast, when I I was in Turkey
and Egypt, you know, thestreets sounds there was so much rich,
so much richer than it is here. I mean, you know in Cairo,
for example. There was this inEgypt generally, but it's in a
big city like Cairo really makes this. When you're the people are driving that
they don't really pay much attention tolines in the road, you know,
(44:21):
so when somebody pulling by, youknow, passing you in a car,
they'll tap their horn like they justreally kind of I'm here. But you
know, but in Cairo, youlisten at all day and night, you
hear these all over the place.It sounds amazing, you know, and
it's friendly. You know, it'slike here. I'm here, you know,
and it's not nobody's angrily punching punchingon their horn and the same thing.
(44:45):
What's going on the streets or inthe in the in the you know,
in the markets and in the parks, people are hanging out with each
other and they're talking. You've beenlistening to. Thanks go to Michael Stocker
(45:20):
for being so generous with his time. If you'd like to keep listening,
please subscribe to the Home Sound Showthrough your podcast provider, or visit the
Home Sounds Show on speaker dot com. You can also look for the Riverlands
Show on poppy Land Radio, whichbroadcasts live sounds from Woodland and Felbrigg and
the Silver Gate Stream in Blickling herein Norfolk in the UK every Wednesday evening
(45:45):
at ten pm. Finally, youcan visit homesounds dot org, where you'll
find all previous episodes of the HomeSound Show, as well as many more
opportunities to actively listen and numerous waysto support and get involved with the Home
Sounds project. Thanks for listening andwelcome home everybody.
Welcome home, everybody, and welcometo the Home Sound Show. My name
is Martin and I'm a field recordistantteacher. I'm the creator of the Home
Sounds Project and your co host forthe show along with Rob. Hello everybody.
My name is Rob and I'm aneducator and naturalist. I work for
the Vesceral Trust at Sheringham Park inNorfolk as part of their Children and Young
(00:59):
People Hub. The Home Sound Showinvites everyone to become active environmental listeners.
In this episode, the first oftwo parts, I interview accoustician and naturalist
Michael Stocker, Drawing inspiration from Michael'swonderfully free ranging and rich book Here Where
We Are. The conversation and accompanyingaudio extracts explore the myriad themes within Michael's
(01:23):
book and relate these to the experiencesof the Home Sounds Project. The book
examines how humans and other hearing animalsuse sound to establish relationships with their surroundings.
It does this through incredible scientific detailmixed with stories of everyday human experience
and emotion, as well as enrichingour understanding of sound. The book is
(01:47):
inspired by a desire to shed lighton seemingly illogical and self destructive human behavior
so often unconsciously and profoundly influenced bysound. With an extensive background advice and
designing sound environments for clients, includingthe National Holocaust Museum in Washington, d
C. George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch,the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Mexico City's Children's
(02:12):
Museum and Museell Papallotte, and numerousHollywood sound and film studios. Michael is
now the director of Ocean Conservation Research, an organization seeking to understand the impacts
of human generated noise on marine life, a theme touched on in both our
conversation and the sound extracts selected byMichael and I. I can hear you
(02:40):
just fine, okay, okay,yeah, it sounds good. So to
start with, I wonder whether youcould give us a bit of background to
yourself and how you got you know, a bit of history as to how
(03:01):
you got into the field, andhow you're kind of you know, why
you've begun to specialize in the areathat you have and you're in your kind
of main interest. Really yeah,okay, it's kind of a securitist story.
(03:21):
Starts out pretty early when I wasa youngster, just a pop.
I started taking piano lessons when Iwas about four years old, and I
was really in love with nature.We were in a kind of a suburban
setting, but there was a lotof nature around, and I was particularly
enamored with ocean, you know,the beach. My mom would take me
(03:42):
to the beach and drop me intoa tide pool and then she was done
for the day. She could justcrack a novel and not be pestered.
I would be tooling around on thetide bulls for all, you know.
And so I was really and youknow, by the time I was ten,
I had all these aquariums all overthe houses. You know, it's
just saltwater and freshwater quariums. Ijust really loved gritters, you know,
(04:05):
and I wanted to be a marinebiologist. At that time, a lot
of us, kind of at myage, were impressed by Jacques Cousteau,
who had his under the Underwater Worldof Jacques Cousteau. But he called it
the Silent World, which unfortunate becauseI think he really set us back a
(04:28):
lot. But you know, whenI was again about that age, nineteen
years old, we used to takea vacation up in mid central coast to
California, a place called Morro Bay, and they had an aquarium there that
had, among other things, theirlocal fish, you know, wolf eels
and Moray eels, and they havethese rockfish there, and they had a
(04:49):
hydrophone in this aquarium, and youcould just hear these rockfish, you know,
chortling away. And I was totallyfascinating. And you know, when
I got home from that, Iwanted to get a hydrophone for one of
my aquariums. And my mom said, oh, you won't hear anything.
I think she was still subject tothis. You know. Turns out there
(05:13):
were actually a lot of fish Idid have that would have made you know,
picked us cats. Really they wouldhave made noises and corridors and an
event. But I probably also wouldhave heard the noise of the of the
pump as much as anything else.But that being said, you know,
it kind of set me off onthis idea. And then I got into
high school and I had this biologyteacher who had this unbelievable talent of making
(05:38):
biology tedious. You know, hewas a real worrying guy. And so
I said, if by all thesethat, I don't want to do it.
So I fell back into into music. I started working in the music
industry in recording studios and realized earlyon that the people who got paid most
reliably were the technical people. SoI started studying electronics and and acoustics and
(06:00):
studio design and things like that.So I got my vocabulary app around physics
and acoustics and and was doing that, you know, for I did some
big jobs. I would do soundinstallation, design installation for museums like the
Holocaust Museum Washington, d C.And mozip Aapa lot Delino. We did
(06:20):
put together an amazing soundscape. Iwas working with the Academy Studios and they
built a seventy five foot tall,you know, twenty five meter tall tree.
It was a rainforest, it wasa fcus and they had all these
animals in it. And we madea twenty six channel soundtrack for it,
and we can pressed twenty four hoursof jungle sounds into you know, basically
(06:46):
a little over an hour and ahalf and you know, rain, rain,
thunderstorms and all these different critters.And so we kind of replicated that,
which was nice because we got togot to the jungles recorded, and
you know, it was a itwas a nice fun fun. Yeah,
and then I I ended up herein northern California. I was managing the
installation of Skywalker Ranch, the techbuilding up there, which is all sound
(07:11):
recording tech building. We have puteight hundred miles a wire in the walls.
Wow, it was pretty pretty amazing, and they take soundtracks and you
know, all kinds of folly studiosand things like that. Yeah, that
was a good job. So Icontinue to do that contracting work. But
it was shortly after that job thatthe Navy was proposing this onsonification of the
(07:31):
entire ocean basin uh mostly sorry,what was that the proposing boat? Sorry,
they were going to insonify. Theywere going to sense sounds across the
ocean base. It was an acoustictomography of ocean climates, and and Walter
Monk was, you know, abrilliant physical oceanographer. But they were talking
about putting you know, sound inthe ocean that was loud enough to travel
(07:54):
between you know, California and Hawaii. And I thought, you know,
the animal, I'm not like that. You using the ocean as a as
a communication channel. Really. Wow. So there was a lot of environmentalists
who were concerned about it, butyou know, two to one. They
didn't really well, there was therewas one Lindy Wildgart actually was a scientist
on our side of this thing.But outside of that, nobody really understood
(08:16):
the science behind the stand physics didunderstand biology. They just knew it was
a bad idea. And so Iended up becoming kind of a translator because
I knew the math, I knewthe science and physics behind it, but
I also understood the biology. Sothere was a fairly sharp divide between people
who were into physics and people wereinto biology back in the nineties, and
(08:41):
finally after after maybe two thousand andtwo thousand and two, they started coming
together and they used different math.I mean, biologists used statistics and physicists
used you know, calculus and youknow, vector nals and stuff like that.
So they they don't trust each othergenerally, So I was kind of
(09:01):
acting as a go between between thetwo different And also when I talked to
the public, I don't use numbersbecause people don't understand it. I use
metaphors that people can understand. Butthat's kind of, you know, that's
kind of how I got involved init. Our clients advisor for a small
nonprofit for the early two thousands.I had been doing applied physics for a
(09:22):
biomimicry company for about seven years,and they paid me enough that I could
actually donate my time to this nonprofit. But when it really came down to
brass tax in two thousand and seven, I really needed to focus on the
things that I thought were important forthis particular issue, and a lot of
(09:43):
it was metrics, because I puttogether a paper I was looking at essentially
auditory thresholds of marine mammals and offish. It was a lit review,
and I was going through all thisliterature to try to find if there was
a correlation between the sound perception andthe kind of the noise curves that tradition
(10:03):
are typically found in the ocean.And there was a correlation there. But
what I also found is there arenine different metrics that which we use to
express noise exposure and in three differentdimensions. And it was just totally nuts.
It's like, you know, Ihad to do a lot of translation
and I had to throw a lotof stuff out because the metrics didn't make
any sense. So I realized therewas a real need to to kind of
(10:26):
unify the way we talk about noiseexposures from a quantitative standpoint, and so
I started working with the International StandardsOrganization and also the American ANZI National Standards
Institute to try to get clear definitionsof what we were going to use underwater.
(10:48):
I mean, there's a the decibelwas that was really contentious back in
the early two thousands because people thoughtthe decibel was actually you know, like
a quantity, and it's not.It's it's used for comparison. And because
decibels in air are set to humanauditory thresholds, we use as a zero
(11:09):
d B twenty twenty dB I mean, excuse me, twenty micropassals and underwater
you use one micropass call because it'snumerically convenient and it has a hearing underwater
has nothing to do with human hearing. So there was already a you know,
a numerical difference when you started talkingabout you know, some a noise
(11:31):
in the ocean at one hundred andtwenty five dB, Well that's you know,
that's the threshold of pain for humansin air, but in water it's
you know, it's just typical,you know, it's what the ocean is
about, that that loud because there'sjust a lot of different coupling issues and
numeric issues. So those are thetypes of things I was straightening out,
trying to straighten out with the conversation, but that's kind of how I got
(11:54):
to where I am right now.And we're still doing metric stuff, but
I'm also doing a lot of otheryou know, understanding how sound impacts animals.
I mean that we use the thresholdsthat we use here for regulatory thresholds
are predicated on exposure to sinusoids orband limited pink noise, and the difference
(12:16):
between you know, a fingernail scratchingand a blackboard and in terms of you
know, you get the same volumeof somebody playing a violin, it might
have the same frequencies in it,but one sounds horrible, one sounds good.
So you know, I've been doing, you know, developing this metric
based on you know, on thatcretosis, which is essentially a statistical analysis
of sound right that expresses, youknow, the difference between nasty sounds and
(12:41):
not nasty sounds. So that's kindof so those are the types of things
that I've been working on. It'sa little abstract, you know, it's
not really fuzzy and warm. We'renot going out taking you know, turtles
out of fish, you know,fishnets and things like that. But it's
it's necessary. What's the easiest wayto describe the difference in terms of sound
(13:01):
between underwater and in the air,you know, what's the kind of what's
the easiest way that you describe itto an uninformed, you unaware audience.
Well, the ocean is you know, it has three three thousand times of
density. Water is three times youknow, approximately three thousand times a density
of air, and so it couplessound a lot better, so you get
(13:26):
sound intensity is a lot higher.And to get an idea of what this
means, if you reach your handout and kind of scratch your fingernail on
your desk in front of you,you might be able to vaguely hear it,
but if you put your ear onthe desk, you can hear it
really loud. So sound transfers throughsolids a lot through gas, right,
(13:48):
and so you can make a soundyou know, in the water that you
can hear three thousand miles away.And whales do it all the time,
the great whales, you can theyand they use it for navigation, communication,
what have you. If you madea sound that you could hear three
thousand miles in uh you know,if you made a sound in London that
(14:09):
you could hear in Berlin, youknow, you have them explaining to do
so. So that's kind of theway and there's a consequence of that.
I mean, the ocean is reallya very superb acoustical environment and animals adapted
to it in amazing ways, youknow, through both pressure grading as well
(14:30):
as what they call particle motion.And particle motion is kind of the kind
of the atomic level of oscillation that'shappening, and that you know, when
you're scratching on the tabletop, you'reactually creating a vibration that all of the
little you know, particles of materialare moving, and so there's you know,
(14:50):
they sense that. I mean,you take a fish's body is you
know, approximately the same density ofwater, so it's transparent to sound.
Sound goes right through the fish's body. But they have organs in their body
that sense that, you know,so they're not just hearing with years,
they're hearing you know, through senseorgans both the lateral line as well as
(15:13):
they have these accelerometers. Not allfish different, but generally, you know,
there's a fairly common you know whattell you as fishes have these accelerometers
in their ears, who are basicallya mass that their body moves against and
they proceed sound through that. Soother I mean, who are the loud
(15:39):
the loud guys in the ocean andwho are the quiet guys? And is
it is it kind of obviously relatedto size, you know, the whales
the loud guys and small guys quietor were there got lots of variations between.
There's variations on it because the environmentis so adapted to that. I
mean, you know, the loudestsound in the oceans comes from the at
least in terms of energy density,comes from the snapping shrimp. And it's
(16:03):
a dinky little guy. It's youknow, maybe ten centimeters is a big
one, so it's six to tencentimes and they snap their claw and they
have this interesting uh device where thesnap so fast they get this cavitation bubble
that pops and creates this little tickyou know, but it is so loud
(16:26):
that it stuns its prey because theyeat basically you know, small zoaplankton.
So they're making these clicking sounds andthen just harvesting all the the zoaplankton that
gets shocked by that sound in frontof them, or other fish, little
fish and things like that. Soyeah, so they're very loud, but
and you can hear it pretty muchin any temperate water if you stick your
head into a wall, hear thiskind of popping or clicking, or I
(16:49):
can I can send you some snappingshrimp when we make a building that here,
they will send you the sound ofit. But it's ridiquitous actually,
and so my notes here. Yeah, yeah, so you can, you
(17:17):
know, you can hear it soundslike popcorn a little bit or sand moving
around, depends on how dense theyare. But then you have uh uh,
sperm whales make these incredibly loud pops. How do they make those sounds
(17:47):
of spum whales? Well, thethe cetaceans have these things they call monkey
lips. Because they're underwater, they'renot blowing like you know, we we
need a passage of air through ourvocal cords of trachia to make sounds.
They have these muscles that kind oflook like I don't know if I can
see it, like kind of likethis a little They call the monkey lips,
(18:10):
but yeah, and they kind ofkind of blow air through it.
They have these different air cavities intheir in their you know, in their
breathing system. They managed to movethe air back and forth between these cavities
and create in the case of thesperm whale, these pops and also the
biosnar They use these kind of clicks. So the popping is one thing,
(18:33):
is a communication social sounds, andthen they have the biosonar, which is
you know, at the dolphin's useand what have you. But then you
have more elaborate animals like the humpbackwhale, which is very you know,
it's it's very song like stuff.People are, you know, fall in
love with that sound. The soundsthat we'll hear from the Arctic are are
(19:00):
the bowhead whales and they have alsothat's found that they have songs like humpback
song. The humpbacks have these youknow, these epic songs that they sing
through a season. It's a youknow, it's a real define structure and
form. Well, they've found recentlythat the bowheads do the same thing.
They have the song that they singthrough the season. And I don't I
don't know if they've if they're individuatedsongs, or if they if they group
(19:25):
songs. The thing that's reable ormarvelous about this about the humpbacks is all
of the humpbacks sing the same song. All the males in one clade,
one area of breeding area, theywill sing the same song with the same
and the same kind of patterns toit. Really, wow, that's incredible.
I've heard somewhere that that there issome level of individuation in terms of
(19:47):
understanding. Is it is it possiblethat they can identify individual whales from coles
like that a mother could identify theiryoung for example. Well, I mean,
the songs are these epic songs,they're like stories, and they all
sing these same songs. But thenthey have these social sense But any animal,
(20:08):
you know, like any human,can be identified by characteristics of their
of their song or their voice.The challenge that we have is most of
the time when people are doing analysison this, they're using what they call
fast forward. You transform, soyou get a spectrogram and you can see
the shape, but it's so distortedin the time domain. That's all you
(20:32):
really get is a visual representation ofthe of the frequencies that are being represented
in the amplitude. We're working withanother technique called wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis
essentially it has an easy way toexplain is if if you we're throwing a
(20:55):
ball at the wall, as aflat wall, the ball would come bounce
back to you, but it wasn'tthere the same way. But if there's
an interference in the wall, thenit would bounce off in another direction.
So you take a set signal andyou basically move it across the data that
you have, the sound data inthis case, and it really highlights the
differences in the time domain. Soyou get these really seriously different visualizations if
(21:22):
you're you know, if you're havingit represented visually, that help you individuate
from one animal to the next muchin the same way humans do. I
mean, you know, somebody couldI haven't spoken with in twenty years can
call me on the phone. Ican recognize immediately who it is. That's
because there's there's in the time domain. There there's fidelity, there's you know,
(21:44):
coastic sonic fidelity. And even evenif your voice changes you get older
and you know, your vocal courrentsget a little looser and what have you
get more crackically voiced. You canstill identify things because of where certain components
nuances within that. Yeah, yeah, right, And it's not just uh
you know, it's it's things likewhen harmonics begin mm hmm. It's not
(22:07):
just you know, the way yousay certain words. Uh huh. So
we're using the wavelet analysis for that. And in that case, yeah,
you can ident you can uh identifyindividuals by there by the sounds of their
voices. H h h lay da. I say, how d D D
(28:12):
M you time you us could weI'd like to talk a little bit about
(29:59):
some sections in your book, ifthat's okay. There are, particularly in
relation to the work that I dowith the project that I run here.
There are a couple of well,there's I mean, there's so much in
your book is so much too,which is relevant, But there are a
couple of things particularly which I feltwere I wanted to kind of ask a
couple of questions about. And thefirst one of those was you talk about
(30:26):
the idea of acoustic community communities.I wonder whether you could whether you could
expand you know, give a bitof an introduction to people what you mean
by that, And yeah, kindof elaborate on the idea of an acoustic
acoustic community, because I mean youcan get people that might have a good
idea about what that might means.You can recognize place by sound, for
(30:48):
example, but you know, justto give more bit more background to that
as a concept. Yeah, yeah, well I'm think of a biological standpoint.
How I got onto this is Iwas it was a hot summer day.
I was at my backyard and therewas these cicadas that were buzzing along.
It's like zz and all of asudden, one side of the yard
(31:10):
went silent for whatever reason, andI got just a very small snap of
vertigoes. So I had actually entrainedto that. And the frequency that that
that that sense of of uh spatialityhappens in humans is you know between you
know, one and two and ahalf, you know, two point five
killer hurts, And so obviously theseanimals had somehow synked up at this high
(31:36):
frequency. So I took a coupleof microphones out and put them up in
the trees, and I looked atthe manasylloscope and these animals were buzzing away
and they were sinked all the wayup to four killer herts. So they
were the buzz was only at fourteenhertz, you know, so that it
sounded like but there they were harmonicallysynchronized up to filler. Okay, that
(32:02):
says a lot because now they havea very fine pitch relationship to each other.
Yeah, yeah, how do theyHow do they do this? So
because of the if if this guyis buzzing here his and his ears are
right on his legs right there,he could be basically masking his own sound,
(32:22):
So how's that happen? What endsup happening is when they buzz,
they have a neurological damping that dampensuh at their own buzz frequency. So
let's take it down to the crickets. Because his crickets do the same thing.
They're chirping away, chirp, chirp, chirp, and they have this
neurological blanking that blanks out that chirp. So when they're their wings are creating
(32:44):
the you know, the sounds,they don't hear anything and everything's perfect with
their cricket. So it makes alot easier to synchronize with other crickets across
because if you're hearing a sound,you're not in sync. So you basically
adjust your sound so everybody's in sync. And then when the whole communities and
sync together, nobody's hearing anything.So it'd be like going to a football
(33:05):
match or you know, or asoccer match or whatever, and every and
sort of everyone looking around, nobeing able to being able to hear anybody
else. But then everybody creating asound. Is that right? I wouldn't
because the negative the blanking creates anegative target, right, Okay, So
uh so now you have these animals, they're all creaking away and everything's fine,
(33:28):
and then I encroach on one ofthem, get too close, and
he slows down a little bit.Now everybody goes something's going on over there.
And there's one of the reasons whyyou know, you'll all of a
sudden hear you know, crickets orfrogs will stop because there's a threat.
But are they calling? Are theyAre they making that sound all the time.
It's kind of positive. Yeah,they're making all the sound sound all
(33:50):
the time that they're feeling safe.So they create a group ear if you
will, and they you know,same thing with the cicadas. You know,
if I encroach on them, theycan here. I mean, but
they if you haven't, you're talkingabout four killers. You're talking about very
pretty, pretty fine wavelengths. Herethey can sense, you know, if
the wind is blowing because the densityof the wind is changing, so they
(34:13):
can get a sense of their surroundingsin terms of where each other is.
But also if the wind is blowingor if the sun is shining over here
and not over here, so theyget a they can get a temporal sense
of their surroundings by that. Sothat's an acoustic community. And I think,
you know, most remarkably, peopleare familiar with the murmuration of starlings.
You've seen it before, okay,so it's it always baffles me how
(34:37):
they portray that as being you know, essentially set theory with you know,
with group behavior from a visual standpoint. It's not visual at all. It's
auditory. And essentially these animals aresensing the pulsing of their wings beating,
but also sensing the pressure gradients ofthe wind around them. So that's why
they create these things that look likethe wind. And if you fire off
(35:02):
you know, a starting gun orsomething like that in the middle of that
job pranks really fast and then I'llget back together again and you see this
with fish. You know, ifyou're swimming in a in a school of
anchovies and they're all sync together andyou snap your fingers, they're all pulse.
So they are starlings are literally movingwith the wind. They are part
(35:22):
of sort of part of the windif you like the wind, and also
each other's mutual wing beats, thepressure gradients of their wing beats. So
what Yeah, and you will talkabout it in relation to sort of emotional
safety from a from a human pointof view, you say, sound marks,
(35:43):
the sound marks in our landscape ofsecurity and emotional safety. We feel
safe where we are within the encompassof these sounds. I mean, could
you talk about it from the humanperspective to what degree we we use that
or employ that as a Yeah,we're kind of getting unfortunately a little bit
torn from that because everybody has theirindividual earbuds and they're creating their own repertoires
(36:10):
sounds that they're comfortable with. Butin you know, in rural landscapes,
you know where you hear the churchbell at you know, at noon,
you'll hear the sound of certain carsgoing by that you're familiar with, and
they're not racing they're just kind ofgoing and or the sound of you know,
(36:31):
with somebody who's in my neighborhood's gota rooster, and every morning I
hear this rooster. It's a funnyrooster. It's not it's got an interesting
kind of a downsweeping call. Butyou know, I mean, everybody's got
this repertoive sounds that they're familiar with, and when things are going well,
the tones are fine. So whathappened to me, I mean recently and
(36:52):
well not recently and over the pastten fifteen years. You know, it
used to have this you could depictkind of depend upon the crickets cricketing at
night on warm summer nights and bombysummer nights. The cricket you know,
the insect population is being decimated rightnow in over the past ten fifteen years
of crickets that haven't been showing up. And initially I was like, the
(37:14):
first nights that I didn't hear,crickets was keeping me awake, the sun
was keeping awake. And I've gottenhabituated to it now. But it's creepy
because you know, we're all thecrickets that used to make sound I mean
back fifteen years ago, I couldhear I could identify three different species of
crickets in my backyard, and nowat night there's none, and we've done
(37:35):
something to them. There was aninteresting go ahead. No, no,
So, I mean essentially, youknow, the less you hear of,
you know, the natural world,the sounds of the natural world around you,
the less you hear it, theless habituated you are to it,
and the more sort of almost threateningit, because it becomes when you are
exposed to Because that's kind of whatwe've found with when we start to long
(38:00):
sessions of listening with particularly the youngpeople, is that they they almost react
as if they're under threat when youput them in. If you listen to
a long soundscape for a long periodof time, you know, forty forty
five minutes of just sort of quietlistening, their response is often one of
like they're a little bit threatened.You know, they don't know what to
do with themselves. I mean,so it's very it's very interesting that that
(38:22):
that that point of crossover, andyou're talking about a natural soundscapes that they
haven't heard before. Yeah, Yeah, natural soundscapes they haven't heard before.
Yeah, And they feel threatened.Interesting. Yeah, well, they sort
of react, they're sort of it'sboth. It's not like they're not sort
(38:44):
of it's more like an emotional response. You can see that they are that
they're unused to it, and theysort of and they feel in of see,
they feel in slightly vulnerable in thatsituation. You know, you'd be
listening for a long time to quitewithout somebody human contributing or you know,
(39:05):
chipping in with a bit of conversation. They just listened to a natural soundscape
for forty to forty five minutes.It's not that they you know that particularly
they find it so uncomfortable they haveto leave or you know, it's desperately
uncomfortable. It's just that they thatthere's a sense of them being, you
know, feeling vulnerable. Yeah.Well, I mean getting anybody, youngsters
(39:27):
particularly to sit quietly for forty fiveminutes is that is remarkable. Yeah,
I mean what I don't know.These soundscapes are these sounds of water with
birds and yeah, things like that. But they we would put in live
streaming microphones at sites around locally towhere we were, so there would be
a mix of sort of fairly youknow, a bit a heavy mix of
(39:52):
man made sound and naturally occurring sound, but not full packed full of wildlife.
It was not like a full Amazonrainforest or some thing. You know.
I kind of a very you know, European kind of soundscape, lots
of lots of occasional jets, youknow, lots of wind rush through trees
and grass and stuff like that.Even that, for a long time seemed
(40:14):
to be quite overwhelming interesting. Yeah, well, it used to be one
of those things if you're walking downthe road and again and I'll balmy summer
night and the crickets are creeking andall suddenly stop, you'd go, oh,
you know, what's going on.Yeah, But because it's so now,
I don't think people have made thatassociation anymore. But I'm really interested
(40:37):
and fascinated by you know, there'sa lot of expectation for people to engage
with nature. You know, wewant people to engage with nature a lot,
and yet there's very little sort ofappreciation of the impact and relevance of
sound in that engagement. There's obviouslya big visual coach of culture. You
(40:58):
know, look at this pretty animal, look at this lovely landscape, look
at you know, look at thisbut in terms of the importance of sound
in the world that I see.It's it's very it's very limited, and
it's it's very hard to kind ofwe're trying to get that message across of
of why where the disconnect? Youknow, people always talking about and wanting
(41:19):
to reconnect with nature and stuff,But what is the disconnect in terms of
the sound thing and how how wecan explain it? You know clearly why
there is this this disconnect. Andit was interesting when you said earlier about
there being people having creating their ownindividual repertoires sound that they feel comfortable with
us. So many implications of thatfor sort of you know, communities working
(41:42):
together, or you know, childrenbeing able to relate to each other,
or to be able to relate toadults, of relate to their environment in
any way. If there if you'resort of siloing everybody into small little little
pockets, that's that's that's so wherewe live in right now. I had
a friend was an author who shelived in in Berkeley, California, which
(42:05):
is the college town here, andshe when she raised her kids, her
kids were out in the front lawn, you know, playing dress up or
market or you know, you couldtell there's chalk all over the sidewalks because
they're doing this stuff. And youknow, her kids grew up and kind
of went off to school and whathave you. And then she had a
neighbor who had been living there foryou know, a long time. And
(42:28):
she saw her neighbor pull up ina van, open up the back of
the van and grab a girl bythe hand, who was like nine years
old, and drag her into thehouse. And she said she had no
idea that there was a little girlliving next door, because the mom was
so afraid of having a kid outsidethat she you know, made sure she
(42:50):
was in the house all the time, and she wasn't out playing dress up.
She would So the sounds of childrenplaying and laughing and things like that,
stuff that I grew up with,that's not there. I mean,
all these the kids are inside lookingat screens and so all these sounds that
would otherwise let us know that we'rein the safety of a community. Yeah,
children playing, you know, adultschatting away. I mean, this
(43:15):
is particularly bad in America because wehave we you know, we live in
a culture of fear here. Youknow what fear is one of the dominant
mediators of our of our cultural vocabularyin America, you know. And it's
not just guns. It's like thingsare falling apart. We don't have control,
(43:36):
you know. I found, youknow, in a certain place,
like you know, when I wasworking on this UH project, a sacred
architecture project, I was going followingthese kind of numbers, sacred architecture back
from the you know, fourteenth centuryon back to pre dynastic h Egypt.
(43:57):
But when I was in the MiddleEast, when I I was in Turkey
and Egypt, you know, thestreets sounds there was so much rich,
so much richer than it is here. I mean, you know in Cairo,
for example. There was this inEgypt generally, but it's in a
big city like Cairo really makes this. When you're the people are driving that
they don't really pay much attention tolines in the road, you know,
(44:21):
so when somebody pulling by, youknow, passing you in a car,
they'll tap their horn like they justreally kind of I'm here. But you
know, but in Cairo, youlisten at all day and night, you
hear these all over the place.It sounds amazing, you know, and
it's friendly. You know, it'slike here. I'm here, you know,
and it's not nobody's angrily punching punchingon their horn and the same thing.
(44:45):
What's going on the streets or inthe in the in the you know,
in the markets and in the parks, people are hanging out with each
other and they're talking. You've beenlistening to. Thanks go to Michael Stocker
(45:20):
for being so generous with his time. If you'd like to keep listening,
please subscribe to the Home Sound Showthrough your podcast provider, or visit the
Home Sounds Show on speaker dot com. You can also look for the Riverlands
Show on poppy Land Radio, whichbroadcasts live sounds from Woodland and Felbrigg and
the Silver Gate Stream in Blickling herein Norfolk in the UK every Wednesday evening
(45:45):
at ten pm. Finally, youcan visit homesounds dot org, where you'll
find all previous episodes of the HomeSound Show, as well as many more
opportunities to actively listen and numerous waysto support and get involved with the Home
Sounds project. Thanks for listening andwelcome home everybody.
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