Listening for the Sounds of Life

I breathe in, my lungs expand in my chest; I breathe out, my body relaxes, settles into the ground; it is finally quiet enough to hear my breath. In the heart of Indiranagar, Bangalore, at 1 am, it is neither loud nor dark — it is quiet. A kind of quietness that settles in when living things that call at night are lost. Here, there are no crickets, no frogs, no night birds. The only sounds I hear are cars and bikes whizzing past 80 Feet Road. How did we build societies composed mostly of us?

Those that have ventured deeper into wilder spaces know that the night is not silent — it is loud, noisy, and bursting with life. In Kalpavalli, a communal savanna and grassland just three hours outside of Bangalore, you hear crickets, nightjars, spotted owlets, cackling lapwings, frogs that sound like goats, wild boars, the low, ocean-like hum of windmills that stick out of the surrounding hills, perhaps even Indian wolves, and surely the loud running, meowing of peacocks at the crack of dawn, when it is still too early to be woken, if you got any sleep at all.

The sounds of living things are not always as pleasant and harmonious as we might romanticise in cities. They can be loud and haunting, like the howls and screeches of foxes and hoolock gibbons. 

It makes sense to me that we adjust and coordinate our rhythms to be heard or seen. Like flatmates who live in a shared bathroom house — we can’t all have the same rhythms, or we’d be in trouble. We stagger ourselves in time, frequency, and pattern, so we don’t compete. Likewise, species adapt and call out at different times, so that they can be heard. Bernie Krause, an American soundscape ecologist, calls this acoustic niche separation. The Earth is the maestro, an invisible composer subtly orchestrating our staggered times, pitches and acoustic frequencies so we can coexist and be heard.

We make sounds by pushing air through our vocal cords. Our words are shaped by our breath and the shape we make with the tongue and the mouth. But insects rub parts of their bodies together — wings against wings, legs against thoraxes — to form an orchestral performance that rises and falls through the day, sometimes so loud that we can’t hear each other in the forests.

Instead, we wait for our turn to sing. My friend Ella Browning at the University of Oxford is recording worms in the soil to build a library of worm sounds so we can monitor biodiversity through acoustic recordings. Bioacoustics has been especially well developed for bats and whales. Bats use high-frequency calls to see and hunt for prey. Did you know that humans with impaired vision can learn to echolocate? And we are on the brink of being able to use machine learning to speak to whales, the ethical and moral implications of which are being ironed out as we speak. In this vibrational world, each species has its own acoustic space, but within species, we are all slightly different. And some people sit at the edges of this niche space and can tune into other species’ frequencies.

Whether an animal sings or drums, we all have something in common — we use sound to communicate. Sound is not just heard; it is felt, because sound is vibration. To understand sound, we must imagine our eardrums gently humming and vibrating and perceiving the quality and materiality (origin) of the source. My deaf friend in a dance company I was part of in Mumbai was always in time with the music because he felt the vibrations in his body. My favourite storyteller and eco-philosopher David Abram, in his classic way, speaks gibberish during his talks to demonstrate that communication is not through verbal language alone; it happens through our bodies and all our senses.

Do trees make sounds? My friend Zack Di Lello spends his time pressing his ears and often his microphones against trees, listening to them for his DPhil in Music at the University of Oxford. He says sometimes you hear watery sounds that could be the xylem or phloem transporting water and nutrients in the inner bark. He thinks about trees as architecture, and architecture inherently as sound. If you press your ear against the smooth bark versus a crevice, you hear the tree differently. The presence of trees shapes how sound waves travel around them to reach your ears. If you walk past a woodland on a windy day, you’ll hear the loud creaking sound of wood. Each leaf has a sound when shaken by the wind or by animals. Seed pods can be music too, especially in the hands of kids. Do you remember hearing the thud of a juicy fruit falling from the tree?

Plants are musicians, if you’re willing to listen. The first sound we know intimately is the sound of our breath. In many cultures, it is also the first thing that connects us to the divine presence. Prana, umoya, chi — lifeforce. Do other species breathe similarly? Does breathing connect them to themselves and their environment? What about species that hold their breath for hours under the sea? What happens when we hold our breath?

There’s another kind of quietness that emerges from breath retention. A few seconds, minutes, and it is a tool to quieten the mind or a tool to explore the seas. Our oxygen reserves kick in — an ancient mammalian response and a reminder of our ancestral connection to water. Hold the breath too long, and we go quiet forever.

A quiet city at night is like a living thing holding its breath, waiting for life to return.

What is it that sustains us? For me, it is art, birdsong, cicada song, my family getting together to sing Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam songs. I saw AR Rahman and Rushil Ranjan create an orchestral Sufi performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Aakash Odedra, one of the finest kathak and contemporary dancers in the UK, performed a piece called “Songs of the Bulbul”, about a bird in Urdu poetry that is caged and blinded in order to sing its most beautiful song. He takes his last breath before he is freed from the cruelties of this world. Aakash says this story is much like an artist’s life; something in him is left behind forever on stage as he dances this dance. Slowly chipping away, until nothing remains.

The famous mycologist Merlin Sheldrake says that, of course, we experience a sense of loss because life is a process of transformation. What is it about music and dance that brings us closer to ourselves? In the Western Ghats, Shankar Mahadevan filmed himself singing a jugalbandi (a musical call-and-response) with a Malabar whistling thrush (mazhai kuruvi), a rain bird.

In the high-altitude cold deserts of Ladakh, I heard wolves respond to the azaan at dusk. Do our evening prayers move the wolves? Are we alone in this world? Or is there something that connects us all?

Sound shapes our bodies and is shared amongst everything that coexists. It connects us in more ways than we understand. I don’t want to fall asleep to silent skies, ever. I want the loud frogs, nocturnal birds, screeching mammals, the whole insect orchestra. I want to thump my feet together and sing with my family (yes, including you), the ocean, the stone unturned, the earthen pot, the limestone rock face, the coconut shell, the ground, and the sky that holds us.