The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants by Karen Bakker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Recently, I've encountered a number of books concerning the use of digital technologies (artificial intelligence, automated recording devices) for the study of the acoustic expressions of non-human animals, but none of them offered a comprehensive overview of the major bioacoustic discoveries in the form of a follow-up story, and each focused only on a particular group of creatures (for example Tom Mustill's How To Speak Whale, which highlights cetaceans).

I'm all the more pleased with Karen Bakker's book, which not only offers such an overview, but also discusses the sounds of creatures that are of somewhat marginal interest acoustically: plants, freshwater turtles, and others. Although the book is strictly factual and lacks personal touch (it’s nothing close to David Rothenberg’s or David G. Haskell’s writing in terms of style, although it is well-written in its own right), it is replete with fascinating connections that I had no idea of until now. For example, thanks to this book I know now that elephant infrasonic communication (i.e., communication at long wavelengths that we, unfortunately, cannot hear) was discovered by zoologist Katy Payne, the same person who, with her husband Roger, revealed to the world the beauty and complexity of humpback whale songs.

Personally, I was also very pleased with the amount of space Bakker devotes to traditional (indigenous) forms of knowledge; early on in the introduction and then often throughout the book, she quotes extensively from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), who successfully blends scientific and indigenous perspectives in her work (Braiding Sweetgrass!). That indigenous knowledge gained through hundreds and hundreds of years of patient listening and observation should be taken seriously is certainly not a commonplace attitude among Western scientists and science popularizers. By acknowledging the indigenous art of deep listening (and broadly the importance of indigenous knowledge), this book simultaneously celebrates the insights gained through digitally enhanced listening and points to its serious limits.

Modern digital listening tools, which greatly expand the scope and depth of our hearing, reveal to us that there is virtually no life form that does not sound. This book offers a detailed initiation into remarkable things these tools have opened to us in recent years, to all those wonderful novelties in the field and art of listening to life.

I highly recommend it!



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