The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S4E1: Soundscapes and Soundscape Ecology with Bryan Pijanowski
In this first episode of season 4, Claudia speaks to Bryan Pijanowski about soundscapes and sound ecology. They discuss what soundscapes are, how to study them and why thinking about sound might help scholars to think more deeply about animals and their environments.
Date Recorded: 7 October 2021
Dr. Bryan C Pijanowski is Professor and University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University. His work focusses on the use of sounds to study nature and how humans perceive their environment through their senses, especially through sound. He is also the Director of the Center for Global Soundscapes, which serves as a focal point for comparative global soundscape work that focusses on classifying sounds for use in biodiversity research. His group also spans into informal learning. He is the Executive Producer of an IMAX-Giant Screen-Domed Experience interactive film called Global Soundscapes! A Mission to Record the Earth. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed articles, conducted research at over 54 locations around the world, and is close to reaching his personal mission of conducting a study in every major terrestrial and aquatic biome in the world (only four more to go!). His soundscape archive now exceeds 4 million recordings. The longest research project is now starting its fifteenth year. Dr. Pijanowski received his PhD (Zoology) from Michigan State University and his BS from Hope College (Biology).
Claudia (Towne) Hirtenfelder is the founder and host of The Animal Turn. She is a PhD Candidate in Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and is currently undertaking her own research project looking at the geographical and historical relationships between animals (specifically cows) and cities. Contact Claudia via email (info@theanimalturnpodcast.com) or follow her on Twitter (@ClaudiaFTowne).
Featured:
Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape by Bryan Pijanowski et al; Soundscape conservation by Sarah Dumya
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.
Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.
iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
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SPEAKER_04:We don't necessarily have to come up with a species catalog to know what species richness or diversity is, biodiversity is. The functional aspects of the ecosystem, which is its sonic signatures, are just as important because sound is a means for how the ecosystem is functioning. Animal communication is part of the network that keeps things going.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome back to the Animal Turn, everyone. It's season four of the Animal Turn. Yay! And I think when a podcast reaches the fourth season, you know that it's established. So I think it's official. The Animal Turn Podcast is legitimately a podcast. By the time this air, we will be just under 10,000 downloads. So a huge thank you to everyone for your continued support, for listening and for spreading and sharing the podcast. And a huge, huge, huge thank you to all of you that leave reviews. Reviews go a long way in terms of helping others find the podcast. And as always, this podcast is sponsored by Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple, which is a fantastic uh research group in Kingston, Ontario. But for the first time ever, we're also being sponsored by two other sponsors, by the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory, SAP Lab, as well as the Sonic Arts Studio. So they knew that the season was coming up with focused on sound, and they were very keen to sponsor this season. So thank you so much to Matt Vogolski and Laura Cameron for your support with this as well. And as part of their sponsorship, something new is going to happen with this season. Instead of me doing the animal highlights at the end of every episode, I'm going to have a graduate student from SAP Lab who's going to help me with those. Hannah Hunter, you'll meet her at the end of this episode, is going to be doing all of the highlights, and she's wonderful and fantastic. And I'm pretty certain you're all going to fall in love with her too. But I don't want to talk for too long in this introduction because I start off with a fairly long episode, but it is brilliant and it is really exciting. So let me tell you a bit about my guest today. Dr. Brian Pajanowski is a professor and university faculty scholar in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University. His work focuses on the use of sound to study nature and how humans perceive their environment through their senses, especially through sound. He's also the director of the Center for Global Soundscapes, which serves as a focal point for comparative global soundscape work that focuses on classifying sounds for use in biodiversity research. And you're going to hear that today we speak a lot about soundscapes as well as soundscape ecology, which is considered to be a relatively new field. And Brian has done a lot of work in this field, and he kind of gives us a really nice baseline to begin this whole season. What is it when we're talking about sound and what could sound ecology mean? And what on earth is a soundscape? So one of his missions is to record the earth, and he has published over 170 peer-reviewed articles. He's conducted research in over 54 locations around the world and is close to reaching his personal mission of conducting a study in every major terrestrial and aquatic biome in the world. His soundscape archive now exceeds 4 million recordings, and his longest research project started 15 years ago. So he is certainly an expert to be speaking to about sound, and you're going to hear throughout this episode that he introduces a whole bunch of new concepts, new ideas, and new ways, I think, for animal studies scholars to think about animals and the ways in which we understand them. I hope you enjoy the show. Hello, Brian. Welcome to the Animal Time Podcast.
SPEAKER_04:Well, thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_03:I've never really thought about sound in an academic kind of way, in a scholarly way. And I've been spending the past two weeks or so kind of going through some of your work and your websites and what an exciting, exciting field. So before we get into uh the concept for today, which is uh soundscapes or and sound ecology, I'd I'd like you to perhaps tell us a little bit about yourself and the kind of work you do.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, um, again, I'm excited to uh be on the show and talk to you about what I do. There are so many different facets to the work that we're conducting here at Purdue. Uh, it's kind of hard to even include it into a show that's like this. But you can imagine that every place on earth has a set of sounds that are very characteristic to it. They're just sounds that define a place. And as humans, uh, we've experienced that. And matter of fact, we we do this on a regular basis. We wherever we go, we listen. And the sounds help us to further refine and define that place. And so as we might walk around in a in a field, in a forest or something like that, uh, we might hear the sounds of birds and crickets and frogs, but as we kind of approach a stream, or we can hear that stream before we see it. And so it's part of it's part of how we uh uh kind of find information or determine the information about place, what's happening, what what's there with us. Um we use it in such distinct ways that it's almost kind of scary because we can close our eyes and listen to the sounds around us, and we can determine, for example, a door opened up in the room next to us, and maybe we can hear footsteps. And and those sounds are ones that we use as what's happening around me. Uh so all of these sounds are embedded in our neurological system in really ways that are just fascinating to me. Um the sounds of my childhood are very distinct too. Uh, I grew up in Michigan, uh, used to spend summers at my grandparents' place, and uh, we would go out, my grandfather would take us out or take me out with him to to go fishing early in the morning, and I would lay in bed and I would hear the coffee maker. And it would I would hear it before I smelled it, and it's like, okay, it's time to wake up. And he'd be banging around, and and then we go out and grab our fishing poles, and even the sound of those fishing poles as you kind of grab them, are so distinct. I mean, this is decades ago, right? And and then we step into the boat, and then you just hear the quiet lapping of the waves against the boat, you know, and then you get your fishing pole out and you throw it out, and the reel goes zing, and then you hear the bobber just hit the water, and it's just very quiet. So those sounds are distinct, but I could go even further and say those sounds are part of who I am, they define who I am, right? The sounds of our childhood, the chants, the sounds of our parents' voices, the sounds of our relatives. Uh and so you can you eventually have all of these catalogs of experiences that are all sonic. And eventually they become more than even just who they are, they trigger emotions, they trigger something deep inside us. And so my argument is also that compared to all the other senses, sound is probably the most deeply emotional trigger that we have. You know, uh you know, the parallels to music are really easy, right? You can just listen to music and we all kind of have the same emotional response to a sad song, to a song about love, to a song about having fun. They they all kind of have this universal appeal to us. So um, so sounds are kind of uh really uh part of human society. So uh when I talk about sound to people, I I talk about the three major dimensions of it. So the one is just its physical presence. Its physical presence is sound just exists everywhere. I mean, you can't find a silent place on earth, it just doesn't exist. And then there's the the um the psychological part. How do how do we sense it? It's it's how do we uh perceive uh the environment around us through that that really critical pipeline of sound. And then the last one is is kind of transitioning into like emotions and even spirituality, as I began to talk to people that are not thinking like the Western world does. You know, the eastern cultures, for example, have a very different perspective of sounds. So I study all three of those together, and I'm interested in all of those signals. Now, in particular, um I use the sounds, the presence of sounds, to quantify the amount of biodiversity of a place. And I'm very I'm I'm extremely interested in that because we have very few tools as scientists that can go out and develop the catalog of sounds of all animals at a place. So you can imagine that if you go to a place like the tropics, I can easily develop a catalog of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of species that exist at a place. I have one instrument that we can record that and do it continuously for every day, every week, every month, on for years. So I have an incredible uh uh ability, because of the technology, to go out, measure biodiversity at just about every place. Terrestrial systems, we have studies in the marine environment, freshwater systems, and and sound for us is a measure of who's there, the sounds, the sounds of nature. Um so um I'm you know, I'm I I I'm focusing on a distinct purpose. I'm also interested in in making sure that people are aware that you know we're we're having we're having a great impact on the planet, and it's one that's not good. And when I go to places like Borneo or Africa, I mean I'm at places that people haven't been maybe ever. And I'm recording these sounds, and I'm thinking, we can't lose this, we can't lose this ecosystem. Yeah, how can I tell my story? I can tell my story through the sounds that I play back to the public and use that emotional trigger that I think is really powerful. It's a powerful voice in the way in which I uh me as a scientist and trying to communicate um the impact that we have on ecosystems, but also the beauty and awe of nature that I have and that we should all have.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and it's it's amazing the the work you do. And just having gone through through your website a bit, just the number of recordings and the number of places you and your team have managed to acquire uh the different sounds and soundscapes, uh, and we're gonna we're gonna get into some of that a bit later, but you brought up some of those childhood sounds for you. And was it these kinds of sounds when you were a kid that got you interested in sound and soundscapicology? Or, and I know that that's a relatively new field, but what got you interested as a scientist in sound? How what was that moment for you when you thought, okay, sound is where I have to focus my attention?
SPEAKER_04:Well, you know, uh I I think um an answer to a question like that is there are just like multiple pathways and roads to get you to the same place. And it's hard to kind of um identify just one single, simple, like this is what um what did it for me. But you know, as a as a kid, I was interested in being outside, uh being in the backyard, chasing grassrock grasshoppers, butterflies, crickets, frogs, birds. And uh so I always had that um interest in at least the backyard ecosystem, and then of course the the northern cabin. Uh I eventually picked up a guitar and started playing in a band, and we weren't very good, but anyway, it was a lot of fun. I had uh an old Les Paul through a Marshall Stack, so it always sounded pretty decent. Uh, but I really wasn't very good. But uh anyway, we had fun.
SPEAKER_02:I'm sure you look better than me. You can maybe like um I'm convinced that the more I just stare at like a musician or something, I'll one day be able to play.
SPEAKER_04:But anyway. Yeah, and and then in high school I took a music history class, and then in college I took a music theory class. And uh, but I was always driven to kind of go into science uh and uh got into into biology mostly uh because my my parents wanted me to become a medical doctor. Um so I disappointed them in becoming a doctor of ecology uh instead. But you know, there there was a moment when I was an undergraduate where um I thought this is it. Uh, we I I had a I had one of those great professors in college, a little bit quirky, no a lot quirky, you know, just out of the box kind of guy. Uh he um was really into birds. I couldn't quite understand his full fascination with birds until I started seeing uh birds through his lens, you know. And um uh he was teaching an ecology class too, and and I took that ecology class. It was it was actually a record class of me as as a pre-med major. And I I remember uh going to all these different types of ecosystems, and I thought, wow, the diversity of wetlands is really extraordinary. It's just I can't believe all the different, you know, bogs and fens and swamps. And and uh one day I was just having a conversation with in the hall, and he said, So, you know, what do you think about these, you know, Saturday morning trips we're taking? I said, I love them. I can't wait for the next one. I I don't like getting up so early in the morning, but anyway, I love him. He said, So, what do you want to do when you grow up? And you know, it's one of those questions where you just hate to have that answer, right? And oh, well, I'm on the pre-med track. And he says, Well, well, why don't you why don't you do something for me? And and you know, he said, uh, what was your favorite place? And I said, I love this fen. I said, I didn't even know what a fen was. And I said, I just loved it. He said, Okay, do you have binoculars? And I said, Yeah, actually I do. He said, Do you have a car? And I said, Yeah. Okay, hold on a second. And he goes in this back room and clanking, and things are falling all over the place. And I'm thinking, what is he doing? And he comes out, he gets me a pair of waiters, gets me a map, he said, sit down, let me show you how to get there. He says, I want you to go to that fen early in the morning. I want you to go by yourself, go out and walk, get out in the middle of it at sunrise, and you just stand there for 15 minutes and you come back and you tell me what you want to do with the rest of your life.
SPEAKER_05:Wow.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. I mean, so it was like, oh wow, and I did that, and I came back and I said, Okay, you got me hooked. This is this is really cool. What what do I need to do? Um, so you know, I ended up planning to graduate school and going through the rigors of that and becoming a faculty member. Um, you know, again, it's there are multiple pathways here. Um, one of the other pathways was my fascination with just um technology. And at the time I I was contemplating whether or not I should take a computer programming language rather than take something like Latin or Greek. And I thought, uh maybe I should take a programming language. That might be a little bit more useful for me. And so I took a Fortran programming class, and I actually did fairly well. And so there the professor told me, you know, you should think about doing this. And I said, you know, I'm I'm just really uh really into ecology. So combine the two, just you know, find ways to do that. It was really good advice, and and I did. I kept pursuing uh computers, and before I knew it, um there weren't that many people back in the late 80s that were fairly good at programming and figuring out new programming languages, and here's a sensor, and you know, how do you work with it and how do you program? And it's like, okay, I'll figure it out, you know. So so that love of, you know, nature in general, which goes back to my childhood and then transitioning from pre-med to becoming an ecologist to having this fascination with sensors and gadgets and data and that sort of thing, all kind of came together um maybe about 15 years ago. And that's that you know, it's that kind of a long road. I've always had also a fascination for with um social science and the the psychological aspects of sound just truly, you know, fascinated me. So it's like putting it all together. So anybody who I've I found out that just about everybody who's kind of in this uh space that I'm in has similar kinds of stories. Um they find they find that sound is this like universal thing that helps pull together all of these desperate strands in their life, um, and makes it something that um is kind of purposeful.
SPEAKER_03:So that's a beautiful uh origin story. Uh in in many ways, I've I felt like that when I started when I entered the realm of animal studies. I felt as though I'd kind of arrived, you know, that I was home somehow. That yeah, um yeah, I can kind of make connections between all my different interests and how they got me to focusing on this, which is really just lovely. Um, so this is the the first episode in in a season of 10 episodes that's going to focus on animals and sound. And I thought it would be really good to speak to you so that we could kind of get a general sense of why sound is important when thinking about animals. And so far in the podcast, we the previous seasons have focused on things like animals and the law and how policies kind of manage animals and the ways in which animals can move and weigh. And I'm sure you'll have something to say about that in terms of sound. The second one focused more on sound, I mean animals and experience, and kind of how animals experience the world and you know the the phenomenon this word, phenomenology of phenomenology, that's right. The experience of the world. And then I think again, sound here is really vital to how animals experience the world. I mean, we are animals, and as you I think beautifully charted there in the beginning of this episode, is how essential it's been to who we are as individuals and who we are as societies and cultures and people. And then the the last one was uh animals and the urban. And of course, in in a lot of your your writing as well as uh some of the videos I've seen of you, you you tend to speak about the city as a really important place in terms of thinking about sound and ecology. So I thought it would be great for you to start off this fourth season for us and kind of just maybe giving a general sense of why should scholars who are interested in some of these questions about animals and putting animals at the forefront of their thought, why should they be incorporating sound into how they're thinking about these animal worlds and these animal problems?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, there are lots of answers to that question. Uh you know, the first is most animals are active at night. The largest number of species uh just are feeding, doing what they do at night. How do they navigate spaces? Uh you know, many of them are using the visual, but the but the sonic uh space is far more informative for them. So uh they've developed the acuity to listen and to use those sounds to help navigate, find prey, find mates, uh, figure out where there is danger to communicate with conspecifics. Um so that's you know, that's an important aspect of their lives. So um ecologists uh go to sleep when it gets dark, and then we wake up when it gets light. So we're we haven't paid much attention to uh the active period of most animals. So uh so as a scientist, we need really need to understand uh how animals are surviving in this rapidly changing world, and how are they using sound to do that? Uh you know, at the same time, uh you know, sound is uh the gonna be the most important sense for them, maybe outside of the sense of smell, to being able to navigate through dense tropical rainforests or even dense temperate forests, you know, getting through, you know, seeing something is usually fairly difficult. And oftentimes if you see something, you don't see it very long. Um, sound travels uh a fair distance, and so you can use that as a way to kind of navigate space, find information, you know, just it's just information about place. So sound is is very, very important. Um, a couple of things about um the urban environment, and I and I wanted to speak to that too, because I think it's important. One is more than half of humans now exist in cities and in urban spaces. That means we're surrounded by concrete jungles. It's not a natural jungle, it's it's uh walls and glass and steel. And we are uh we're physically separated from nature. And you know, psychologically, I don't know what that means, or there are a lot of people that speculate what that means, as as as a species, as as we um move through life continuously separated from nature, does that mean we become different from it? We shouldn't, because we are part of it. And if something is happening in nature, maybe we don't care anymore. So that that um that caring part is the is is the aspect that I worry about because we we are in the middle of a biodiversity crisis on this planet, we are in the middle of a sixth extinction, and we need to be able to rally the troops, right? Rally society around this and focus on it as something that uh is important, it's important to our survival. So the first aspect of this is uh the urban environment uh has uh tended to separate us as a species from hum uh the rest of of nature. Um the second is the urban environment. We can extend that to just debate about everything mechanical. By that I mean the combustion engine has pervaded just about every space uh in air, on gland, in the water. Uh the combustion engine produces um not very informative sounds, so we don't listen to it, we turn our ears off to it. But it's everywhere. And it's so loud in some places, especially in our oceans, that it interferes with communication. And you know, when whales are trying to find one another, when whales are trying to sing their songs and provide ways in which there's there's a presence, they they defined their presence. Um we have an impact. Uh our so our urban space, I'm saying, is it goes beyond the built environment, it goes it goes into the transportation systems. So as the as the earthworms, for example, um our our reach, our noise impact footprint, if you will, as it now is being extended into the northern poles, because we can now ship things more cheaply by going through northern passages. And so, you know, places that used to be fairly quiet are now noisy. Um, air traffic continues to go up, the number of cars we have on our planet continues to go up. So, so the other aspect of this is our noisy urban footprint is is just everywhere. I mean, it is. I mean, even when I go to places like, you know, hiking into the mountains in Patagonia to go record the sounds of glaciers, there's something flying overhead, or there's something that, you know, it's like, wow, where did that sound come from?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Um so so our presence is everywhere, you know, and and uh in some cases it's like, well, we can't we can't have um half of the world in quiet spaces. That's just not practical. But we don't have very many, or for that many, maybe any quiet spaces where we don't have an impact. So our urban footprint is is impacting, I think, uh animals, animal communication around the world. And there's lots of there's been lots of great examples by scholars in this field to be able to demonstrate that you know birds have to sing louder or they sing at a higher pitch to be able to kind of elevate the sounds above the background sounds. And there's they're changing uh the timing of their singing. They're singing more at night when it's quieter. So there's just um we're we're having an impact though. So our urban spaces, you know, do uh do impact the animal community, you know, it's something that we're all trying to study.
SPEAKER_03:Um this this was something that came up in a lot in season three was kind of uh the the significance of the idea that somehow humans are separated from that that we are nature. Um, you know, in in some ways I would think of the city as nature, which I know is perhaps maybe slightly different to the way you're framing it here, but uh but that I certainly agree that what's happening in cities extends far beyond what we would consider to be the borders of cities or the boundaries of cities in in waterways, in and in sound. Um, you know, I I was into space podcasts for a little while, and I was I'm marveled actually at the fact that how far our sound just keeps going out and out in space. It's not even just the globe, our sounds are just continuing throughout space. Eventually, maybe another civilization out there will all of a sudden get this like smack of sound, which is really far beyond the city. But in terms of animals, there, what I what I heard you saying was that sound is significant for for animals' lives. It's it's significant in terms of when they communicate, uh, and it's significant for how they communicate, uh, as well as where where they view themselves in relation to others who are communicating. Um, and I thought it was really significant what you said there about nighttime and kind of some of the the gaps in our view as scholars that we we kind of go to summer destinations or we go out during the day and maybe we fail to take into consideration the animals and how they're communicating and how they're experiencing things at times that we that would be inconvenient for us. Um, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, uh no, I I uh what what is uh truly fascinating about uh a lot of the work that I do and others do is that we couldn't have done this unless um engineers came up with solutions to making these marvelous sensors. I've got, you know, like one here, for example.
SPEAKER_03:Uh so I Like what does that what does that do?
SPEAKER_04:So so you got you've got two uh microphones sitting off the side here. Something I just I can attach to a tree, and then you're listening, it's like a box. Yeah, it's like a box. It's uh it's called a passive acoustic recorder. Okay, and so and so I can program it here, or I can be on a laptop and program it. And so what it does is it turns on and turns off its specific recording cycles, it's called a duty cycle. And then on the side there are SD cards that store my data, and I can put two one terabyte uh drives in there. So it's like, and then uh then I have my batteries that I can put in there, so D size. And you know, what's r really remarkable is that uh there are several companies that produce these that uh I can put this out and record one minute per hour and it's gonna go for over a year. Let me think about that. So I can record, um, and I have these going all over all over the world right now in various studies. Um I can record, and then you know, I have to do sneaker net to which is me going out and getting the data, but I don't mind that if they're in really cool places in the world. And then I'm doing analyses of the data, using a lot of machine learning, artificial intelligence kinds of tools uh to probe these files. Um, but uh in the early days, many of us that were trying to do this were taking microphones, putting laptops in suitcases, and coming back a day later finding that the$3,000 worth of equipment that we just put in there just failed, just fried, you know. So ecologists doing you know, engineering work, it's just not pretty. Uh, but engineers have figured out a way to kind of make this make these things robust. You know, I've got these in deserts, I've got these in tropical rainforests, uh sitting in the middle of icy uh you know, roof uh mountaintop areas. Uh they're really robust, and uh it's it's allowing us to collect a boatload of data. So as a community, we probably have uh petabytes and petabytes of what the earth sounds like and all of these places.
SPEAKER_03:I'm not exactly sure how big a petabyte is, but I'm guessing that's really, really, really big.
SPEAKER_04:It's really, really big.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when uh when you think about it, you know, also uh we have a record of what the landscape, what places look like. They go back to maybe about the 18 what, 30s, 1840s. Uh we don't have very many recordings that go back maybe prior to 1920, right? And very few. Um, but now, but now we've got these little you know, magic boxes and uh the magic box records, and there are so many of us all around the world using these. So now we've got another tool in our toolkit, in our toolbox to go out and study the environment. But you know, this one here focuses mostly on animals, um, the songs, the calls of everything.
SPEAKER_03:So that that takes us to kind of the the concept and focus, which is uh soundscapes. And for I think a lot of listeners, the idea of a soundscape is a rather new idea. Um you know, I th what is it? What is a soundscape? Why, why would what is different to a soundscape versus me recording my dog Linus when he's chewing uh a stick, you know, crunch crunch. That's probably one of my favorite sounds. Uh what's the difference between recording a soundscape versus uh recording Linus?
SPEAKER_04:I see no difference. And uh it's so uh let me let me kind of back up a little bit and kind of put a uh kind of focus on uh the soundscape versus what many uh folks have done prior to this, which is bioacoustics work. So the bioacoustics work has been a study of species communication. How do animals uh structure their sound, structure their voices, how does it propagate across space, and then how do they receive it? You know, uh and and the reception is is very complex too. It's it's you know, every animal perceived, receives information, sonic information, acoustic information, differently than humans. So there's just been a lot of studies on species, very species specific. Uh but uh you know, my some of the bioacoustics work moved out of that and started doing like multi-species comparisons, you know. Um it was a really, really hot area for a while. It's called acoustic partitioning. How do animals communicate that are are singing basically in the same kind of acoustic space? How do they partition it so that they don't kind of walk over their signals? And there's been a lot of work that's been done on that, it's very fascinating. Um, but uh uh to me, a soundscape is a collection of all sounds, and in many ways um you're kind of agnostic as to what it is you're looking at. You want to you want to study every sound that exists in a recording. That's a soundscape. And also you're interested in its structure, spectral structure, you know, is it high frequency, low, whatever, modulated? Um, but what is its sound source? And then we get down to the sound source, it is the biological, the biophany, the geophysical, the geophany, and then the anthropogenic or the technical technological uh anthrophony or technophony, those sound sources begin to tell you a bit of a story about place. Okay, so if you're getting if you're listening and you hear the sounds of certain kinds of birds, but you also hear in the background the sounds of running water, you know you're probably next to a stream. So this is something about that place. You know, I have I have sensors in Tanzania, for example, where I listen to the recordings and I can hear the sounds of the running water. It's very distinct. And I can I can tell you pretty much what date that might be, because I have a sense of what the rainy season and the dry season schedule is. That stream is dry, a lot of part of the year, and so it's not making sounds. Um, other times of the year it's kind of moderate trickle, other times it's gushing, it's roaring, right? So it tells me something about the climate, the weather patterns that exist there. And then I can listen to everything else and begin to develop this taxonomy of sounds, sources the primates, the birds, the insects, the amphibians. And that begins to tell me a story about the animals that all the animals that exist there. Uh so uh all it's all the sounds. So the specific definition of a soundscape is all the sounds at a place over a given time period, so you have to define the time period uh that come from all sound sources and that are perceived by humans or animals. And I I can go either way, I can I can say multi-species too. By that I I mean humans are animals. Uh I'm a biologist, I would I would say that we are, but there are societal norms that say, well, we're a little bit different. But anyway, it it's all the sounds that occur, co-occur from all the sound sources over this time period that can be perceived and that are perceived.
SPEAKER_03:And when you start to collect all of these different uh so you said biophony, geophony, and anthropony or tech technophony. Yes, yes, yes, so yeah, yeah. So so you're starting to so I understand that I can start recording anywhere, and I'll I'll in a sense, whatever I'm recording at that moment, I'm getting a sense of the scape, how the scape of the sound there. So similar to if I was standing on a street or standing on a mountain and looking at that street or looking over that mountain, I would, based on my vision at that moment, I would get a particular landscape. Here I'm getting a particular soundscape depending on where I am and when I am, uh, which is great. But when I start to take into consideration these different kinds of parts that you mentioned, do you find that there are different uh like classifications of these sounds, different compositions of how these sounds are put together in different places? Are you starting to, with all the data? I forgot the big word you used just now. It's bigger than it. Yeah, there we go. When when um when you start to put these together, what patterns are you finding in terms of different sounds and how multi-species, humans and animals, how we're producing sounds?
SPEAKER_04:Wow. Yeah, so I mean that's kind of like my my uh life mission. So, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is, you know, I call it uh record the earth. What does that mean? Well, it means that I want to study every major biome on the planet uh with one study that helps me to define what the characteristic soundscape is of that biome. So um there are lots of ways to count biomes. You can be a lumper or a splitter, but the one that I use is we have a 32 biome, major biomes in on on Earth, and we've done 27, so I've got about five more to go. Um every biome does sound very distinctly because every biome has a certain assortment of animals. And what I also found find fascinating is that every biome has a structure, and we've known this for a while, of body-size relationships of animals. So um large body-size animals are very common in places like grasslands and savannas. The sounds there tend to be fairly low frequency dominated by those large-bodied animals. Uh, you get to the tropics, you don't have a lot of large-bodied animals except for maybe uh, you know, a few uh holler monkeys that go to the top of the trees. But anyway, you've got a lot of small birds because they have to navigate through small spaces. It's just, you know, um, so the their high frequencies there. Um, but it it goes beyond just like frequency distributions, too. Um we've known for a while, for example, that the sounds that birds make in forest tend to be more whistles because they propagate better through that kind of environment, uh forest environments. Yeah, so you know, one of one of the things I I say to the public, we're talking about um uh the different kinds of sound patterns that exist in different places. Um, what I've discovered is I've gone around the world in just about every place that I think is kind of a healthy environment, I can tap my foot to it. I can tap my foot to the soundscape. And here's why there are uh a collection of rhythmic animals, and these tend to be our crickets, our anurans, our frogs, that uh basically serve as the base of the food chain, right? So the rest of the vertebrate community, the animals such as um our mammals and birds, uh will feed on this. It's a food resource. Uh, if I can tap my foot and listen to the crickets or to the frogs, that means they're there. Uh when they're not, uh I have to ask the question, well, should they be? And if they should be, it's like, well, this might not be a good thing. So, you know, there are things that I I do listen to, and I can tell you are are just like patterns of different uh different ecosystems. There are very distinct patterns too, in some areas when you you start getting up into higher mountain elevations, uh, you hear very, very few animals, and it tends to be very quiet. And uh that's probably, I think, a natural uh phenomenon. But um, as you move from those quiet mountain areas down into the tropics, you can certainly hear many more voices, many more sounds of animals. Uh the chorusing is it's just unbelievable.
SPEAKER_03:That's a word I've heard you use a lot, chorusing. Is is that because uh I think I know what a chorus is in a song. Um I mean I've listened to the Backstreet Boys and any so um but what what do you mean when you're saying a chorus in terms of uh an environment or an ecosystem? Uh is is this the foot tapping that you're talking about?
SPEAKER_04:Well, no, it goes beyond that. It's it's uh uh it's the collection of all the animal sounds uh together, you know, and it's how are they spaced out spectrally? By that I mean higher frequencies, medium frequencies, and low frequencies. How do they and then um there's lots of evidence to suggest that uh animals will space out their songs, and in some cases they take their cues from a leader, there's a conductor. So, you know, this has been uh true in some of the research on birds, where you know, one species might serve as I'm gonna sing and then I'm gonna stop for a while, and then and then others kind of come in. So there's there seems to be some kind of structure that's evolved so that um everybody can do their thing because we all can't communicate in the same space. It's gonna get too crowded, it's not gonna serve its purpose, right? We got to find our acoustic space, and so um that's what I mean by chorusing. Now there are sp specific times of the day where there's a peak, and on the terrestrial, on the land, uh it's the dawn. And it's really, I mean, we all know it, we all listen to it. It is the sounds of birds, uh, frogs, and insects, and it tends to be the overlap of the nighttime animals, animals, and the daytime animals. And so what you've got there is this kind of the peak and abundance of animals that want to do their communication. Um, several theories as to why that is. It's probably the quietest time of the day for both um animal communities to kind of participate in some kind of uh communication to say, I'm here, this is my space, or or we have so many conspecifics in the area to kind of figure out what our densities are. But um what I find fascinating is that when you begin to do uh comparison of ecosystems, which is you know what we've also been talking about, the peak chorusing in the in the oceans is at night. It's a dusk. And so you have fish, you have you have sea urchins, you have snapping shrimp, and they're all chorusing at night. And it's like, why is that? That's one of those things where I'm just kind of going, why?
SPEAKER_03:That's fascinating. I mean, because I I think about chorus is really a beautiful word. You you spoke earlier about childhood memories, and for me, there is something, there's almost like a hug when I think back to waking up in the early morning and you've kind of got those. It's and and so I I grew up in Johannesburg, and we had, you know, lots of lots of insects were a very insect uh oriented place, I think, and and just the the air would often be thick or humid, you know. Right. It's a dry, it's a fairly dry place, but in the mornings it had like this thickness, and you could hear the insects. And but dusk was always my favorite. Um, you would hear the frogs come out and the crickets, and it really is just part of it's part of my day in terms of how I know when I'm gonna start and when I'm gonna end. But then the idea that the ocean, where most of the planet is, is singing at night.
SPEAKER_04:Um Well, you know, the the other the other part of the story is um just by listening and thinking about ecosystems, every ecosystem has its own long-term stretched-out rhythm. By that I mean the winter sounds different than the spring, which sounds different than the summer, which also sounds different than the fall. So those of us that are in regions of the world where we have four seasons, every season has a distinct sonic signature. So, you know, we're listening here in the mid-latitudes and the northern mid-latitudes right now. I'm hearing katy dids that are singing just at dusk. You know, Katie did, Katie didn't, Katie did, Katie didn't. You know, it's like, okay. Um, I guess it's fall, you know, it's it's and it's not, you know, it's not early, you know, it's just like the middle of fall, you know. And uh the sakadas have just stopped. They're they're done. But that's telling me it's late hot summer.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I I had never heard a cicada until I moved to South Korea. I was lucky to live in South Korea for a little while.
SPEAKER_05:Oh wow.
SPEAKER_03:And um, yeah, that mmm mm mm mm. And that to me is now a distinctive hot, humid summer's day sound from South Korea. It's it's a sound I never encountered, uh, or at least wasn't conscious of in South Africa.
SPEAKER_04:Well, I tell you, um we have dog day cicadas here, which is just you know a regular annual cicada. Um I was stunned when I got to Borneo and found that there were 32 species of cicada.
SPEAKER_03:You send me a cicada um sound, I think.
SPEAKER_04:I did. I did.
SPEAKER_03:Let me see. I think I've got two sound clips from Borneo. I think this is the correct one to me.
SPEAKER_04:Should be the second one. Yeah. So we were just talking about waking up to a dawn chorus at night at 5:30 in the morning. This is what it sounds like outside my cabin.
SPEAKER_03:Sounds like an alarm clock.
SPEAKER_04:It's yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_03:Um yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And here's here's here's what I find fascinating by uh by by this particular cicada that we're listening to now. When I got to Brunei and I gave a talk uh at the university there, and uh there were some graduate students and uh gave a talk about soundscapes and what I'm about to do. I'm gonna go out to your forest here, and I'm gonna spend three months and and and study it. And I've got all these um experimental designs. I had a graduate student, she she raised her hand, she says, Dr. Dr. Pijanowski, are you gonna study the six o'clock cicada? And I said, Oh, that's that's an interesting thing for it. I said, Well, tell me more about that. She says, We have a cicada that sings at six o'clock in the morning and in the evening. And I thought, that's fascinating. I said, I'm gonna have to do that.
SPEAKER_05:Wow.
SPEAKER_04:So uh, you know, there since there are 32 cicada, 32 species of cicada, it's like, how do they find the space to sing? They sing at a certain time and they take it all up. You know, they're just gonna this, this is so um I I get to I get to uh the research station. Takes me about an hour and a half to two hours of going up the river, just completely remote. I mean, I'm in no place. This is wonderful. And after three months there, I came back, I gave a talk to the same graduate class. And I said, Who is it that asked me this question? She said, I said, okay. You have five species of six o'clock cicada.
SPEAKER_05:Wow.
SPEAKER_04:And it was just like, wow. I said, yeah, this is the way in which they structure their sounds.
SPEAKER_03:So when we're listening to that clip, is that one cicada or we're hearing?
SPEAKER_04:There's probably about three or four in that recording. And so yeah, go ahead if you want.
SPEAKER_03:Is that rhythm?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so some some uh some animals have what I call very specific soundscape triggers. By that I mean there's something in the environment that triggers them to start singing or calling. In this particular case, although I didn't have a light sensor with me, it just started making sense to me that they were triggered by a certain amount of solar radiation. You know, it's like it's it's starting to get dark, it's about this amount of solar radiation, I'm starting to sing. And then another one would come in just a little bit after that. And so it was very, very kind of structured in in that that sense. And it's like, wow, this is very, very interesting because if if there are 32 species of you, you got to figure out ways to kind of do things that are different. But as you listen to it too, um, they've structured their sounds to be very, very unique too, you know. So um, and then and then they're just fascinating. Uh, just to look at them as as I was walking through uh the forest on my first day. I was there with my colleague, and uh this thing flew in front of me, and I thought it was a bird. Landed on a tree, and I looked over, it's like, my God, that's a huge sake, it's about the size of my hand. And I thought, wow. And then it started singing, and I thought, I gotta get out of here. It's so loud, it was like a hundred.
SPEAKER_03:They need their exoskeletons just yeah, I know.
SPEAKER_04:It's like there they were, yeah, at one point in time. Yeah, so it's a fascinating system, but uh uh you know, the the you know, the point here is is that you know, animals have a rhythm. Uh the rhythms are kind of complex. You go to a place, there's a signature that exists for every ecosystem. And as an ecologist that's studying these ecosystems, I want to know what is that spectral signature? You know, what is it like?
SPEAKER_03:And and and also how and I know you've written a bit about how we should conserve these and archive these and respect them. Um so uh I've got another one here from Borneo. I don't know if you should be pulling. Okay, what this on the map is on calls.
SPEAKER_04:So here's another thing. If I were to have a bunch of experts in a room, the best experts in the world that are studying all the species at this at this site, none of us could come up with a full catalog of all the sounds that we listen to and have a hundred percent confidence that every sound we listen to is what we think it is. Now, there are a lot of people that tell me, well, well, that's no good, because if you don't do that, then you can't get anything like that species catalog that you're after. And I say, I'm not after a species catalog, I'm after the signature. I'm after what is the essence of this place and what should it sound like. Now, what I have are sonic structures that represent sound sources from a variety of animals, and I'll tell you, I will be completely happy, pleased, thrilled actually, if I can develop this sound source taxonomy that tells me something about who is there, but in a general sense, that's all I need to know. Because if I go to someplace else and I don't hear that sound signal or a host of them, then I can then I can start asking the question, well, what's missing? Yeah, and why is it missing, right? So so it's like it's like in some cases, it's like going to a symphony and listening to, you know, uh a Beethoven symphony, for example, and thinking that you're gonna listen to every single instrument, know what note is playing, but also what instrument it is. Sometimes you just you want to take the whole thing in and know what it's all structured at. Uh so it's like it's like coming up with a quantification of the soundscape, and that is good enough. And what I tell my ecology uh colleagues is that we don't necessarily have to come up with a species catalog to know what species richness or diversity is, biodiversity is. The functional aspects of the ecosystem, which is its sonic signatures, are just as important because sound is a means for how the ecosystem is functioning. Animal communication is part of the network that keeps things going. So if we have a full network, a full complement of sounds, of animal sounds, or if we can go to places that are reference baseline and say this is what it probably should sound like, and then compare that and say, all right, now we have a reference. Now we can go someplace else and say, okay, what's missing? That is that is the useful approach that we're trying to apply here.
SPEAKER_03:Let's say if we were if we were starting from like my kind of perspective, where I've got a an interest in a specific species or a specific animal. And I know you had mentioned bioacoustics kind of deals with the communication aspects, but perhaps if I'm interested in a specific uh animal species or set of multi-species relationships, I I think that this could be really useful as well, in that I could go, I could consider the soundscapes of different places where the species are found and start to think a little bit about how their health correlates, uh, or what the soundscape health could tell me about their population health, uh, because I'm I'm sure there must be connections there, right? This is what you're saying. That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. So, I mean, the way I approach every study is I try to find a reference place. Takes me a long time. Uh, I have to build relationships with people that are uh aren't key colleagues, and um but I also have to look at the ecosystem and and ask the question, what are the major threats to it? And then how do I structure my studies to be able to study that kind of phenomenon? So I'll give you an example. You know, I'm uh working in in Mongolia at the moment, and I'm interested in um uh the potential impacts that livestock grazing has. on grasslands. Mongolia represents the largest intact grassland we have on the planet. They're beautiful grasslands. Actually, if you get out to the eastern steps, it's just, you know, eye-watering beauty.
SPEAKER_03:I cycled to it up through Mongolia. I cycled a cycle from Ulampata up to a beautiful place. I yeah, absolutely. I can at least share this with you.
SPEAKER_04:Dornod. Maybe Dornod. Did you get up to Dornod? It's just uh yeah. It's beautiful. Anyway, yeah, it is. So uh started a study, uh went to a a place where there's the Taki horse, which is uh an endangered horse. And I knew that the landscape would be managed in a way where it's pretty much pristine, no grazing. And so then I went to areas where work with herders to say, okay, where do you think there's been the most uh grazing, the least moderate, and put sensors out and you know, we're analyzing the data now. But the idea here is to look at what are the major stressors on that ecosystem and how can we use the soundscape to be able to detect whether or not our activities have any impact on that ecosystem. And I I, you know, I could go on for maybe about 50 studies or so where we're doing pretty much the same thing. We're looking at marine protected areas, areas that in in the marine system, like kelp forests, where um you can't you can't fish, you can't do other things there that potentially might harm the ecosystem and then look outside that marine protected area and compare and contrast those. So what does the soundscape sound like in the protected area versus outside? So those are the kinds of studies that we're doing to kind of get a sense of how can we use soundscapes to understand um reference condition baseline and then compare that against our human activities of for whatever kind that might exist.
SPEAKER_03:That's fascinating. And to circle back to our conversation about cities earlier and also and Trophani, do you find do you find that different cities sound different to one another or is this is this a similar is this a similar you know how you said depending on the size of animals and depending on kind of the time of year you can there's signatures to different soundscapes. Are all cities kind of sounding the same or do you find that there might be some distinctiveness between cities across the world? There is.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah I I was called up by a group and I won't say what group it was you can probably guess what group it was and it's not something I can't talk about. But Dr. Pijanowski, if I were to play recording from you from a cell phone and we don't know its position, could you tell us where it might have come from and uh my answer was at the time well probably uh maybe guesswork. But what I did is I started sitting down putting together a rubric for listening. And I thought to myself I think I can get very close. Why? Well every city sound a little different so uh the sirens that exist in cities uh have have been tuned to different kinds of frequencies depending upon where you're at so that you know there are regulations in say Europe and United States and where the sirens sound different. So you you can listen to that you can listen to police sirens and other kinds of sirens. You could also listen to things like um you know what I call the acoustic religious symbols uh you know church bells uh Muslim chants in the evening that tells you something about place maybe geography um you can listen to the sounds of you know the sounds of animals especially birds are are very distinct and then very geographically defined all right um and then so before I knew it it's like well I can probably get maybe down to continent and then I got the seasonal thing that I'm listening to so I can tell you something a little bit about crickets and because those emerge during certain kinds of seasons. So before I know it I've maybe got a little bit more to my latitude and then I got time of day okay that tells me something about longitude so before you know it and then if you start thinking about how sound reflects off of brick and glass and you know what kind of structures there are, uh you could probably get to well what kind of buildings are around there. So before you know it, you probably have a rubric that you could figure out how how you could identify a place through all the complexities of sound. That's uh that's an incredible answer and your your comprehension of sound is just marvel like to think that sound reverberates differently off different surfaces, that animals produce sound differently depending on where they are, what time of the year it is uh these are all nuances I think that I hadn't ever ascribed to to sound um we're gonna start wrapping up now but just a couple of uh final questions one um what is your favorite animal sound um let me uh gibbons let me tell you about gibbons uh when I wasn't Borneo I climbed a tower and I did this uh a couple of times in the morning which was really characteristic of what people were doing in this tower in the national park and you you would leave early in the morning before sunrise of course take some time to get up there and I'd haul up all my audio recording equipment uh but when you got got all the way to the top of the tower uh we were on this like ridge so you're very very high up and so we were 90 meters above the ground but probably about 30 meters above the top of the canopy so we just had this really distinct like perch and um I just remember the the gibbons the way in which their families bark across the river banks it was it was just unreal. I mean I I just um it was a it's a social um social acoustic communication uh but the way in which it kind of echoed across the river canyon is just unforgettable to me. So you know that's that's one that I find to be you know almost kind of like a spiritual you know because you're connecting in a way where you just kind of go uh very few people have ever had this experience right aren't gibbons one of the loudest animals that I don't know if you were one of the sound tips you sent me a a gibbon I'm not sure uh I I I don't I don't think so maybe uh no oh yes uh Holler Monkey in Costa Rica should we hear it?
SPEAKER_02:I think it's kind of sound but it's are you ready?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah yeah oh hold on to your seats yeah oh there we go you know what I thought I clipped the beginning of that you know here's the fun you know so holler monkeys you go to Costa Rica uh encourage people to go to Costa Rica if there's any place that is fun and just full of nature and full of sounds it's a great place um but holler monkeys are are one of my favorite things to listen to in at Costa Rica because I think they're kind of funny uh they you know they sit up on top of the of the trees and I'm not sure what they do most of the day other than just pretty much sleep uh but when the rains come they howl when the thunder hits they howl it's like you've just woke me up you know and say wanna make a and they want to scream back to the sky that they're just not so pleased about that. You know so I have to laugh every time.
SPEAKER_02:I love how you can hear them responding to the panda.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah yeah but but you know when I was uh we we made an IMAX movie a couple years ago and I was uh filming in Costa Rica and I and it was funny I I told the film crew I said so when the howler monkeys start howling it's time to kind of pack up and they looked at me and said why and I said because they're the one they're they're sitting on top of the forest they're the first ones to hit that have the rain hit and I said it's going to take about a minute for the for the rain to eventually drip down to us and we sometimes don't know it's raining we it's it's it's just kind of windy up there so we just can't can't distinguish the wind in the set so I said the holler monkeys start howling it's time to pack up this very expensive IMAX equipment and they laughed and and after you know a couple times it happened they said wow you're right you know I said well you gotta listen figure out what's happening tie it all together you know so much of what you've said I think today with regards to sound and animals has kind of taught me about again the sensory experiences of animals whether it's the cicadas you know responding to heat and sun or or um you know these howler monkeys responding to rain and how we communicate through these variety of senses that go so far beyond just the the visual um which is amazing. Do you have a a quote ready for for the I I do I do it's a quote that I put on top of every syllabus that I teach because it's just one of my my it's my favorite quote so every student gets to see it. I probably should talk more about what it means to me but I get to do that with you. So here's the quote it's a kind of a short one those who dwell as scientists or laymen among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary wary of life. It's beautiful yeah by my my by um by my famous uh favorite writer Rachel Carson and uh it you know it just speaks to uh the fact that as a scientist um we can find beauty in the things that we study and that and that um if we study it really in depth we're always in awe it inspires curiosity um but nature you know if if you have an appreciation for it you're never alone because because you are one with nature when you go and be the only person there but you may be the only person but you're never alone so it it's just a a wonderful quote uh it's one that I've always felt to be true when I go out and do my deep listening exercises I'm trying to tune my ears to a place be early on when I go and listen to the ecosystem because I want to start asking the really deep relevant questions. So this this this quote here really reflects uh some of the the passions I have about studying the earth through the lens of sound.
SPEAKER_03:And and a stillness so I find it so interesting because when we think about sound I think we think of loudness somehow but I think what you've spoken to here is that to hear sound is to also be still with with it and to listen and I I'm not too sure what deep listening uh is what what does that mean?
SPEAKER_04:Um so what I've I've tried to do is I I've I've developed these exercises where I just go out and I listen and it's it's it's a kind of taking it all in. I'm I'm trying to remove my bias of the previous place that I was in and listening and just trying to understand it in all of its structure the temporal spectral structure and um what I've always tried to do as part of this is is to write um about what I hear and then eventually distill it down into one word. And for me that's the deep listening exercise it's it's like what's the essence of this place? So for example Borneo the one word that I've I've kind of come up with is evolution. When I listen to the soundscapes of Borneo I hear evolution in so many different ways. Right? When I go and listen to the sounds of glaciers to me it's it's just water which is like the essence of life in itself. So um I'm trying to I'm trying to because as a scientist I I want to look at this and sometimes I'm getting far too complex. But I also want to kind of come up with the higher order essence of a place and describe it. So you kind of I you have to do that just by listening and deep listening by just kind of going to a place and you you have to you have to do this by yourself. You just take nothing but a piece of piece of paper or a notebook and uh a pencil and and take take notes but listen for a long period of time. I also think that you you start to hear more you know when you when you really want to immerse yourself into something it's really like deep thinking it's just trying to trying to understand. It's tuning in yeah yeah deep tuning in yeah yeah it's just it's just finding that that one way of just kind of saying this is what this place is.
SPEAKER_03:And I think this is so important for for animal study scholars too because animal ethnography is coming up now as a really important tool for trying to understand animals and animal worlds. And I I like this idea of even if I was trying to understand a specific animal or a specific group of animals it could be a multi-species community to actually sit among them and listen to how they communicate listen to if whether it's you know Vine Sanctuary in Vermont or or or a jungle to say well how are these how are these different beings including myself not just watching one another but listening to one another sounding to one another I think I think what you've helped me with today is just kind of opening up my my own vision to some extent to how I should be thinking about animals and and and appreciating that the way I listen might not be the same as the way they listen and the way I talk might not be the same as the way they talk but that all of these sounds do come together in a particular way and that says something that says a story about our relationships that says a story about our environments which is really profound I think. Yes yeah no I I completely agree with you of course okay well thank you so much we uh we had we had quite a long one um but it was okay it was endlessly uh interesting uh if folks are interested in your work or want to find out more about what you're doing uh how could they get in touch with you or find out those details?
SPEAKER_04:Oh they can send me email uh that that that that works or visit my website and uh that you can find out more about what we do there. Uh yeah I'm all in the do you do you still have the app where everyone can record you know um uh the the the the Google app uh I don't want to call them police but uh the technology folks have uh it's kind of turned it off we have to go apply for another uh application for privacy for that to work so uh yeah the collection record the earth watch the space record theearth uh is a place where we uh ask people to go out record their own soundscapes tell me how it affects you does it make you happy does it make you curious um and then upload that to our website and we we want that on on Earth Day every year April 22nd and the idea here is we're kind of capturing the sounds of the planet but also how do people feel about the sounds that they're surrounded by so next time I hear Linus chewing that stick I'll record it because it is one of my favorite songs.
SPEAKER_03:All right well thank you thank you so much for joining me here today and for uh being so patient with my questions and explaining everything uh I really really appreciate it it was a a lot of fun claudio so good luck on the rest of the rest of the podcast for the series okay welcome back to the animal highlights everyone as you know I started these highlights in season three and uh it was kind of a bit of an experiment actually to see what they would sound like because I really wanted to start to bring animals a bit more into focus. This season's animal highlights are going to be done by a good friend of mine and a graduate student in the SAP lab and that's Hannah Hunter. Hi Hannah welcome to the show thank you so much for having me thrilled to be here. Hannah and I have had loads of conversations about animals and about sound and about all sorts of things and Hannah's actually doing her PhD related to sound and animals.
SPEAKER_01:Could you perhaps maybe just give us a snippet of what you're doing and what your interests in sound area sure um so I am broadly interested in historical bird sound recordings. So some of the earliest ones from around the period of 1910 to 1950. And I'm especially interested in recordings of birds that are now critically endangered or extinct so that we can't listen to in the wild. So we kind of have to go to these historical sources to listen to them. And I'm interested in how that changes our relationship with those animals um how it's different to represent animals through sound than it is to represent them through photos or taxidermy.
SPEAKER_03:Fascinating and I know you're gonna join me in the grad review. So we're gonna hear more about your research then but for now you are going to take charge of the animal highlights this season so it's kind of a weird thing. It's the first time I'm handing over the baton to someone else and the microphone and the show so this is like a big moment for the animal turn. But I think that in your capable hands we're going to learn a lot about animals in these highlights. So which animal are we focusing on in this episode?
SPEAKER_01:We're gonna be focusing on the common nightingale I think first listening to what a nightingale sounds like so one of the things that you and Brian talked about in your interview is about how animals change their sounds in response to urban noise and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit with the example of nightingales and urban birds in general so I a long time ago I saw this article in the New Scientist which was published in 2004 but I must have seen it more recently which proclaimed that urban nightingale songs are illegally loud. And so this came from research by a fellow called Henrik Broom who found that the songs of nightingales in Berlin can be as loud as 95 decibels. So that's about as loud as if you stood next to a chainsaw one meter away that would be a similar volume. And when they say it's illegally loud um this is because it's about eight decibels higher than European law would permit workers to be exposed to without ear protection. So pretty loud and you don't expect bird song to be to get to those levels. But the explanation for this is that as cities have gotten louder and louder, urban nightingales have had to change both the frequency and volume of their calls in order to survive, especially their alarm calls. So this is known as the Lombard or the cocktail effect where birds in cities have had to adjust their songs to be heard much like a person would need to at a crowded party. So if you and I were at a party back in the old times and it was getting louder and louder we would also have to get louder or maybe subconsciously speak in a different frequency in order to hear each other. So in terms of urban spaces the soundscapes of cities are often made up of quite low frequency sounds so we think about like the hum of a car engine it's quite low and so urban birds will sing not only louder but also at higher frequencies and also at different times of day when the noise is reduced so they might not sing during rush hour but they will sing in the early morning. And so you might have heard of the ecological niche hypothesis and there's something similar which is the acoustic niche hypothesis which kind of posits that there are there is a limited amount of acoustic space and different animals have to find and exploit different acoustic spaces. And so that's what the nightingales are doing. I think this is quite a cool case in a way because it reminds us that animals aren't just passive victims of humans' actions but they're also very resilient and adaptive. So the nightingales are able to reconfigure their behavior to survive in the changing acoustic landscape. But unfortunately not all species are able to alter their songs because humans are taking up so much of that limited acoustic space. And as I'll discuss in a bit song altering is not necessarily good for birds as well noise can be a major thresher to birds. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology found that zebra finches, for example, exposed to noise can experience rapid aging and shorter lifespans which is what we would probably expect from noise pollution. But the extent to which nightingales and other birds have altered their calls in response to urban noise of course was made clear during the early months of the COVID 19 pandemic. So you'll remember during lockdowns everyone suddenly noticed the birds again because there was a decrease in urban noise in planes and transport and everything like that. And so a study from San Francisco found that the reduction in traffic noise led to a quite dramatic shift in song frequency in white crowned sparrows. They found that in the absence of noise sparrows switched to a lower amplitude more complex songs that had an increased communication distance so because of this the researchers suggested that sustained periods of urban quiet would be beneficial to the sparrow population in terms of demographic recovery and species diversity. So they were able to communicate in ways that were more efficient and also more successful in terms of attracting a mate or communicating with each other. And that obviously happened quite quickly so it shows the extent to which bird song is is adaptive and responsive to the soundscape around it. All this to say that the urban soundscape has a significant impact on bird communication which of course is key to their life world and survival though it is amazing to see how they're able to alter their songs in response to changes in the landscape these noises and noise response changes may often be detrimental to the species. That's my tale about urban birds and noise that I wanted to share with you all today.
SPEAKER_03:That's that's fascinating and um you know nightingales I was I was just having a look now that nightingales they have one of the biggest like repertoires of of apparently bird sounds of saying that they've make over a thousand different sounds which is just incredible. You know when you start to actually pay attention to these sounds and you kind of get a sense of how varied and diverse they are. So I guess it's not supposed surprising that a bird like like a nightingale is able to respond that way and just the the sound you were saying the the the the intensity of that sound I had no idea that a bird could produce sound um what did you say there?
SPEAKER_01:Being one meter away from a chainsaw yeah so I never thought I'd hear the word chainsaw nightingale in the same like sound but it's also I mean when I first read that article that said they were illegally loud I was thinking you know and they go over kind of the the noise codes and I think you know if you think about some of the things you talked about in the Animals in the Urban season about how animals can be kind of spatially transgressive in this way we can kind of think of them as also being sonically transgressive in in some ways. But yeah I don't think they face too much persecution over nightingales have luckily uh what we consider as being nice songs. And so then being loud isn't as much of a problem but that's less the case with seagulls and and other sounds that we might not think are as nice.
SPEAKER_03:That's fascinating. Yep so thank you thank you so much for for bringing uh nightingales into focus for us a little bit uh and for some of those uh cool facts and bits of information for us to think about when when hearing birds in the city thank you so much to Brian Pajanowski for being a fantastic guest to Hannah Hunter for teaching us more about nightingales as always a thank you to Jeremy John for the logo and Gordon Clark for the bed music and thank you to Animals and Philosophy Politics Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast and to Sonic Arts Studio and Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory for sponsoring this season too this is the Animal Turn with me Claudia Hurzenfelder For more great iRu podcasts visit iRulpodcom that's I R O A R P O D dot com
