Tune in to the music of the UNIVERSE
A Book Of Noises: Notes On The Auraculous by Caspar Henderson Granta €20
When still in the womb, babies begin to form memories of sounds. At the other end of life, hearing is often the last sense we lose. The dying brain registers sounds, even in an unconscious state. What we hear in our lives can be as significant as what we see. Caspar Henderson’s thoughtprovoking book is a collection of essays on what he calls in a (slightly clumsy) word of his own invention, the ‘auraculous’. Wonders for the ear.
He begins with ‘Cosmophony’, the sounds of space. From the ancient world to the Renaissance and beyond, people believed in the ‘music of the spheres’, a harmony created by the movement of the planets. The early 17-Century astronomer, Johannes Kepler, even assigned vocal ranges to them. Mercury was a soprano, Mars a tenor. Earth was an alto. In the 1970s, a jazz musician and a geologist collaborated to turn Kepler’s data on planetary movement into real music. The results were not entirely successful. Their album, The Harmony Of The World, was described by the New York Times as ‘a cacophony of tweedling, wailing, thumping and droning’.
‘Biophony’ comprises the sounds of the animals and plants with which we share our planet. Plants make noises but can they hear? Charles Darwin once played a bassoon to a mimosa in an attempt to answer the question before deciding that it was ‘a fool’s experiment’. In the late 1960s, Dorothy Retallack argued that plants thrived when exposed to Bach but withered under the influence of Jimi Hendrix. Her theory has little scientific evidence to back it up.
Insects can certainly hear, although many have their ears in peculiar places. Some butterflies and moths have them at the base of their wings. ‘Rather as if we had ears in our armpits,’ as Henderson comments. And insects, of course, produce noises, often surprisingly large ones for their size. Species of crickets have even found an ingenious way of amplifying their songs. They chew a hole in a leaf, stick their heads through it and the rest of the leaf acts as a megaphone.
Many people will find Henderson’s section on ‘Anthropophony’, the sounds of humanity, the most interesting in his book. His essay on onomatopoeia in different languages is fascinating. The Taa language, spoken by Bushmen of southwest Africa, has up to 164 consonants and 44 vowels. This means they can come up with words which imitate such unusual sounds as that of a rotten egg being shaken and grass being ripped up by a grazing animal. We have been making music since prehistoric times. The oldest purpose-built musical instrument so far discovered is a flute made from a vulture’s radius bone. It was found in a cave in Germany and is about 42,000 years old. Bones seem peculiarly suited to the creation of wind instruments. In Tibet, a ‘kangling’ is a kind of trumpet made from a human leg bone. Also appearing in the chapter on ‘Strange Musical Instruments’ is the Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna who play carrot pipes, leek oboes and more. Each performance by the orchestra features fresh instruments which are later turned into soup.
A Book Of Noises ‘began in wonder’, Henderson writes on its first page and it is full of wonders (such as that bees express surprise when they bump into one another) for the reader to enjoy.