ELLIE HARRISON
There are many noises that distract, but nature’s soundscapes can offer comfort and tranquillity
How nature’s soundscapes offer us both comfort and peace.
It’s the call of the “Wild track, wild track everybody!”, that is my happiest moment on location. A sound-recordist’s request for 60 seconds of quiet in order to record the ambient noise, used later in the edit to blend over a cut. It happens several times during a two-day shoot and, because our contributors aren’t always familiar with the practice, I close my eyes so we’re not tempted to chat. It’s a gift: an instruction to be still in nature and listen.
And as much as the exaggerated eye-roll goes around the crew when we’re “waiting for sound” while a jet blasts overhead, the truth is that with sound alone, we still have radio or a podcast, without it, we don’t have a programme.
I suspect that, like many people, I’m particularly sensitive to sound. I can’t hear a single note of music or word of chatter if I have to concentrate on a task. Overstimulate any other sense and I still have the eye of the tiger, but play a little melody and I’m flawed into incompetence.
It is mercifully peaceful where I live. I can hear when the birds begin to quiet at the end of summer as breeding ends – and I feel the loss to the sound stage. Perhaps it’s that I’m mourning the best season passing and the descent into sombre winter emptiness, as sounds disappear. But do they really?
SOUNDSCAPES THAT SURROUND US
There are plenty of other noises to fill the airwaves when nature retires into quiet. Omnipresent vehicles, cracking pylons, planes, garden machinery and parties all chip in. Even tranquil farming can make a racket: anaerobic digesters, diversification in the form of weddings, horse or motorcross events and wind turbines add to the volume. For human ears, it isn’t just the synthetic that rattles our tranquility – some natural country sounds are fairly unpleasant, too: dogs barking, shrieking foxes, bluebottle flies, poultry (at large scale) are just some. We actually quite like the man-made sounds of church bells and sport.
Strangely, volume isn’t really anything to do with the upset. Birdsong can reach 70 delightful decibels, whereas music playing at the same volume can seem intrusive. A rooster in Dorset managed an impressive 90 decibels, equivalent to a lorry thundering past. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) even publishes ‘tranquility maps’ to show where in the countryside natural sounds prevail.
But why is it that some sounds are pleasant and others shred our calm? A study at the University of Newcastle played different noises to participants and discovered that activity in the amygdala – the part of the brain responsible for producing emotions – increased in direct proportion to the reported unpleasantness of the sound. Metal against glass, chalk on a blackboard, angle grinders and screaming came out as least liked and all were in the frequency range of 2,000–5,000 Hz, prompting the theory that high-pitched sounds may resemble the alarm calls of our primitive relatives. But studies on primates have since disproven this idea and instead a simpler explanation has been put forward: the actual shape of the human ear amplifies certain frequencies and triggers a sense of physical pain. Small unconscious physiological happenings that we are completely unappreciative of. How many thousands of other small ways are we out of tune with nature and its impact upon our bodies?
Birdsong is now used therapeutically in children’s hospitals, while hundreds of apps offer meditative recordings of babbling brooks, rainfall, thunder and the ocean. While I offer true thanks to the technical skills of the unsung sound recordist, I hope that we all get to find a place to tune in and be comforted by the simple raw audible landscape.
Watch Ellie on Countryfile, Sunday evenings on BBC One.