Why does sound get so completely under our skin?
There are two things the Grinch — and here I mean the Grinch as voiced by Boris Karloff in the 1966 CBS special; the only real Grinch, as far as I’m concerned — hates most about Christmas. The first is the noise, noise, noise issued by the jing-tinglers, floo-floobers and tar-tinkers that the Hoo girls and boys unwrap on Christmas morning. The second is the sound of the Hoos, hand in hand, singing their hearts out — until, of course, that very song wins him over.
What is it about sound — screeching noise and mellifluous music and everything in between — that gets so completely under our skin? Two ambitious new books by British writers set out to explore the magnetic pull of the aural world. The Dutch-born novelist Michel Faber bills “Listen: On Music, Sound and Us,” his first booklength work of nonfiction, as a kind of anti-music book, one that “will not do for you what other books about music will do for you.” Still, he sets his sights high: “I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop,” he writes. “I’m here to change your mind about your mind.” It’s the book he’s wanted to write his whole life, he says.
In “A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous,” the journalist Caspar Henderson takes a more eclectic and encyclopedic approach, presenting 48 short entries on noise broken into four categories: geophony (the earthy sounds of volcanoes and thunder), biophony (noises issued by the body, and by plants and animals), anthropophony (language and music) and cosmophony (celestial noise). His aim is to stir in readers a “sense of aliveness” and a desire to pay attention to the “revelations in sound” that might astonish and nourish our souls.
For Henderson, there is something elemental and profound in sound. “Touch is often regarded as the most primal sense,” he writes, “but hearing begins before we are able to touch and be touched by the world.” Henderson is enamored with these kinds of small miracles. He notes the way orbital resonances correspond with intervals of minor sixths, perfect fifths and perfect fourths, and marvels at the noise made by the corona discharge from the aurora borealis — “crackles and muffled bangs” that fall in the same decibel range as a human whisper. He explains that the syrinx is the avian equivalent of the larynx and that a songbird’s ears are capable of perceiving sounds that last as little as one millisecond. Readers are treated to the story of the time Charles Darwin played a bassoon to a mimosa flower (“He wondered if it might respond by closing its leaves, just as it does when gently touched,” but he concluded it was a “fool’s experiment”) and the time the Italian biologist and priest Lazzaro Spallanzani surgically removed the eyeballs of a bat to figure out how it was finding its way in the dark (yet another inconclusive experiment).
Stacking fact on fact, “A Book of Noises” sometimes gets weighed down by its commitment to trivia. The book is at its best when Henderson loses himself in the fun of it all, like when he considers the parasaurolophus, a “duckbill” dinosaur, and how it made noise — through a “hollow bony tube on its head” that resembled a “slightly flaccid upside down didgeridoo.” In the 1990s, scientists in New Mexico re-created a full-size replica of the tube on the head of what became known as the “trombone dinosaur.” Henderson listens and reports back that the timbre of the 30-hertz tone it emits is “a splendid noise,” falling a little lower than the lowest note of a piano: “To my ears, there’s a dash of French horn or sousaphone and a hint of creaking metal door in there too.” Here a long-lost noise dislodged from our planet’s Cretaceous past is familiar but new, ordinary but wondrous.
Henderson has great faith in the power of sound to transform. He writes of a campaign to have music therapy prescribed by Britain’s National Health Service for wellness, for example, an idea Faber is taken with, too. But the books’ similarities end there. “Listen” is a far more idiosyncratic and freewheeling work. Faber is largely fixated on the social capital that music offers — how one’s record collection is “part of the artillery with which you announce yourself to the world,” as Peter Gabriel put it in a 1987 interview in Rolling Stone. “There’s nothing more self-absorbed and tribal than music,” Faber writes; we certainly can’t escape that “music is a commodity,” he says — or that music appreciation tends to be a very “blokey” pastime. And he is all too aware that music is “tremendously overhyped”: “This book will not add more hype to the landfill,” he writes.
There are some promising strands of thinking to follow here about music and cultural identity, but Faber leaves many broad ideas floating (“society, like music, needs dynamics”). He has a tendency, too, to riff unchecked, as when he complains about the “elitism” of classical music — a genre he dismisses as being merely for musicians with “conformist skills.” (“When a government department or hospital switchboard plays you a loop of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ while you wait on the phone, you and the institution both understand that nobody respects this music.”) What about more contemporary fare? Faber takes issue with Beyoncé lip-syncing high-stakes live performances (such as President Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration) when she is a “perfectly capable” vocalist. “Whatever Beyoncé is, she is not a singer in [the] old-fashioned sense,” he writes. Oh, dear.
The book truly flounders when Faber tries to demonstrate an earnest engagement with non-white perspectives, awkwardly stuffing a chapter titled “Different Strokes for Different Folks” with interviews with Black and South Asian composers, DJs and broadcasters. Each is asked nearly identical questions: What do they think of the Beatles’ “Revolver”? Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”? What about the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” and the origins of “Sloop John B” as a folk song from the Bahamas? Their answers are printed in Q&A form. It’s as excruciating as it sounds.
Perhaps the most remarkable and admirable thing about “Listen” is that it exists at all. After Faber’s wife, Eva, died in 2014, the grief-stricken writer declared the end of his career. “History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway,” he said at the time. “That’s very likely to happen to my books.” Reading “Listen,” I found myself thinking of the voice of another eccentric British writer who swore off writing in her prime. Rosemary Tonks briefly worked for the BBC in her youth, and Min, the protagonist of her novel “The Bloater” (1968), is a sound engineer who argues archly with her colleagues about the finer points of tone and taste as they score an experimental radio broadcast of a Greek poem about Orestes:
“This time the treble is expertly removed, some echo is added, and the voice is twice as hammy as before but somehow convincing. Obviously it’s no good being slightly vulgar; you must be absolutely vulgar. Taste in the arts and theater should never be confused with ‘good taste,’ which is static and middle-class. It’s evident that we’re treating this voice like a loaf of bread, first the crust off, then the foot, and now we’re going to cut it into slices … with any luck. Ah, no —”
Tonks went one step further than Faber when she decided her literary career was over: She burned all her old manuscripts. This self-erasure was so successful that her work was largely lost until publishers began reissuing it after her death in 2014. Faber, on the other hand, was able to stumble his way back into the world of words in his own lifetime. “Here I am, singing,” he writes, “and you’re listening.”