Pause and Listen

Quarter of a year check-in

It’s been three months since we began this Seeing your Place project. I like to mark these milestones as a time to pause and reflect. What have we discovered and where are we going next? 

On the surface, we’ve covered a lot of different topics. But the main theme was for us to expand our ideas about who and what are the inhabitants of our place. Besides other people, there are rocks and trees and animals, even water. And, of course our ancestors and earliest peoples also play a part. The past is present.

The Importance of Listening

The very first Seeing Clearly post in 2021 was about the importance of listening. And, I asked you to notice the soundscape of your environment. Being a good listener is one of, if not the most important qualities in any good relationship, whether with a person or a place. Through listening we come to know and understand, and hopefully empathize with whoever or whatever we’re in relationship.

I thought about this after reading an interview with soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause in Emergence Magazine, where he describes being an earwitness to place.

Krause has been recording wild soundscapes for more than fifty years and, through his research, has gained evidence of the extent of biodiversity loss. He explains that seeing is relatively passive, while hearing is much more physical; our bodies respond to sound vibrations and make meaning from them. According to Krause, every organism “produces an acoustic signature,” often a voice, but it could also be something else. Some organisms rub different body parts together to create sound.

For example, my daughter heard an unusual call from a hummingbird in her yard. She learned that it was a special mating call made by the bird rubbing their legs together. 

Acoustic Sources

Krause describes three acoustic sources that make up a typical soundscape. (Anthropocene Magazine)

• geophony - the nonbiological natural sounds produced in any given habitat, like wind in the trees or grasses, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, or movement of the earth. 

• anthropophony - all of the sounds we humans generate. Some of these sounds are controlled or created, like music, language, or theater. But most is random, chaotic or incoherent — what we call noise.

• biophony - the collective sound produced by all living organisms that reside in a particular biome. This is your soundscape which is unique and confers a strong “sense of place.” 

This month, we’ll focus on all of the different sounds of our place, ending with a special assignment for the last week of April. For this week, let’s just become aware of the general soundscape of our place, the biophony. Next week, we’ll focus on geophony, particularly wind and water.

Practice

Take pauses throughout your day, inside or outside, to just listen. You could sit at a body of water or at an outdoor cafe or by a busy street or quiet park. Let go of any need to judge the sounds that you hear. Find examples of each of the acoustic sources this week in your place. 

How would you describe the soundscape of your place to someone who doesn’t live there? Share with us in the comments or on Instagram (add the hashtag #seeingyourplace2022).

Resources

Do you Hear what I Hear? - the first Seeing Clearly post

Earwitness to Place, an interview with Bernie Krause, Emergence Magazine

Another acoustic ecologist, Gordon Hempton, via On Being

Anna’s Hummingbird Courtship Singing via YouTube

A heads up: For the month of May, we’ll be focusing on kinship or reciprocity, how all of the inhabitants of a place work together. I’ll be drawing from many sources, but mainly Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. If you’d like to go deeper that month, I invite you to read this book, if you haven’t already, during this month.