Listening to the natural world and hearing how it used to sound.
By Francesca Mackenney and Jamie Castell
The negative effects of noise on mental as well as physical health are increasingly recognised; medical research is being directed towards the problem.
From a valuable article: Noise and mental health: evidence, mechanisms, and consequences – PMC
Meanwhile, the positive consequences of Natural Sound Exposure (NRE) are attracting attention. (See: Natural Resources Wales / Nature’s symphony: the benefits of natural sounds and Effects of natural sound exposure on health recovery: A systematic review and meta-analysis – ScienceDirect).
And, as we understand this better, nature is falling silent and / or its sounds are being drowned out. The birds have to shout to be heard (How Birds Change Their Calls in Noisy Cities – bird-life.com). The ‘great thinning’ as it is called – not only the loss of biodiversity but the decline in populations of surviving species – means that our natural surroundings have become emptier and hence quieter.
And, with each new generation, what people expect to hear or see – what they take to be ‘normal’ – changes. This is called Shifting Baseline Syndrome (Shifting baselines: Have we forgotten what rivers used to be like? | Wildfish)
Living writers, musicians and artists can help us listen more carefully. Those from the past can reveal what the natural world used to be like. Both can help us understand better what is happening and how declines can be reversed.(See this inspiring article: A ‘great and merciless thinning:’ the vanishing world of insects | openDemocracy)
Sounding Out the English Fens
Image credit for ‘North Drove Drain’: Kate Jewell / North Drove Drain, Deeping Fen / CC BY-SA 2.0
In this post, Francesca Mackenney, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Jamie Castell, Cardiff University, describe the work they have been doing to help us all to listen and remember.
How can listening help us get to know or sound out a place? What would it mean for a modern audience to hear how Britain sounded in past centuries, before the advent of recorded sound? And how might poetry enable us to imagine these lost soundscapes, when the ‘crex crex’ of the corncrake still could be, as the poet John Clare wrote in the 1830s, ‘heard in every vale’?
You can hear about our project in this programme, with Martha Kearney: ‘The Sound of the Fens’ (BBC Radio 4 Open Country) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021qpk.
For more on John Clare: John Clare and About John Clare | John Clare Society website
And this episode of BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time – What John Clare’s poetry can teach us about nature
The Sound of Nature
How did poets, writers and scientists listen to the natural world before the advent of recording technology? How do representations of sound in literature shape our awareness of the natural world and our understanding of the importance of protecting it? The following freely available special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science focuses on literary and historical writing from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
https://www.literatureandscience.org/volume-17-number-2-2024/
The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950 was an international research project funded jointly by the AHRC and the DFG and hosted by Cardiff University and Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin.
