Acoustic Enrichment

Ghost Songs & Ecological Resurrection

Photo by Georgette Apol Douwma

Tines of yellow light striped through the beech trees signal the low angle of the sun, the tip from yellow to pink to the long, puddled blues of the crepuscular hour. On the breeze is the sweet, powdery scent of rosa rugosa, the peppery twinge of wild thyme crushed underfoot, the wet bittersweet perfume that encompasses all the green, all the plants: that July riot of post-floral, photon-plush exuberance. I’m on my evening walk, drinking it all in, hoping to store it in my bones as marrow; hoping to spin it into my cells so that I can speak it, sing it, bleed it when the season has long since passed. Then I hear it: muffled laughter, an upward cascade of bells, the tinny twinkle of disco played off speakers. It sounds like someone is having a dance party.

And I love to dance.

The sound is coming through the woods to my right. I cut through mugwort and barberry. I push under the heavy arms of elm tree. I walk deeper into the woods until I come to an incline. Up the ridge the trees thin and then I’m looking out at a field framed by mountains.

No one is there. Not yet. The sound comes from the field. But it is empty. I’m perplexed. The disco thumps, horns echo through the air with such bright urgency I can almost see peaks and valley of brass wire cut where their sound waves travelled. There are voices of friends gossiping and laughing. I can hear a child singing.

I stand still. And slowly, from all sides, more and more people emerge from the forest, drawn by the sound. A woman holding two children by the hands. A man with a guitar and a straw hat. An older couple in matching denim jumpsuits. A young girl and a giant Great Dane. A lady with a picnic blanket, a bag of food, and sound system she quickly sets up.

They, like me, have been drawn by the phantom party. And soon we create a dance party of our own, more and more people drawn to the revelry through the forest.

This, of course, is an exercise in imagination. But it is also inspired by a very real phenomenon that has been observed and experimentally proven by scientists.

A chorus of festivity can create the very party it imitates. The sound of health can inspire a healthy community to grow where there was only barrenness or an empty field before.

Marine biologists and marine science researchers have found that while we assume the ocean to be a quiet place, it is really teeming with sound that helps multiple species navigate, survive, and build community. Coral reefs, in particular, rely on sound to attract and cultivate a healthy ecology. Dr Mark Meekan from the Australia Institute of Marine Science memorably describes listening to a coral reef as like “listening to bacon in a frying pan. It’s punctuated by chirps and tweets and all sorts of screeches that come from fish.” Infant fish can recognize this sound at a distance and use it to navigate their way safely home. And even more crucially, coral polyps even though they do not have ears, navigate towards this sound. It has been postulated that instead of “hearing” the music of a healthy reef, the larva sense the vibration with their cilia (hair-like appendages) and orient towards it.

Marine researchers have taken this research one step further in an age of coral reef bleaching and ecological devastation. Playing the sound of a healthy reef with underwater speakers to a dying reef can quantifiably call back the fish and coral polyps and species that have fled, setting up the ecological groundwork for repair. This amazing phenomenon, closely studied and popularized by marine biologist Steve Simpson, is called acoustic enrichment. Fish numbers doubled and overall species increased by 50 percent in locations where recordings of healthier environments were played. Shrimp returned and general biodiversity also increased with multiple different types of fish taking up residence in these previously depopulated reefs.

In an age of illness, genocide, and extinction, it can feel like what is lost is surely lost forever. It can also feel like art is a flimsy way of memorializing or responding to our violent and unpredictable conditions. But the recordings of Steve Simpson offer us an antidote to this pessimistic outlook. We must save the songs of our ancestors, our birds, our ecologies. We can do this in story, in song, in recordings, in scientific research. And we can play these songs, these recordings, speak these poems back into the empty spaces.

This isn’t just an empty ritual. It is summoning. It is a resurrection of the coral polyps, the snapping shrimp, the susurrating fish scales.

As someone whose body has been decimated by long-term chronic health issues, I wonder what music I can play back into my bodily ecology, to summon in the dance party, to repopulate my coral reefs.

Like in the common folktale, stone soup is a bowl of water that becomes a meal for the whole community: all it takes is the initial imitation of health, one person stirring the pot, one recording transmitting the remembrance of an older symphony and song, to inspire a community to return.

Research:

Steve Simpson Ted Talk

A Healthy Coral Reef Is a Symphony

Coral Larvae Move toward Reef Sounds

Habitat degradation negatively affects auditory settlement behavior of coral reef fishes