A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous
Autor Caspar Hendersonen Limba Engleză Hardback – 6 noi 2023
The crackling of a campfire. The scratch, hiss, and pop of a vinyl record. The first glug of wine as it is poured from a bottle. These are just a few of writer Caspar Henderson’s favorite sounds. In A Book of Noises, Henderson invites readers to use their ears a little better—to tune in to the world in all its surprising noisiness.
Describing sounds from around the natural and human world, the forty-eight essays that make up A Book of Noises are a celebration of all things “auraculous.” Henderson calls on his characteristic curiosity to explore sounds related to humans (anthropophony), other life (biophony), the planet (geophony), and space (cosmophony). Henderson finds the beauty in everyday sounds, like the ringing of a bell, the buzz of a bee, or the “earworm” songs that get stuck in our heads. A Book of Noises also explores the marvelous, miraculous sounds we may never get the chance to hear, like the deep boom of a volcano or the quiet, rustling sound of the Northern Lights.
A Book of Noises will teach readers to really listen to the sounds of the world around them, to broaden and deepen their appreciation of the humans, animals, rocks, and trees simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780226823232
ISBN-10: 0226823237
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.54 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10: 0226823237
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.54 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press
Notă biografică
Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist living in Oxford, England. He is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings and A New Map of Wonders, both published by the University of Chicago Press. As a journalist, he covers topics such as energy, science, environment, and human rights.
Extras
When I told people that I was working on a book about sound and noise I was quite often asked if a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest but there is no one there to hear it? The short answer to this is yes: a trunk crashing down sends vibrations through the air whether or not anyone is listening. That’s what sound is. But there is also a way in which the short answer is no, because sound as we usually think of it is an experience of a sentient being (and we tend to assume that trees and rocks are not sentient, or at least not in that way). If that’s all you wanted to know, then you can put this book down now. But while these short answers may be true they are also unsatisfactory because there is, I think, often something else lurking behind the question concerning the listener’s relation to the universe as represented for them by the forest. That unspoken (and perhaps unconscious) thought, I’d suggest, is something like, will the world really go on without me? It can be hard to get one’s head around the idea that the world will continue without the awareness to which we as individuals so often cling. As Alexander von Humboldt wrote in 1800, ‘This aspect of animated nature, in which man is nothing, has something in it strange and sad.’
Some sounds can be a kind of revelation to those who hear them, and sometimes the experience can be deeply unsettling. In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, an air-raid siren in a residential neighbourhood that has been mute for a decade or more shrieks back into life, like a sonic monster, ‘a territorial squawk from out of the Mesozoic. A parrot carnivore with a DC- 9 wingspan.’ And when, in his exploration of the world of those preparing for apocalypse, the writer Mark O’Connell visits a former US Air Force bunker that is being repurposed for end- of-the-world preppers, the sound of its great doors closing is like nothing he has ever heard: ‘an overwhelmingly loud and deep detonation, the obliteration of the possibility of any sound but itself’. In a poem by W. S. Merwin, a foghorn becomes a ‘throat’ that ‘does not call to anything human / But to something men had forgotten / That stirs under fog’. And in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria, an extremely loud noise heard only by the protagonist foretells (and maybe causes) a descent, or possibly an ascent, into a strange dimension of existence – or annihilation.
But revelations in sound can also be comforting and life-expanding, bringing reassurance and beauty in the wide view. This is expressed in comic form by Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, who ‘is hearing the little ants chittering to each other as they scuddle around in the soil [and] is sometimes hearing faraway music coming from the stars in the sky’. It takes a mysterious, transcendental form in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph’, where the faithful who gather at the great mosque of Amr in Cairo know that the hum of the entire universe can be heard by placing one’s ear against one of the stone pillars in its central courtyard. The physician and essayist Lewis Thomas took pleasure in imagining all the non-human sounds of the Earth together: ‘If we could listen to them all at once, fully orchestrated, in their immense ensemble,’ he writes in ‘The Music of This Sphere’, ‘we might become aware of the counterpoint, the balance of tones and timbres and harmonics, the sonorities.’ And in one of his ‘Love Letters to the Earth’, the Zen monk Thích Nhaˆ ́t Hanh writes that ‘humanity has great ̣composers, but how can our music compare to your celestial harmony with the sun and planets – or to the sound of the rising tide?’.
We live in times in which more is being destroyed than is being created. (Extinction rates of non-human forms of life, for example, are much higher now than at any time in Earth’s history, including during mass extinction events millions of years ago.) ‘Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself,’ writes the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. ‘Our greatest fear should perhaps be that we have forgotten how to listen to the living Earth,’ adds the biologist David George Haskell, who documents a catastrophic loss of sonic diversity and richness worldwide. And it is precisely because of this that it has never been more important to pay attention. Building on pioneering work a generation ago by the composer R. Murray Schafer and others, ecologists today are increasingly recording ‘soundscapes’ on land and in the ocean over the seasons and years as a means of assessing the vibrancy and health of ecosystems. By enabling us to listen more carefully and deeply, new technology can help us to limit and even reverse some of the damage that has been done.
Some sounds can be a kind of revelation to those who hear them, and sometimes the experience can be deeply unsettling. In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, an air-raid siren in a residential neighbourhood that has been mute for a decade or more shrieks back into life, like a sonic monster, ‘a territorial squawk from out of the Mesozoic. A parrot carnivore with a DC- 9 wingspan.’ And when, in his exploration of the world of those preparing for apocalypse, the writer Mark O’Connell visits a former US Air Force bunker that is being repurposed for end- of-the-world preppers, the sound of its great doors closing is like nothing he has ever heard: ‘an overwhelmingly loud and deep detonation, the obliteration of the possibility of any sound but itself’. In a poem by W. S. Merwin, a foghorn becomes a ‘throat’ that ‘does not call to anything human / But to something men had forgotten / That stirs under fog’. And in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria, an extremely loud noise heard only by the protagonist foretells (and maybe causes) a descent, or possibly an ascent, into a strange dimension of existence – or annihilation.
But revelations in sound can also be comforting and life-expanding, bringing reassurance and beauty in the wide view. This is expressed in comic form by Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, who ‘is hearing the little ants chittering to each other as they scuddle around in the soil [and] is sometimes hearing faraway music coming from the stars in the sky’. It takes a mysterious, transcendental form in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph’, where the faithful who gather at the great mosque of Amr in Cairo know that the hum of the entire universe can be heard by placing one’s ear against one of the stone pillars in its central courtyard. The physician and essayist Lewis Thomas took pleasure in imagining all the non-human sounds of the Earth together: ‘If we could listen to them all at once, fully orchestrated, in their immense ensemble,’ he writes in ‘The Music of This Sphere’, ‘we might become aware of the counterpoint, the balance of tones and timbres and harmonics, the sonorities.’ And in one of his ‘Love Letters to the Earth’, the Zen monk Thích Nhaˆ ́t Hanh writes that ‘humanity has great ̣composers, but how can our music compare to your celestial harmony with the sun and planets – or to the sound of the rising tide?’.
We live in times in which more is being destroyed than is being created. (Extinction rates of non-human forms of life, for example, are much higher now than at any time in Earth’s history, including during mass extinction events millions of years ago.) ‘Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself,’ writes the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. ‘Our greatest fear should perhaps be that we have forgotten how to listen to the living Earth,’ adds the biologist David George Haskell, who documents a catastrophic loss of sonic diversity and richness worldwide. And it is precisely because of this that it has never been more important to pay attention. Building on pioneering work a generation ago by the composer R. Murray Schafer and others, ecologists today are increasingly recording ‘soundscapes’ on land and in the ocean over the seasons and years as a means of assessing the vibrancy and health of ecosystems. By enabling us to listen more carefully and deeply, new technology can help us to limit and even reverse some of the damage that has been done.
Cuprins
Introduction
Cosmophony: Sounds of Space
First Sounds
Resonance (1)
Sound in Space
Music of the Spheres (1)
Music of the Spheres (2)
The Golden Record
Geophony: Sounds of Earth
Rhythm (1) – Planet Waves
The Loudest Sound
The Northern Lights
Volcano
Thunder
Listening to a Rainbow
Biophony: Sounds of Life
Rhythm (2) – Body
Hearing
Ancient Animal Noises
Plant
Insect
Bee
Frog
Bat
Elephant
The Thousand- mile Song of the Whale
Leviathan, or the Sperm Whale
Blackbird
Owl
Nightingale
Anthropophony: Sounds of Humanity
Rhythm (3) – Music and Dance
Onomatopoeia
How Language Began
The Magic Flute
The Nature of Music
Harmony
Strange Musical Instruments
Sad Songs
Bashō
Visible Sound
Plato’s Cave
Earworms
Noise Pollution
The Sounds of Climate Change
Hell
Healing with Music
Healing with Sound
Bells
Resonance (2)
Frontiers
Silence
Some Good Sounds
Thanks
References and Further Reading
Permissions
Index
Cosmophony: Sounds of Space
First Sounds
Resonance (1)
Sound in Space
Music of the Spheres (1)
Music of the Spheres (2)
The Golden Record
Geophony: Sounds of Earth
Rhythm (1) – Planet Waves
The Loudest Sound
The Northern Lights
Volcano
Thunder
Listening to a Rainbow
Biophony: Sounds of Life
Rhythm (2) – Body
Hearing
Ancient Animal Noises
Plant
Insect
Bee
Frog
Bat
Elephant
The Thousand- mile Song of the Whale
Leviathan, or the Sperm Whale
Blackbird
Owl
Nightingale
Anthropophony: Sounds of Humanity
Rhythm (3) – Music and Dance
Onomatopoeia
How Language Began
The Magic Flute
The Nature of Music
Harmony
Strange Musical Instruments
Sad Songs
Bashō
Visible Sound
Plato’s Cave
Earworms
Noise Pollution
The Sounds of Climate Change
Hell
Healing with Music
Healing with Sound
Bells
Resonance (2)
Frontiers
Silence
Some Good Sounds
Thanks
References and Further Reading
Permissions
Index
Recenzii
“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. . . . 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. . . . Henderson has great faith in the power of sound to transform.”
“Mr. Henderson nicely brings out the pull of shared rhythm, whether the lilt of a nursery rhyme or the elastic syncopation of jazz, which a drummer describes to him as feeling like ‘plasticine.’ This experience of self melting into sound elicits some of Mr. Henderson’s best passages.”
“A splendid survey of the symphony (and spectra) of sound. . . . Fittingly, Henderson says writing the book was his attempt to listen closely, deeply, to the world around him. Readers will be grateful to accompany him on his ‘earwitness’ explorations. This is a writer who thinks, really thinks, though always gives full credit to those who preceded him in sonic studies, quoting them liberally. In sound terminology, Henderson consistently strikes dulcet tones.”
“Mind-bending revelations about the nature of sound, in a book gloriously packed with hundreds of them, are delivered with such wonder, detail, and scientific heft by British science writer Henderson that they will delight audiences ranging from widely read—even jaded—adults to elementary-age kids. . . A total blast!”
“Henderson spotlights the wonderful concatenation of noises that enrich one’s ears. In 48 essays, the book moves from cosmological exploration to technical dissections of musical works, extolling both rare and common sounds that are glorious in their expressivity and beauty. . . the author’s joy and breadth of study come through clearly.”
"Henderson’s book stands out for its breadth, its humor, and especially the author’s passion for the material."
"[Henderson] listens deeply, amplifying centuries of research into our understanding and production of sound. He offers engrossing cultural (art, literature, film), historical, philosophical, medical and political background to render a book of genuine insight and value."
"In A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous, journalist Caspar Henderson documents how our home on this planet has actually never been quiet, and why that's (mostly) awe inspiring. After the big bang, the universe was so dense that only sound, not light, could travel through it. These soundwaves formed a sort of cosmic scaffold on which galaxies such as our own formed. We'd be nothing without sound."
“A piece of concentrated listening, with science and environmentalism at its heart. . . . You could read the book for the sheer cascade of facts it offers, but it has a tender, lyrical quality, which at points makes the writing sing.”
“A Book of Noises is another wunderkammer, this time of aural wonders and curiosities. . . . An irresistible blend of colloquially insinuating and accessible writing, and rigorously researched scientific detail.”
“A pursuit of auditory wonders—a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence. . . . Ransacking A Book of Noises affords hours of listening pleasure. . . . Readers can and should take their time. It will be time well spent.”
“In this delightfully titled series of notes on the miraculous ‘auraculous,’ Henderson documents noises emanating from humans, the planet, and space. He revels the everyday—the buzz of a bee—as much as he marvels at the incredible—the deep book of a volcano. . . . A truly magnificent adventure.”
“Henderson’s appetite for marvellous phenomena, and commitment to searching them out, makes him a most congenial literary companion. . . . Readers will come away struck by different items in the glittering array here. Henderson offers them up with just enough commentary to leave you wanting more.”
“A whistlestop tour past thunderstorms, volcanoes, bees, blackbirds, bells, haiku, earworms, noise pollution, climate change, even silence. . . . The way Henderson plucks and assembles his sources from literally centuries of collected knowledge is an impressive feat.”
“You will gasp with surprise and sigh with delight over the pages of A Book of Noises. It is the most elegant and erudite history of the world as sound ever written.”
“A feast for the ears, mind, and spirit. Henderson not only celebrates the marvels of sound but also offers wonderfully original reflections on the relationships among music, science, and the living world. A delightful and generative invitation to deeper listening.”
“By turns haunting and captivating, A Book of Noises is a marvel of curiosity and elegant storytelling. Caspar Henderson confirms that, for all its turbulence, this is still ‘a world alive with good noises.’ Open your ears.”
“A book of exquisite richness and erudition, dedicated equally to the beautiful strange and the precious ordinary.”
“Caspar Henderson’s books are a special kind of treasure; I struggle to think of another writer who achieves this combination of scope, intellectual rigour, and deep reflection with such grace and style. Don’t be deceived by the title—far from being a noisy book, this is a quiet and determined call to listen better.”
“Spell-binding, brilliantly executed, extraordinary.”
“Magnificent, bravura, beautiful and astoundingly interesting.”