Articles Archives - Remember The Wild

Learning to listen and listening to learn

Catherine Cavallo Articles, Feature Articles September 18, 2024 Catherine Cavallo September 18, 2024 I’m walking down into a gully on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung. It is a misty morning, the winter sun yet to burn off the dew of the night before. The bush is quiet, muted. But here and there I hear the cough of a Red Wattlebird, the titters of thornbills, and the ringing call of a Grey Fantail singing; “I’m a pretty fan-tail!”. A flock of White-winged Choughs, startled by our arrival, ascend to the trees and lift a chorus, their wailing cries floating down all around us. I’m here with renowned sound recordist, Andrew Skeoch, and today I am hoping he will teach me how to listen. Andrew Skeoch represents one-half of Listening Earth, an Australian record label dedicated to capturing and sharing nature’s soundscapes. The other half is photographer Sarah Koschak, Andrew’s partner in life and business. For the last thirty years, the pair have been travelling the world, recording natural soundscapes from Australian outback waterholes to the cloudforests of Malaysia, from Scandinavian Taiga bogs and Turkey’s Taurus Mountains to the rainforests of Zanzibar. Listening Earth has published more than 100 soundscape albums, sharing the aural magic of nature with tens of thousands of listeners on streaming platforms every month. After three decades of listening, Andrew has developed an intimate understanding of nature and what it can tell us, if we pay attention. In his new book, Deep Listening to Nature Andrew shares his knowledge with us. Through his stories, listening tips, and philosophy, Andrew emphasises the importance of deep listening for humans, for nature, and for each other. It is an invitation to listen, for our own health, and that of the planet. What is it to listen? To really listen? When did you last really listen to someone, to something? Andrew says hearing is a really under-appreciated sense, one of the key ways that we have evolved to understand and respond to our world. Our brains are wired to the ancestral importance of sound, listening in for the information contained in speech, music, rustling leaves or animal communications. But, as Andrew explains, our modern, urban environments are uncomfortably full of “anthropogenic noise – traffic, machinery, aircraft – characterised as low information sound. There is nothing engaging, interesting or useful about it, so the brain tries to filter it out. And while we’re extraordinarily good at filtering out information that isn’t of interest to us, it does take a bit of processing power.” Andrew likens the neurological effort needed to filter noise to the lengthy, memory-heavy processing his computer has to undertake to clean human noises from his nature recordings. Importantly, the evidence is that this constant sensory filtering fatigues and stresses us. Perhaps that’s why so many of us walk around with headphones on. But how much are we tuning out? Andrew reflects on the time he has spent with Indigenous communities and cultures across the globe, saying, “you realise just how tuned in they are to sound. They’re aware of how much it tells them, about the world around them.” Andrew thinks of these cultures as ‘listening peoples’ and explains that the rest of us are losing access to important information from the more-than-human world in which we evolved. “Our distant ancestors spent 100% of their lives in that sound world and their mental processing was attuned to that. We’ve inherited that capacity, but by virtue of our lifestyle, we’ve lost our natural ability. But it is still there, and we can recover it”. Phew, that’s a relief! According to Andrew, we need to be listening because nature has so much to tell us. Learning to listen, and listening to learn As Andrew travelled the acoustic world and refined his listening and recording techniques, he started to develop a deeper understanding of sound, and how nature uses it. He began to realise the depth of information sound reveals about landscapes and communities, their health and resilience. Also, that sound facilitates cooperation and collaboration, providing ways to avoid conflict and harm. In Deep Listening to Nature, Andrew writes of the diplomacy of the dawn chorus, “one of nature’s most sophisticated processes of negotiation – both between species, and among members of the same species.” Rather than shouting over one another, birds have developed sonic strategies and acoustic behaviours that provide spaces for other voices. These acoustic adaptations are paralleled in the chorusing of frogs. Listening to one another allows animals to share information about threats and resources, within and between families, species and communities. Like the ringing, high-pitched calls many honeyeaters give in response to the sight of an aerial predator, or the harsh multi-species scolding that follows any python or monitor lizard on the hunt for eggs and nestlings. Quiet, high-pitched twitters keep mixed flocks of small bush-birds together as they forage, and the deep ventriloquial ‘oooms’ of Bronzewing Pigeons allow intraspecies communication while keeping predators in the dark. Eavesdropping on these interactions reveals the agency and sentience of the animals around us, surprising us with the depth of their relationships and the complexity of their existence. But even more than that, Andrew says that nature is providing us with the blueprint to survive ourselves. “In our social systems, we prioritise the ideal of competitiveness, that competition is natural and necessary and good. That it brings out the best in us, and always leads to the optimal outcomes. And I’m looking around the world and going, ‘really?’, because it doesn’t seem like that to me!” “Communication is used to avoid harm, to facilitate interactions without causing harm. And I thought, if we’re to learn anything from listening to nature, it’s in the complexity, richness and integrity of those interactions. If you lose species, you’re losing voices, and the whole thing starts falling apart. Understanding the function of communication in nature helps us appreciate the importance of communication to us as humans, because we’re communicating animals. The processes of nature that have evolved over time through natural selection, tell us what works and what doesn’t.

Latest

Featured

Popular