The Sound Atlas, Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen (Reaktion Books)
Despite the vast number of contemporary ambient albums released that now include ‘environmental recordings’, I don’t own many albums that consist purely of the sounds of landscape or animals. In fact, I think I have two: a double album of birds, animals, ice and wind from Antarctica, bought in a charity shop to accompany and inform a long-term Captain Scott obsession, and the obligatory album of whale song. As you might suspect, in the scheme of things, neither gets played very much: my childhood explorer hero turns out to have been a foolish, opinionated leader whose rejection of expertise and scientific advice, along with the last minute decision to take an extra person to the South Pole, led to unnecessary deaths; and the whale song simply is simply too hippy and passé.
That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what this new book calls ‘Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination’, a fantastic collection of thirty-six entertaining, short essays whose subjects range from Aeolian harps to how sound behaves in caves, via computer start-up sounds, ‘Bach’s favourite organs’ and ‘Sonic Warfare and Propaganda’. Each essay is full of intriguing facts, associated stories and interesting connections.
It’s not really an atlas, more an intriguing assortment of places and sound phenomena. One essay considers the possibility of sound archaeology, another the sounds recorded in/from the deepest artificial hole in the world, a Russian boring project that drilled many miles down. The project is now ended, the small but deep hole clamped shut under ‘a metal lid of sorts, an arm’s length in diameter, welded and sealed with metal screws, thick, heavy, rusted.’ Recordings remain, of course, including the previously viral sounds of people in agony or hell someone started disseminating.
Even more interesting are pieces about singing sands, ‘The Past, Present and Future of Sound Recording’ (wax cylinders through to glass recordings via hard discs), Gagaku music from Japan, the golden record attached to the Voyager spacecraft (will aliens have a record player?) and – of course – strange bird song from seven continents.
Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen are both nature writers, concerned by the climate crisis and humanity’s relationship with the Earth (and space) but also fascinated by the sounds that predate the human ‘noise and chaos where once there was silence’. One of the underlying themes of these stories is a sense of wonder:
the cries of beasts living and extinct, strange hums from mysterious sources,
holy sounds and timeless sounds, stretches of silence and ambience, the songs
of earth and wind and ice.
Although we often rely most on what we see, paying attention to what we can hear, reveals more of what ‘our bodies experience and process’, more of the world we inhabit. This is an entertaining and informative book highlighting what we have all been missing.
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Rupert Loydell
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