A Natural History of the Senses (30 page)

Sitting on the beach in Bermuda, I decide to make quicksand in a glass. First I partially fill the glass with sand, then add water until it just covers the sand, and stir hard. The result looks solid, like firm sand, but when I stick a finger in it, it sinks fast. Quicksand is just a suspension of sand in water, sand that’s become so saturated it pours like a milkshake—something temporary, not a permanent booby trap. Scary movies show people taking a wrong step, sticking deep, sinking agonizingly, and then suffocating. But that’s not likely, unless you thrash about so much in panic that your body goes under and you swallow, inhale water, and drown, as you might in any swimming pool or lake. Water is denser than the human body, as
is sand; and the combination makes floating doubly easy. The body is buoyant, if allowed to be. I encountered quicksand once out West, on a ranch where I was working. A cow had wandered into it and panicked trying to escape, finally drowning. When we lassoed the carcass and dragged it out, the hide was coated in a rough porridge, and the eyelids looked as if they were sewn shut with burlap. I’m sorry now I didn’t wade in myself and test the waters, but at the time I listened to the cowboys’ warnings. Their land-savvy never failed me, and often delighted with its intuition and clarity. They’d seen frightened horses and cattle thrash until they disappeared in the mire, and had assumed that quicksand was aggressive and always deadly.

The hypnotic crash of the waves lulls me. Bending, I press my ear against the beach and hear the waves break even sooner. The vibrations travel about ten times as fast through the ground. Were I a Kalahari Bushman, I would be sleeping on my right side tonight, ear to the ground, so I could listen for the approach of a dangerous animal; my husband would sleep on his left side, and between us there would be a small fire to keep us warm while we slept, our ears cupping the earth. Or, if I were a character in one of the old cowboy movies, I might put my ear to the tracks and listen for the sound of the oncoming mail train. Because sound waves stay inside the metal rather than dispersing into the air, I’d hear the vibrations some distance away and know the payroll, or my sweetheart, would soon be arriving.

For hours, I’ve been watching the ocean for signs of humpback whales, whose songs were first recorded off Bermuda by Frank Watlington, and then later by Roger Payne. When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I attended a concert that Payne gave on his cello, accompanied by whale songs that boomed, yowled, gnashed, squeaked and thrubbed, filling the large auditorium with otherworldly music, and making my bones resonate from the low-down bass notes. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard whale songs; I had a record of Alan Hovhaness’s musical composition “And God Created Great Whales,” a piece haunted by a raga of sounds one doesn’t expect to add up to song. And yet the whales do sing. In fact, they
croon. Lone, inactive males start to sing during winter, the breeding season, and continue their ballads until company arrives to interrupt them. Their songs often last fifteen minutes or so, and they repeat like carols over many hours. How structured the songs are, obeying the sort of rules one associates with classical music.

What’s more, the whales vary their songs. New phrases and elements arise each year, allowing the songs to evolve the way a language does. Each has half a dozen or so themes arranged in a certain order; if one theme is removed, the others still stay in their original order. When you sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” you may choose to leave out the verse in which soldiers have built God an altar “in the evening dews and damps,” but you’ll keep the rest of the verses in the right order. Within the whale songs, there are repeating phrases that follow a carefully structured whale-song grammar. Perhaps the most impressive thing about all this is that the whales not only learn the complex language, but remember it from season to season. They arrive singing the song of the previous year, like coeds returning to school in September; when new phrases and slang evolve over the season, they remember them for the following year and abandon the lingo that’s out of date. They don’t sing by expelling air, as one might guess. Nor do they use their blowholes in a clarinetlike way, as is sometimes shown in cartoons. Instead, they probably make their sounds by moving air around inside their heads. Like opera singers, they control their breathing very carefully, so as not to interrupt the fluency of the song. Most whales choose to do their breath-snatching in the same passages, and that allows researchers to listen for the breath spot and identify the singer.

Those who have dived among the singing whales describe the feel of the song as a drum pounding on the chest, or a pedal organ played inside the ribs. If you can’t be in the water with them, you can hear and feel them singing through the wooden boards of a boat. And not only humpbacks sing. White beluga whales have such a sweet, trilling voice that early whalers called them “sea canaries.” Now that their numbers are drastically reduced by pollution, the belugas are becoming the canaries in a liquid mine, warning us about the health
of the oceans. Superstitious sailors used to hear the mournful songs of whales echoing up through the hulls of their ships, and were enraptured. Singing whales once inhabited the Mediterranean, and probably are the Sirens Greek myth says lured sailors to their doom on the rocks. Coming through the wood of a boat, their songs would be diffused in such a way that a sailor couldn’t localize them; the sounds would seem to be enveloping the ship in an eerie veil of song. Because whales ululate in sounds unique and varied, it’s a little difficult to describe their voices, but I once wrote the following
sound
poem after hearing a whale concert, and it may give a better sense of their songs:

Music, the perfume of hearing, probably began as a religious act, to arouse groups of people. Drums set the heart sprinting in no time, and a trumpet can transport one on chariots of sound. As far back as we can see, people made music. The first instruments used in western music were probably just sticks or rocks thwacked together to make a beat. There would have been many occasions for them: religious dances and other rituals; to accompany work songs; as a musical way to teach lessons to the young. Mesopotamian instruments have been found dating back some 5,500 years (pipes, triangles, stringed instruments, and drums), and the Mesopotamians even devised a method of musical notation. People probably made music even earlier than that, by blowing on blades of grass held between their thumbs or banging sticks and stones together—instruments we wouldn’t now be able to recognize. The Mayans played an array of intricately carved clay whistles, flutes, recorders, and ocarinas. Whistles shaped like men produced lower notes than those shaped like women. Some of them had secret chambers and could play as many as seventeen notes, others were meant to hold water while you played them, which affected the sound, and some multi-headed flutes played several notes simultaneously. According to Chinese
texts, Oriental music began around 2700
B.C.
, when Huang Ti, the emperor, ordered bamboo pipes of the right length to be cut so that he could imitate the song of the phoenix. If one contrasts 2,400-year-old Chinese bells with a present-day Chinese flute, one finds that the tones are very similar, and nearly match on an oscilloscope. From the outset, our brains and nervous systems have led us to prefer certain intervals between sounds. Our instruments have evolved from a deep inner delight in music, but one that has boundaries. Much of what we hear strikes us as dissonance or as noise, and what falls within a certain range we find sweet, intellectually satisfying, and mellifluous.

I first learned to play the violin in junior high, and though I practiced haphazardly for eight years, I never got past the mechanical bowing, palsied vibrato, and lusterless finger work of an amateur. I loved the gritty yet oily shine of the resin, which allowed the bow to tug gently, as if dragged over a raspy cat’s tongue. The strings I bought were referred to as “catgut,” but of course they weren’t really from a cat; the slang term dated back to an early period in violin playing, when audiences thought the strings screeched like a disemboweled tabby. “Better go buy some more catgut!” they used to jeer, and the expression caught on. Even when I was a “tweenager” (as thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were then called), endlessly rehearsing “The Entrance March of the Peers,” “The Young Prince and the Young Princess,” and “Say It with Music” for school assembly, I’d heard rumors of a dark, nearly mythical violin that could virtually play itself, a violin that smoldered with caged emotion even when lying in its case. The name of it floated in my mouth like magical smoke: Strad-i-var-i-us. How often I lusted after a Stradivarius that would transmute my sandpapery sounds to pure gold. In time, I rose through the ranks to the orchestra’s honored position of “first violin,” which meant that I got to play the melody, which is why I chose to learn violin in the first place. I pitied the tuba players oompahing their way into oblivion. Some of them, though boys, weren’t athletically built, and when they stood up they half disappeared into the shiny, heavy, hallucinating brass, as if swallowed whole by a mirrored nautilus. The percussionists made such a nerve-jangling racket, I
thought they should be given a polite burial in their own kettledrums Nothing about the finicky, birdlike oboe appealed to me. The girls who played flute always had runny noses and looked as if they were trying to blow out a small flame when they played. The clarinets sounded too mouselike. And the idea of playing cello, viola, bass, or any of the other to-my-mind subservient instruments left me cold. I wanted to make music, and music to me was melody, a soulfully singing violin. Although I had never heard a Stradivarius up close, I heard them on records and on television, and I wondered along with everyone else what magical resin or lacquer had gone into their manufacture to produce their uniquely sultry richness. The most precious instruments in the world are still the violins made by Stradivarius. At last scientists are beginning to understand why.

Over the years, researchers have attributed the unique sound to animal fluids, special resins, a water fungus, and many other arcane potions. A more likely explanation was proposed recently by Peter Edwards and a team of researchers at Cambridge University. Using EDAX (energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), they showered a fragment of a cello with high-energy electrons, which allowed them to analyze the wood’s ingredients. To their surprise, they found a thin layer of pozzolana—a volcanic ash from Cremona, Italy, where Stradivarius lived. The ash lay between the varnish and the wood, and Stradivarius probably applied it as a simple strengthening agent for his instruments; since it was a commonly used cement, it probably never occurred to him it could affect their tone. Of course, pozzolana alone won’t produce a Stradivarius, whose age, architecture, and craftsmanship contribute to its sound. Many violinists and violinmakers insist that violins grow into their beautiful throaty sounds, and that a violin played exquisitely for a long time eventually contains the exquisite sounds within itself. Somehow the wood keeps track of the robust lyrical flights. In down-to-earth terms: Certain vibrations made over and over for years, along with all the normal processes of aging, could make microscopic changes in the wood; we perceive those cellular changes as enriched tone. In poetic terms: The wood remembers. Thus, part of a master violinist’s duties is to educate a violin for future generations.

One of the most soothing things in the world is to put your tongue to the roof of your mouth right behind the teeth and sing
la, la, la, la, la, la, la
. When we sing, not only do our vocal cords vibrate, but so do some of our bones. Hum with your mouth closed, and the sound travels to your inner ear directly through the skull, not bothering with the eardrum. Chant “om,” or any other mantra, in a solid, prolonged tone, and you will feel the bones in your head, as well as the cartilage in your sternum, vibrate. It’s like a massage from the inside, very soothing. Another reason it may be so conducive to meditation is that it creates an inner white noise, which cancels out extraneous noises, making your body a soundproof booth. Hebrew davening, in which the faithful bend and chant, bend and chant, has a similar effect. The drumbeat in a macumba ceremony seizes one in a crescendo of fury that climbs higher and higher, as if scaling the Himalaya of one’s belief. All these sounds repeat hypnotically. Every religion has its own liturgy, which is important not just in its teachings but also because it forces the initiate to utter the same sounds over and over until they are ingrained in memory, until they become a kind of aural landscape. We are a species capable of adding things, ideas, and creative artifacts to the world, even sounds, and when we do, they become as real a fact as a forest.