“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening.” – Bernie Krause

We should be thankful that Lisa Schonberg is still listening.

Schonberg is a musician, natural historian, scientist, and creator, and in the face of that ominous silence, she’s made it her life work to document and amplify the sounds of ecosystems in order to protect them. This mission has taken her around the world, recording the sounds of endangered bees in Hawaii and, most recently, ants in the Amazon.

She uses her music to magnify the voices of the silenced chorus. Sometimes she packages the undoctored sounds of the ants. Other times, she mixes them into new rhythms. And sometimes, she plays right along with them, drumming a beat to the choir – an interspecies symphony.

It’s called the biophony – the soundscape of ecosystems that Schonberg is tapping into. I imagine that humanity was once included in that biophony. But at some point, we got too loud, and we began creating sounds that didn’t quite fit in.

Enter, the anthropophony – the soundscape of humanity. In many places, the anthropophony has overlaid the biophony to the extent that we can no longer hear the little critters. Without their sounds and voices, we forget that they have something to say, a contribution to make, and we’re then excused to act poorly toward them.

Striving to break open this silence, Schonberg listens to the ants.

It’s eavesdropping really because, she found, the ants are really talking to one another. Acoustic communication, she calls it. In the past, it was thought that ants only communicate through vibrations, but, thanks to the work of people like Schonberg, we are learning more and more about how these insects relate with one another.

Schonberg’s presentation made me realize the many layers that exist in communication. Spurred by her inquiry into the natural world, I have begun to wonder: how do we communicate up here in the anthropophony? Well, there’s a lot of noise, a lot of images, and a lot of language. With my bachelor’s in English, I have spent years obsessing over the nature of language. In it’s average service to us, language is largely symbolic mixed with a little bit of noise, and thus, though we usually fail to realize, it is limited in its ability to paint a full picture of reality and our environment.

 

When we texture language with acoustics (not thoughtless noise) and rhythm – elements universally translatable to all dialects and, perhaps, as Schonberg is proving, even all species – we get poetry. We get music. Perhaps the more we can texture our language, the richer our communication will be. The more we’ll be able to appreciate the value of the ants.

We need people like Schonberg. People paying attention. People humbling humanity’s hubris with reminders of all the voices that are out there. People not afraid to tease our perceived boundaries of communication. Reminding us that the world of the human is not a rendering of the Big Picture but a faction of it.

 

-Emily Grubby