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The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants

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Format: Hardcover


Description

An amazing journey into the hidden realm of nature’s sounds The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life. At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead? The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity’s relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature’s sounds, we will never see walks outdoors in the same way again. Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press (October 18, 2022)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691206287


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 88


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.63 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #28,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3 in Physics of Acoustics & Sound (Books) #34 in Environmentalism #59 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics


#3 in Physics of Acoustics & Sound (Books):


#34 in Environmentalism:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Half of the book is Appendices !
There's a lot of fascinating and very unexpected material in this book; who would have expected that turtles would be so chatty, And plants of course, most of us have known for years that the plants are conscious beings, but they also talk !
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2023 by TinyWanda
    • Listening
This is quite a technical read, at times, with very long chapters. That being said, it is informative and illustrative of the very real impact that bioacoustics can have on climate change. Also, this book promotes and increases empathy for our nonhuman partners on our one and only home, Planet Earth. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2022 by Susan E Dix
    • A fascinating journey into the sounds of nature
Review Image by BENOIT GEORGES BENOIT GEORGES
There are so many things that our human ears can't hear - infrasounds from the center of volcanos, from thunderstorms or calving glaciers, ultrasounds from insects, animals and even growing plants ! Karen Bakker's book takes us on an amazing journey, exploring how cutting edge technologies - think sensors, satellites and artificial intelligence - give us the amazing power to capture, analyze and understand the unheard voices of nature. The author has the not-so-common talent to mix great storytelling and rigorous academic research - the list of sources will be very useful for anyone who wants to continue this fantastic discovery. Overall, a pleasure to read. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2022 by BENOIT GEORGES BENOIT GEORGES
    • A fascinating and well-researched book!
Review Image by David Gruber David Gruber
Prof. Bakker's "The Sounds of Life" is a tour de force describing unique aspects of how humans have creatively used animal sound to better understand life on our planet --from plants to bats to turtles to elephants to whales! The book makes seemingly complex topics incredibly readable and has an extensive reference list, that I found helpful when diving even further into the book's stories. Prof. Bakker also includes Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), our non-profit and open source initiative that is using the technologies described in "The Sounds of Life" to listen to sperm whales and translate their communication. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2022 by David Gruber David Gruber
    • Incredibly fascinating!
Elephants with particular words for different threats, robot bees that *through dance* can lead the hive to new locations, and coral who swim through the ocean to find the sound of their home reef! A friendly warning: once you read this book, you'll find yourself telling everyone about it for the next several weeks. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2023 by Frank
    • Profound
This is an amazing book, easy to read and presenting the latest findings on conversations going on all around us by so many life forms. We are missing them because they are at frequencies we cannot hear, or are underwater.
Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2023 by Ronnie Schenkein
    • Most Fascinating Book of the Yesr!
This is one of the most important books... compiling thousands of papers about what humans don't hear.
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2023 by Shazam J. Browne
    • Not Just About Digital
Karen Bakker's "The Sounds of Life" brilliantly illuminates the yawning world of plant and animal communication, hinting at societies that indigenous cultures have known for millennia, but which the "scientific" world has only recently been "discovering." Before I get into the particulars of the book, I'd like to highlight a failure in discourse regarding "communication" with non-human beings (none of which is to place any blame on Bakker). I'll begin by looking at some examples of human communication. You're on a battlefront. The enemy has just fired an artillery round, killing three of your compatriots down the line. How do you interpret their communication? You've just received an ambiguous text message on your phone; the words could be interpreted in a few different ways. Is your correspondent grumpy with you, excited to see you? You're not really sure. At this moment, it is likely worth calling out the distinctions that Iain McGilchrist establishes in his book, "The Matter With Things." To oversimplify this 1,500-page work, the left hemisphere of our brain tends to have an instrumentalist outlook on the world, when the right hemisphere has a gestalt approach. For the left hemisphere: think language. For the right: think art. With language you can be precise, but the better your precision, the more divorced your meaning is from the reality it seeks to describe. With art you can be expressive and dynamic, but this dynamism leads to the possibility that different people will interpret your work in different ways. What is the issue with communication? To create a dichotomy, let us contrast it with relationship. Language fosters communication. Interaction fosters relationship. This is not a black-and-white divide; there are shades of gray in-between, such as with poetry. But you might say the majority of communications we take in don't necessarily build our relationships, and many of our most meaningful relationships—say, snuggling with a loved one, might have very little "explicit information exchange." Now let's look at some possible interspecies interactions. You're sitting in front of hemlock tree in springtime. The tips of the hemlock bows are covered in the fluorescent emerald of new needle growth. You're interbreathing, inhaling the green tones of that hemlock, while the hemlock is tasting the humidity and carbon dioxide of your outbreaths. You feel a sense of belonging. You're cross country skiing out in the woods. Thirty feet ahead, you see a white shape cross the trail. Before you can identify that other, they are gone. But a minute later, it happens again. The third time you notice the small white figure of a mink, popping their head up above a drift, their small black eyes watching you. This goes on for awhile—the interplay of the syncopation of their criss-crossing the trail in front of you in contrast to your steady gate. You feel a playful energy. Let's come now to some of the topics that Bakker covers in her book. She looks at projects that "translate" the dance of bees into location data for a nectar source. She mentions the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), "applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales." Yes—these are new frontiers of interspecies communication. But does this kind of communication foster relationship? I would argue: no. You're better off sitting quietly in front of the beehive, or swimming with the whales, if you're looking for relationship. We can begin to develop a "reality" stack. On the bottom (in reality) we have relationship. It is complex, dynamic, and ultimately ineffable. On top, we have communication: language, semiotics, etc. These frameworks are concise, bounded, and ultimately contrived and only tenuously linked to reality. To take an example—think about the last Zoom call you were on, and contrast it with the somatics of the last in-person meeting you had. On the Zoom call, maybe you head a heady discussion, full of concepts and facts, but did you come away with any more trust for your interlocutor than at the start of the call? And then, with your in-person meeting; recall your awareness of their breathing, the temperature of their body as you gave them a handshake or a hug. You notice the hint of an accent you hadn't picked up in your phone conversations. You pick up on the pungency or sweetness of their body odor. You're aware of subtle textures on their face that don't come through on a video feed. And if you close your eyes, you still have a sense of their presence, there in front of you. Maybe this conversation was "less productive;" maybe you let intuition have a stronger reign over the direction of discourse, finding yourself in a story about your grandmother. But I'd posit that you've come away with more relationship than in the former example. If you want a hypothesis to carry with you to help explain these dynamics, I'd suggest the integral model of relationship in contrast with the graduated model of communication. With relationship, when two beings come in contact, if any aspect of either of them drops out, you lose the whole, and a certain kind of relationship is no longer possible. This is an intuitive and subconscious process, so you won't be able to dissect the situation and pinpoint what went wrong. When you're hearing someone over a video call, you still have some visual and some auditory stimulus, but your interlocutor has become a buzzing, whirring computer, rather than a living breathing being. From the integral perspective, this is fundamentally different. But with communication, the situation isn't so stark. You can start tapering down on bandwidth—dropping out visual, adding some static, maybe moving to text, then to Morse code—even then, communication is still possible. But relationship? I'm not so sure. Regardless, Bakkers book does call us deeper into relationship with the more-than-human world. She's done an excellent job synthesizing those whom have come before in the field of bioacoustics (such as Bernie Krause), and has also presenced indigenous perspectives on interspecies communication (such as those of Robin Wall-Kimmerer). By the time you're done reading, you'll have a longing to go sit in your favorite natural place, listening to the rush or hum of the living world. I can recommend this book to anyone working in the field of biodiversity and interspecies communication. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2023 by Will Szal

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