This newsletter presents a small collection of geographic, historical, archaeological, cultural and/or artistic articles that have caught my attention. As a fantasy writer, I am fascinated by the nooks and corners of our real world and constantly find inspiration for my own world building and storytelling — it’s my hope that these newsletters are an inspirational resource for other writers, too, or for anyone who wants to learn more about our world.
Invention demands not just an open mind, but a hungry mind. You have to pursue channels of knowledge that are unfamiliar to you, uncover answers to questions you didn’t even know you had. Let yourself rest in the tension between “things I know” and “things I don’t know yet.” It’s there, in that space between the familiar and the unknown, that connections are made and you can begin to shape profoundly new ideas.
When you follow your curiosity, you end up in places you never expected. I clicked on the interview with David G. Haskell (see below) because the attention crisis has been on my mind for the last year, and the title “Listening and the Crisis of Inattention” seemed to be address that topic. What I discovered instead was a deep discussion of the evolution of sound, going back to before organic life evolved on Earth. I mean, yes, it did address the topic I thought it would, but not in the way I thought it would, from the perspective of modern social science, talking about how we use our phones too much.
Have you ever thought about what the world sounded like when there was nothing but wind, water and stone? Or about how the sounds that surround us — or the lack of them — can shape our psyches? Or about how little we know about how other animals on our small planet communicate? I know I’m thinking about those things now…maybe you will, too.
When the Earth Started to Sing
There’s a link between the so-called physical world and the biological world that is hiding in plain sight: Mostly when we hear a birdsong, we just think, “Oh yeah, that’s an American robin,” or whatnot. We don’t think, “Oh, that song has within it the imprint of the forest in which that robin has been living.” We’re hearing the legacy of plate tectonics and great migrations of creatures from one part of the Earth to another just by lying in bed and listening to birdsong in the morning. You don’t even have to get out from under the covers and you can hear this magnificent legacy of kinship, not just in the present moment but in deep time.
Read more: Listening and the Crisis of Inattention
Extra: When the Earth Started to Sing
Prairie Madness
Velez found that, while all the landscapes contained plenty of sounds humans would naturally be able to hear, the sounds of the city were more diverse, spreading more across the range of human hearing and forming something like white noise. But out on the prairie, there was little to none of that background din. And what sounds there were coincided with a particularly sensitive part of the human hearing range the brain notices more readily.
“The way I can describe it is: it’s very quiet until, suddenly, the noise that you do hear, you can’t hear anything but that,” says Velez.
Read more: Is the Silence of the Great Plains to Blame for ‘Prairie Madness’?
The Music of Owls
The prevailing notion is that one owl's hoot is like another's. That is until researchers teamed up with a Baroque musician to prove otherwise. Marjon Saveslberg was trained as a classical musician, and she could discern very fine distinctions in the pitch, tempo, rhythm, and quality of owl calls. When combined with modern artificial intelligence algorithms to sort through large data sets, she was able to figure out that each owl had a signature call. The owls hear variations in the calls that we cannot detect. We hear hoots while the owls are having a nuanced conversation and sorting out who is nearby and what they are up to.
Read more: What an Owl Knows
A fascinating post. I completely agree that the sounds in one environment shapes us to a degree. I live out in the woods of Northern Ontario, neighbor to a mated pair of owls. I am honored every time I'm lucky enough to hear them call back and forth. In fact, I just finished writing an article on owls as part of my paid freelancing work!
I intend to re-read this, so thank you for an informative and interesting post!