Interlude: Beyond human ears
A dog hears higher frequencies than we do. A bat maps its surroundings with a chirp and an echo. An elephant communicates over miles in infrasonic waves.
Whales sing through the ocean’s density, their calls bouncing between the thermal layers of the sea.
These are real acoustic worlds.
Parallel, overlapping, vibrating beyond our thresholds.
To accept that sound exists independently of human hearing is to accept that sound exists otherwise - shaped by ears unlike ours, or by sensors that aren’t ears at all.
Sound isn’t human, but it includes the human.
We are one perceptual node among many registering bodies and systems.
The point is decentring, not anthropomorphism.
The question is whether a sound is registered - by a cochlea, a seismograph, a neural net.
Listening becomes a mode of acknowledging the real: vibratory events that affect bodies, systems, and surfaces, whether they resemble ours or not.
The coral larvae that orient themselves by the acoustic profile of a healthy reef. The fish who sing at dawn and dusk to mark territory. The forests where birdsong has quietened under heat stress, an ecological silence we barely notice.
Or the AI-trained device that learns to identify chainsaws in Amazonian rainforest recordings - an artificial ear tuned to the frequencies of destruction.
Each of these represents a listening presence that reorders what we mean by “audible”.
They remind us that hearing is not the condition of sound’s existence - it’s one possible engagement among many.
The sonic real of an encounter is not reducible to sensation. It includes the hiss of electricity beneath the floorboards, the quake-wave resonances of mountains, the industrial drone of data centres humming across continents. Sounds that shape, irritate, seduce, or pass us by - each unfolding within the acoustic continuum of the world.
Sound appears here as a property of matter before it becomes a product of our attention.
To think, with Karen Bakker, of “the sounds of life” as a planetary phenomenon that binds together communicative bodies across species and infrastructures.1
To imagine what happens to sound when it is not attended to - when the “tree falls” - not just unheard but unhearable, existing in frequencies no ear has evolved to receive.
The human remains inside the field, displaced from its centre.
Listening begins in that displacement: the world already sounding, with or without us.2
Notes
-
Bakker, K. (2022) The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
-
Feld, S. and Brenneis, D. (2004) ‘Doing Anthropology in Sound’, American Ethnologist, 31(4), pp. 461 to 474; Helmreich, S. (2007) ‘An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cybernetics, and the Sonic Unconscious’, American Ethnologist, 34(4), pp. 621 to 641; Voegelin, S. (2023) Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands. London, Bloomsbury.