David Rothenberg | Interspecies Melodies: Making Music With Whales & Birds

People sometimes ask me, what's the point of this work you're doing? Is there any practical value to the perils of this planet and humanity's rapacious attitude towards massive destruction? And then I would say, you know, I mean, playing music with nature isn't going to solve our environmental crises, but it's one small way to take nature seriously enough so we won't destroy it before we understand it. It gives us a few more reasons to keep trying and not give up. Welcome to the Passing Through Podcast. A show dedicated to exploring those spaces not just within, but also between and around us. The cracks in the walls. The moments between the moments. I speak with thinkers, authors, artists, teachers, and everyday humans who have touched the edge of the ordinary and found something to bring back. It might surprise you to learn that the sounds you're hearing were recorded underwater. By this week's guest. Deep beneath the surface of a pond. The drowned liquid sounds of insects, fish, and bubbles of air all combobulate to compose this strange and curious brew. Educator, philosopher, composer, jazz musician, and author, David Rothenberg, creates art in a very unusual way. He plays music with other species. Accompanied by non-human musicians such as birds, insects, whales, and even underwater plants, David has released more than 40 albums and written numerous books like Survival of the Beautiful, Whale Songs, and Bug Music, How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise. David has dedicated his life to investigating the relationship between humanity and nature. He argues birdsong doesn't just sound like music. It is music. And he should know. He's a jazz clarinetist who jams with nightingales and humpback whales. A naturalist and avid lover of nature, he's even studied with Arnie Ness, considered to be the granddaddy of the deep ecology movement. David's been the subject of feature-length documentaries such as Why Birds Sing and Nightingales in Berlin. He teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he's a professor of philosophy and music. A lifelong explorer of ecology, the more than human, and those strange liminal spaces at the edge of the ordinary. He's a natural fit for this show, and I hope you enjoy our meandering conversation as much as I did. You can learn more about David at his website at davidroffenberg.net, or by listening to his music or watching the films that I mentioned. The music that you just heard was from his album The Secret Songs of Ponds, which I really recommend. Links to his website and a bunch of his other content will be in the show notes and on thepassingthroughpodcast.com. So, buckle up, open your ears, and let's go on a sonic adventure. So, hey David, thanks for joining me on the Passing Through Podcast. It's great to sit down with you. It's great to be invited to talk to a man living in a van, traveling around Poland and wherever else you've been. That's where I am right now. As you saw for a moment, I'm in the back of a van all bundled up in the cold here. I bet it's cold. Yeah, it's chilly right now. I wish the heat was on, but it isn't. So, we're going to have a frosty, seasonal kind of conversation. Yeah, yeah. I can't say I'm freezing cold because the heat is on in this apartment. Yeah. It looks cold outside. It looks cold outside. I think I'm going out there next. And you're also in Europe right now, right? You're over in Prague? Yes. And what's going on over there? What are you doing? Is it something you can talk about? Yeah, I can tell you. Yeah, I'm on sabbatical from teaching. I usually live in the Hudson Valley and teach in New Jersey. My girlfriend and I just had a baby who's three months old. And so, I'm taking care of this baby and changing a lot of diapers. It's pretty fun. It's a good alternative to working all the time, which I never really do. I'm not a workaholic type. But it's quite fun to just think about these baby things all the time. I'm kind of enjoying it. Yeah. Because it's like 27 years since I last did anything like this. So, it's interesting to think about it with some years behind. What does it mean? What does it mean to bring another life into this world? And then also try and impart your life experience and imagine the future. What's the future going to be like for anyone born in 2026? It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a fascinating topic to go into if you want. It's not where I thought we'd start, but it's fascinating and important, I think. I mean, the future is something I've thought about for a long time. Yeah. Because the future seems kind of grim at the moment, right? Like, this fact alone is one that often gives me hesitation when I think of bringing life into this world. Because I'm not a parent yet, but we think about it. Yeah. And this kind of tension is something that comes up for me, too. So, I wonder how you navigate that now and maybe how it differs from your experience in the past. He recorded the sounds of cars screeching to a halt. Yeah. So, which was like, we were not, people were not, not everyone thought this was a good project. But then the next question is, what did such a person end up doing with his life? What do you think? that's a tricky one I guess the person could either become a sociopath or a scholar you know he became a video game mogul he's owned all these video game companies he's like super successful finland's a big game country but now he was on like medical leave for a month he'd gotten too much anxiety over the over the speed at which you can program and create games today using ai and during his month off I'm just telling you this story because it's very fresh in my mind he invented 54 games about his life wow moments from his life crisis things turned into games which he then showed me like I said kimo don't do this like stop do one game like come on no wonder you're so agitated I know I know I know but I can't stop and so it's like an art piece of 54 games about his life which you can you can open them and have claude play them for you if you don't want to learn to play them and so it was just like this is a whole different direction and I think he's done well for himself but you know you have to like um see what technology is doing to our the speed at which we operate and someone like me who likes to take clarinets in the forest and play with birds or with whales and like stick to the basics just keep doing it bring people outside like I started to get more interested in turning all my activities into live events with human beings simplify and not think of all the media projects you can make like more films more books more tv shows or more like games like it enough already like just turn it off go go outside and I still spend like most of us what considered work is staring at a screen cutting and pasting things and sending firing off messages to someone around the world asking them to do something for you like that's what we spend most of our time doing it's just go outside and listen and engage directly it's so important today in particular and I think that's what I'm learning over time just just doing these things and not to get stressed out like I haven't gotten this done I haven't gotten that done like just go out there and experience the world and share you know one's way of experiencing with others yes I think there's sagely wisdom in that and you've you've opened a few doors here that I want to touch on I want to talk about you playing clarinet with birds and playing jazz with whales and the importance of doing things live together like this aspect of community and I want to talk about this frenetic hurried frantic pace of modernity and this sense of like more like this is the command from modernity right it's like we need to do it faster and need more of it and something is lost there's some catastrophic kind of harm that's done not just to our ourselves but to our environment and so all of this kind of stuff I want to dig into with you so we we have like a rich soup here at the beginning which of those speaks more to you to start is there one of them that screams a bit louder I was just continuing on this idea of what it means to bring other people out to share these experiences and when I started my adventures like playing music live with birds you know and then whales and then bugs you know I thought of myself as some kind of crazy um individual explorer on this quest and even there was a british edition of of the book why birds sing it has a funny cartoon picture of a guy with no hair and a beret with a clarinet and a bird and the subtitle is like something from monty python you know why birds sing one man's quest to solve an everyday mystery like like that is not that is not the subtitle of the book and that doesn't look like me and you know you're making me into this kind of crazy um you know monty python some people think we're crazy and and even someone introduced me recently uh charles amarkhanian at the other minds festival in california he says like you know what david rothenberg is doing many people would think is mad and insane it's like and then when I got up there I said actually you might think that but it's pretty much what most people did if you go back a few thousand years tens of thousands of years most um people spent their time very closely living together with animals engaging with them and like trying to communicate and um for that I will recite my favorite um inuit poem told to knut rasmussen the explorer in the 1920s by a woman a shaman named nalunjiak and nalunjiak told him these words which appeared in his annals his account of his expeditions and um I would have to say that the version I'm going to recite to you now is a poetic version made by the american poet edward field canadian actually but living in new york and he just passed away a few weeks ago age 102 and I was trying to go interview him just a few months ago it almost happened I'm sorry I missed the chance but anyway this is what he told us in the words of nalunjiak in the very earliest time when both people and animals lived on earth a person could become an animal or an animal could be a human being there was no difference all spoke the same language that was the time when words were like magic a single word spoken by chance might have strange consequences it would suddenly come alive and what people wanted to have happen could happen all you had to do was say it nobody could explain it that's the way it was so oh man I I really love that so much because it speaks to something I I didn't anticipate we would go into so soon but I'm happy we're here it's this idea of this animist sense of personhood that should be extended not just to humans but to all creatures and this beautifully touches on that I'm in a course right now that studies the work of I don't know if you're familiar with stephen harrod buehner no actually yeah interesting guy I didn't know about him until this year but he was a kind of like poet and naturalist and herbalist and he was really into like the gaia hypothesis and he wrote this book called plant intelligence and the imaginal realm and it's the study of like kind of undoing or unlearning these harmful limiting beliefs inside of dominant western culture and ideology that separates us from nature and separates us from animals and tries to tell us that there are ways to reconnect and to communicate because we do all share the same language so exactly the heart of what this this poem is going towards so yeah I would like to dig into this a little bit deeper with you because I'm sure you've had very fascinating and illuminating experiences because you you attempt to do that through music like you are communicating with non-human persons and I'm sure you have very interesting stories to tell about that yes I mean I haven't heard of that book but it does sound interesting but you know I heard I first heard that eskimo inuit poem in elementary school where in the 1970s they were putting us through this experimental form of social studies called man a course of study which is something like instead of normal social studies a second and third graders they gave us this program which had things like imagine you're an eskimo and you got a paper clip what would you do with it and you know we had this poem and this whole thing like years later I wasn't really sure I remembered it all clearly but then I was happened to be in new york at this lunch with jerome bruner the famous psychology professor and he was one of the consultants inventing this thing and we talked about how it came to be and then over the years I've met others who went through this program and so already when we were really young we got the sense that you should take animal world more seriously that different cultures understood things differently and even though you couldn't call something man a course of study today I mean the the whole orientation was very much teaching us at a young age that our culture was one of many and that other cultures might have a deeper connection to the natural world that we could really learn something from and I think I've been trying to do that over the years one reason I picked music to imagine a way to communicate with other beings is that we don't really know what it means but we know it's important to us you can't say what a piece of instrumental music actually means is it happy is it sad or some people will point out to certain chords certain scales going one way or another but then some other culture hears the same sounds a total different way you know if you don't have the title explaining what some notes instrumental notes are about they can be about anything and yet we know it's important it touches our emotions somehow it touches our psyche and so if you imagine birds are singing and not talking and they're making music it's instantly a lot more accessible than something that you need to decode like a language people today talk about decoding the language of sperm whales feeding hundreds of hours into an ai through machine learning it's going to tell us what the whale is saying but you don't need to do that with music because music is um communicates with us a different way it's easier to imagine you could connect to an animal if you say oh they're making music I will make music with this other musician just like we've all had experience playing with musicians who don't speak our language but you could share something right away it's easy to try and to make sense crossing different cultures like I've done it many times and it's a wonderful thing about what music can do to connect different cultures yeah I think that's a brilliant insight there and and you're speaking to something that that's also been on my mind because in this book that I'm referencing he uses music as an example where he says it would be very limiting to look at music solely from the perspective of the physics of chords and the music theory of like chord progressions and arrangements and scales like that's just teaching you very little about what's what the song that's not what a song is that's like a physicalist interpretation of what a song is and of course song is physical it's it's vibratory that has this component to it but it it omits this feeling this this thing that's more mysterious and liminal about music that lets music occur between species in your case yeah I mean you're looking for a way to help explain something that immediately touches us and it's hard to explain and when I was writing my first of various books about music and nature why birds sing where only on the last page I tell why birds sing but along the way I say if you want to try and understand why birds sing and you are human you have to use all the human methods of knowledge which might include mathematics biology poetry music close phenomenological observation putting all theories aside all these things are going to help you make sense of something and none no one approach is is better than any other or more accurate or more honest or more objective you know a lot of scientists studying birdsong which there are many for reasons I can get into they'll say like oh if you start talking about music and birdsong that's subjective but we're talking about you know dopamine released in the brain that's objective you can measure that I'm saying well you can measure that but it's no it's as much a human perspective as hearing some cool tunes from the bird it's just a different way of a human making sense of the world it's like you know mathematics is no better than poetry if you want to make sense of your experience it's just a different approach yeah yeah they're all different maps right you know galileo said that nature is a book written in the language of mathematics and one of my mentors and teachers the eco-philosopher arnon s he said yeah yeah nature sure you know maybe it's written in a mathematical language but it's also written in the artistic language and the poetic language and the philosophical language you know whatever language you know you can use to try and interpret this world that's always going to be bigger than any of our possible explanations of it yeah yeah I like that a lot too that sense of plurality and messiness and possibility and this promiscuity of of nature and and how it's slippery and uh I'm curious to go into a little bit about arnie ness because I I know of him I read john seed and joanna macy and he they wrote this seminal book thinking like a mountain so I'm familiar with him and deep ecology and all of this stuff and from my understanding you had a close relationship with him yeah I spent a lot of time with arnon s I've met john seed a few times and you interviewed him right yes yeah true or am I making that up how's he doing he's doing okay right he survived all these he was great yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we had a great time this camp we went to this camp in the in the forests of australia with all these eco-philosophers old and new it was full of all kinds of drama and weird animals like I really should anybody should write about that trip sometime and how long ago was that that was with arnie ness as well that was arna wasn't there john seed was there um freya matthews val plumwood was there you know about her no she was she was she's a great was a great australian philosopher eco-philosopher and she was a famous vegetarian and uh arguing for the you know we should not eat meat until until she was almost killed by a crocodile leapt out of the water grabbed her off a canoe tore her down to the bottom of a river three times she's like one of two or three people in in history who've survived this oh my god and then her most famous essay is called being prey it's about this and she says like okay now I'm gonna start eating meat now I know and so and she is an amazing amazing character and uh very strong force in in sort of ecological thinking australia is of course a great place for this because the nature is so vibrant and real and scary and full of things that could kill you they even have like porcupines with poisonous back feet called echidnas you know the last place you expect the porcupine to be poisonous the feet you know right yeah yeah that's funny I mean the time that I was in I was only in australia once and uh they were telling me don't go into the water because it was when the box jellyfish were around and they're like they're these little tiny very tiny you almost can't see them yes and then right then you're dead yeah that's how that that the the you know one of those tv crocodile hunter explorers died it's from a jellyfish one of those guys yeah yes you you you things like what's the most dangerous animal in the american woods you know the the tick ticks are the most dangerous things you know they're going to infect you with ever more strange diseases whose uh prognosis can't exactly be traced yeah and speaking of meat eating some of those tick bites cause like meat allergies or some kind of that's an interesting one that's a very strange one then you can't eat meat anymore yeah that's totally crazy yeah ticks are scary australia scary nature is as beautiful as it is is also horrifying and scary I mean I don't I don't find it so in general you know it's human behavior that's frightening and scary and and another guy I should interview is justin greg who wrote a book a book with probably the best title of any book if nietzsche were a narwhal it's about it's about uh what um so many directions this tangent can go but it's about what is it that really distinguishes humanity as a species from other animals like are we the only ones who reflect and ask questions are we the only ones who use tools who have language all this stuff it turns out he finds that whatever you think only humans do there's some other animal that does it yes except for one thing he says only humans have moral outrage only we get so worked up and angry about someone else's behavior like all across the animal world there's homosexuality everywhere but only humans say I'm shocked I'm shocked this is happening in this family in this community you know this is outrageous you know no animals it's like yeah whatever yeah and so that's a good point that's an interesting thing yeah he also yeah he's worth looking into for that reason and he has a new book called humanish and why anthropomorphism can be a good thing you know you're trying to understand animals imagine they're like us and not different like I imagine birds make music a human trait but actually thinking about them that way helps us understand them a lot better so it's not it's not necessarily a bad thing we tend to like objectify you know animals are like little machines they're like automata they're all the same and they're of course individuals just like us everyone is different and so um it's important to like recognize our commonality in the way we experience the world of animals the way we talk to them the way we engage with them you know they're not all that different from us right yeah yeah exactly I mean that's why I struggle even to kill a mosquito because a mosquito I'm aware that it has its own rich inner life that's as dear to it as mine is to me and when I look at it and I'm thinking it's just trying to feed it's it's young and be a nurturing mother who am I to just smite this insect down it's it seems ridiculous when you look at it from that perspective yes the most popular video that I posted on youtube is entitled the dalai lama kills a mosquito because it's a it's a clip from a documentary made by bill moyers about religion that was filmed at middlebury college and a lot of my friends are in it I just happened to have a copy of it in the early youtube days I just took this clip and there are mosquitoes everywhere in the film they're just flying around everyone's swatting at them so his holiness comes out and bill bill moyers says so you know your reverence for all life your holiness how does it affect you know the mosquito oh mosquito yes yes very difficult very difficult first mosquito I say bite let's bite you know a second mosquito brush away a third mosquito ha oh three three strikes and you're out like and of course there's like thousands of comments now like no he's not really killing the mosquito dalai lama greatest person in the world dalai lama you know you know you know spy for the americans you know millions of comments you know it's crazy like this is what our communication style has come down to I guess you know we have so many anecdotes and funny jokes and images and and uh this is why I like turning it all off going outside and let's just listen see what happens and then if you believe in making music with nature then you figure out how to join in you don't just sit silently and take it all in which is a very good thing to do but the what what is controversial to some people is the idea of joining in are we not finding yet another way to harass the world of animals that we're already destroying just by inflicting our miserable music upon them when they of course in their way have a perfection we can only aspire to because these birds have been singing these songs for millions of years they know they know what's what the right music is we don't know we're always making up new stuff hmm that's an interesting perspective I hadn't thought of that or heard that before or perceived the human as meddling or being intrusive to to these animals when we go in I would see it as like I've heard and I I like the idea that one of the unique gifts that humans have is like the ability to give praise and give thanks and to offer and that could be like a song of gratitude or a prayer or something like this to honor and revere nature and I always look at it like that like it's it's I I actually had a I had a strange speaking of like birds and nightingales I had this strange encounter during the summer when I was on like a small bit of psilocybin mushrooms and I was walking around sunset through this like park that had a nice curving stream through it and all of a sudden this beautiful eruption of birdsong just came out of nowhere it was so articulated and like symphonic and it was just vibrating the air and I couldn't me and my my friend we couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from it was just like as though a whole tree had become animate and was singing a song and the the bird was hiding somewhere inside and we couldn't identify where and it was so mesmerizing and enchanting and beautiful that like time seemed to stop we were just totally immersed in this song and just to be a part of it to to hear it was such a beautiful gift that like we were stunned you know so like these moments of being in this kind of rapturous attentive state of listening to to the beauty that's around us I think we don't do it enough absolutely yeah nightingales you know it probably is the same if you're on mushrooms they sound they're very rhythmic and sound kind of like a some strange electronic music with yeah that's kind of what it is so it's actually pretty weird already and certainly when I first heard them which was in finland actually I said this is just not what I expected it's a weird electronic sound and lately I've gotten obsessed with a bird which has in a way an even more beautiful strange song that nobody knows about that also lives in poland you might hear them and that that is the blithe's reed warbler and I'll send you some clips of me playing along with this bird that's endlessly inventive will sing for hours at a time constantly changing its repertoire and they kind of sing when the nightingales go to sleep so no one's up this hour except like you know people coming from raves and stuff like between two and four a.m and stuff the blithe's reed warbler takes over and this is an amazing singing bird I don't know what it is in polish but probably a better word than that and no one no one really knows anything about this bird except one woman in estonia who just spends all of her time making these weird cartoon movies of this bird and you can find her on youtube under the name flacco weasel I will send you I'll send you a link and you you gotta like like what she's doing you can interview her she'll say no but she you should talk to her she's an amazing character and then the next book I'm writing is going to have a section on this story in it but you can have an advanced example the thing that nightingales have like 150 different patterns that are kind of organizable and understandable but the blithe street warbler has hundreds of different birds it's imitating and putting together like a sort of hyper mockingbird that constantly surprises you they migrate to india it's taking some indian bird songs bringing them back to eastern europe and mixing them together like a dj in totally crazy form but nobody knows about it because of when their singing it's the least popular human time to listen to music but uh have you have you ever heard there's a bird in poland that sounds like a cell phone buzzing on silence have you heard this bird uh yes I think I've heard those sounds yeah it's like the alarm call of some species that just sounds like yeah like yeah exactly yeah yes it's very strange maybe a woodpecker some some woodpeckers do that I I would vote for one of the woodpeckers and of course woodpeckers also drum as a form of singing but the sound I'm talking about is an alarm call of the woodpecker okay and but I think there's a you can if you collect a bunch of bird alarm calls some of them definitely have that buzzing like a cell phone sound and people reach for their pockets and say huh what yeah I was it was uncanny how much it sounded I watched these videos of these birds that are in I guess some tropical jungle somewhere I imagine them to be in south america but I'm not sure where they actually are where they can emulate and mimic sounds of like car alarms and chainsaws and weird things mostly it's the it's the liar bird that's famous for that you know and particularly one liar bird who I've visited to play with because he lives in this giant open-air zoo he has like a 200 by 200 meter enclosure to live his life and next door they're always building and things and and they're imitating chainsaws and people's cameras clicking there's a bird in australia called the rifle bird that sounds like someone shooting a gun so the liar bird imitates that all the time and liar birds also you know like many of these birds as something charles darwin pointed out they've evolved a particular aesthetic sense that might not be the same as ours like liar birds like noisy sounds from different birds it picks the noisiest sounds of each species and strings them together and some of these some of these birds it's copying make a lot of beautiful sounds but the liar bird doesn't care he likes complicated noisy tone you know it's very very hyper pop like I would say yeah that's fascinating like this this idea that there are different kind of cultural preferences inside of the bird species there definitely is different evolved aesthetic sense like a liar bird has somehow evolved the need for an incredibly complicated song same with the blithe's reed warbler the nightingale whereas most birds have evolved songs that are very simple and clear and short which makes sense and then also you have cultural difference in animals many birds in different places they have varying dialects and songs but also you know particularly in killer whales different groups of orcas or killer whales live completely differently and they're the same species and you can see this this is what people want to see in nature tv shows like they definitely want to see that killer whale leap up on the beach and grab a seal and go back underwater okay so you can see that in in chile and the beaches in chile but the same kind of seal and the same kind of whale in antarctica they fish and hunt together they're like friends the whale would never eat the seal because they have a different relationship with this other animal it just shows that animals can also have culture and learn different behaviors yeah and I thank you for sharing that because I think that that is something that's kind of mind-blowing to people who don't know that as truth or can't even imagine that that's possible but it's it's really it's true yeah when I was researching my book whale music about whales and music which was originally entitled thousand mile song in its first edition the new edition is called whale music it's way better but when I was researching in the beginning it was a radical idea when a scientist proposed look killer whales have culture but now 15 years later biology accepts this idea you're right you were right we we didn't believe it but now we know you were right and we've found examples in all kinds of species of animals yeah and and where do you think that comes from this like um reluctance to believe those sorts of things the idea that we have to have things that separate humanity from animals like we are the ones that make music we are the ones with culture animals have nature we have nurture they have nature we also have nature but you know we want to make sure we're different and if you go back um you know when I was in college you had to come up what's the definition of music and they would say already by the 80s you know they'd say music is organized sound just put sound together and then john blacking ethnomusicologist who should have known better he said music is humanly organized sound but of course that's a terrible definition like organized sound could be like somebody drilling in the street hey well that could be music my definition of music is some sound is music if someone tells you it is if somebody wants wants consider this as music put this forward hey this could be music just listen to it as if it were music see where it takes you and today we pretty much accept that with all kinds of crazy sounds are put forth as musical sounds and this is a you know one of the advantages of endless availability of everything like you can you can hear anything you want all possible music is instantly available the problem is to know what to listen to or even more so the problem is how to listen to it how to make sense of that incredible richness of possibility most people just don't listen very well they don't pay much attention to what they're hearing and that's something we really should be teaching how to how to listen better that's a I like that you're going there that's that's a great point because I I was thinking recently that we are in a a paradigm that's so focused on surfaces and facades and the kind of like the superficial read or understanding of things that we don't take the time to to listen and think and if you had to give uh some extra instruction or like a tip on what someone listening could do to be like okay yeah I want to explore that how could I listen better how could I connect with music in a way that's richer do you have a sense of what someone could do excellent question very good question yes you can start with whatever any music you want to listen to better if it's a recording you know put it on stop thinking about anything else and just focus on this music for as long as you can give it some give it some time you know but if there's a kind of music you want to understand better you know just pray spend some time with it and I wouldn't read about it I start by just listening for as short a time as like five minutes just intently to something without putting on the background without doing anything else and then come up with what questions you what things you want to know about it or what it suggests to you you know listen again and start you can refine your your quest by deciding is there something you want to know about it or is there something you want to pay closer attention to sometimes when I'm teaching uh and I teach a lot of like how to make electronic music classes for non-music majors we just like plug in computers start making sounds and I don't really want them to produce pop tunes like I want to produce something that's theirs that's never been heard before and so I just but you know I ask them to I say to bring in something bring some music that interests you then we can figure out how it was done like you have a question like here's a sound and they say like how did they do that and then we try and do it without like no music theory without like you know reading too much just just taking the sound in and then you know we take it from there and then of course at some point you can decide I want to make something that sounds like this that's in this genre and uses these chords and stuff like that but you start out by not knowing any of that you just take it in and it's the same with listening in nature imagining it's something musical you go outside and listen try and shut everything else out try and really get in the experience in the moment it's particularly useful with like you know music that happens at another scale like the songs of humpback whales you know these songs are so slow that most people can't hear the structure because the sounds happen too slowly it's not it's not at a human scale so that's why scientists you know print them out make visualizations and then try and that you can see the structure more quickly than you can hear it but to learn to hear it you know I would give a concert telling all these stories and start here here's a whale here's a bird all this stuff that's the usual thing but then I started saying let's just play this hour-long recording of a humpback whale song and do nothing else make everyone listen and then we take a break and come back and talk about it and that's a very powerful thing to do I think like a whale meditation yes it's a whale meditation exactly so And I've done that several times now, and I keep wanting to do more. And then you could even, you know, after the second hour, you could play whale sounds and have people join in, which I think is also worth doing. But the idea being is you just really tune out everything else and try and focus on something that you haven't really focused on or taken seriously. And I think better listening to music. Music is one of the easiest kinds of things to listen to better because people like it already, you know. Or even take something you really like. Take a song you really like, you really know, and find something new in it you've never noticed. Something you think you know backwards and forwards and things like that. And, you know, I worked also, I knew Pauline Oliveros, who founded Deep Listening, a whole practice that contains a lot of these things. And we just, during the pandemic, my friend Stephanie Loveless, she asked for a lot of contributions to have a text score, an exercise for every day of the year, 365 of them, to honor Pauline. And then, you know, then we just published this last year. It's called A Year of Deep Listening. And this book is surprisingly popular. People are doing events all over the world because there's this whole hankering and need for better listening in a creative way. And, you know, there's 365 cool examples of things you could do. And not presented in a very, you know, kind of didactic way, but just how about this? How about that? Yeah. So I think, you know, I'm finding, not only do I want to listen more deeply and more widely as I get older, but also I'm really happy to hear lots of other people doing it. It's not just me defending my territory against everyone else. It's like, I'm the one who plays with whales. You can't do it. It's like, yes, more people go out there and do it. And, you know, again, one of the founders of this field, you know, Paul Winter, the jazz musician, who played saxophone with wolves and seals and eagles and also whales. And, you know, it's through him I first got interested in this when I was like 16 years old. But recently someone asked me to interview him, and I was kind of worried about it because he's 85. Like, oh, it's going to be depressing. But he was so energetic, full of so many projects and way more things he's doing than I'm doing. And then I remember him saying like, well, how do you feel that, you know, there's so many more people interested in this? You know, all these 40, 50 years later, he goes, oh, so many, there's still so few. Everyone should be doing it. It should be an essential part of music education. You start about, you learn the earliest music. It should be, it should be the big bang. It should be waves, the earth, then on to, you know, birds, you know, crickets. These things are a basis of music. Everyone should have to study them if you're studying music. There's two questions I want to jump in on here. One is to, speaking about like music and ancient music, the vibrations and the songs of the earth. You reminded me, I was listening earlier to your secret songs of ponds. And I was thinking like, how did you record that practically? Because it's such a bizarre, it sounds like, is the microphone underwater? Like, is it like an aqueous transmission? It's just ankehr. Thank you. Yeah, we use hydrophones. You should read the book that goes with it. Secret Sounds of Ponds. Just to confuse people, you know, the album is called Secret Songs of Ponds, and the book is Secret Sounds of Ponds. Basically, you need a fairly inexpensive hydrophone that goes underwater. You toss it in, and you plug in a recorder and a little speaker, and then you can hear what's going on under there. And a lot of these sounds are made by plants very directly. Wow. And I would say I would distinguish this from all the plant and mushroom music where people attach electrodes to plants and turn the signals into whatever sound they want. The sounds I'm presenting are just direct sound, generally made by plants releasing oxygen to the air, like in the midst of photosynthesis. They make these sounds. And then they're incredibly musical and strange, you know, especially if you're used to this idea that any sound can be music when someone tells you it is. It sounds like electronic music. And also you have underwater insects and some fish also making noise under there. And so, you know, it's not that hard to record this stuff, and it's kind of a direct experience. But it is this kind of accessible, natural sound that people don't think, they don't even realize is there. Yeah, it's this very liminal sound. It's a very liquid sound. It sounds very organic and very, like you said, electronic as well. So it was very surreal to listen to. And I was like, wow, that maybe was the sound. If you go way back before terrestrial life, when you just have plants and little things inside, maybe that was music back then. Yes, exactly. And we don't know how the... I mean, we know actually a little bit about how the insects are hearing these sounds. We have no idea how the plants are hearing them. I can send you, for example, a plant sound that is so strange, you're not even going to believe it's an organic thing. Can you describe it? It's like, it starts like... it's just like someone messing with an analog synthesizer it's just from this plant it was in england outside of brighton you know alice eldridge brought me there she goes I don't know why it is this plant is always making weird noises like this is really weird and it's basically air escaping from from you know oxygen being released in weird patterns from underwater but it's just usually you're hearing little rhythms and but if they happen really fast then it becomes like a tone and then it's like plant farts in a way yes exactly but you know people think whale songs are like parts plant farts but then if you hear them if you take that farting metaphor away and and think that it sounds musical then it's suddenly beautiful like you know a lot of analog synthesizers sound like farting but somebody says what a beautiful tone and then you you go away from its supposed function and then on to like something like just resonating and a rich tonality and get into this this world of music that can be you know is it objective is it subjective who cares it just can touch us we feel it I was happy to dig into that album because it was so strange and like kind of like experimental avant-garde weird like organic I'm gonna have links to it in the show notes so people could check it out yeah it's worth listening to yeah yeah I remember I was trying to get some you know kind of you know there's always people wanting to help you promote your music sending your emails and things like hey you want to help me with this I said no no no we can't we we see no way right we see no way to even explain what you're doing here we don't even know what it is but I I submit it's like ancient and and rhythmic and completely comprehensible people will like it you know but I have this idea of music that might be wider and more hopeful than a lot of other people I don't know yeah and and when you when you think about because your perception of music is different than the average person because you are in these strange collaborative places like does something stand out to you when you think of all the different places and all the different beings that you've made music with are there a couple that stand out as maybe more memorable or strange or remarkable than yeah so so many I mean there's this one pond near brighton I'm mentioning to you that's pretty special place there's one particular nightingale in berlin that always liked playing with us that uh you know where in berlin he was because I used to live in right at the at the bar of old strassel bridge where there's this little um used to be a bar that was open till midnight and when it closed then so it's it's very close to uh you know prince and strassel stop on the u1 you know one block away there's a bridge that crosses the canal and there's this one bird and the the bar across the way you know it has a bike shop in the back of the bar it used to be open late and then it became a cafe that closes at five but it's interesting that philip alterman the guardian berlin correspondent he was writing an article about my nightingales in berlin project he goes I want to learn about the nightingale the one nightingale outside my window what is he about I said where do you live he goes oh above this bar at the corner go this is the one we play with all the time I see you at the bar right before midnight closing time then we'll go listen to him and he came and so then we had this you know you know of all the birds in this city all the bars you had to walk into this one you know and so and these birds live like seven eight years so every year he would come back and was always ready to play with us and it's just birds are individuals some are interested some or not this is one of the best ones and if you I can send you a link to watch the film and you can see um what I'm talking about yeah that would be great at the very end the last scene has has this bird yeah and so so yeah that's one scene yeah and the blights read warblers you know in the middle of estonia going out and playing with them which I'm going to go back and do this year as well probably the very beginning first days of june this is you have a train going by in the distance too yeah you could hear it nice yeah that's good that's good yeah right why is a train a romantic sound and a highway is generally a sound people don't like although not not always you know something about something about technology sometimes the bells when the train is passing sound very similar to church bells yes exactly because what is a I know many people interested in sound and culture become transfixed by bells and change their whole life to just listening to bells and presenting them you know is it true maybe you know this is it true that bells used to be used like way back when there used to be this belief that the ringing of the bells was a way to kind of like bring harmony and peace and dispel like kind of trapped energies and things like this that were you know around a town square for instance like was there some belief about this this intersection between bells and culture I think so it still exists in zen buddhism you know a bell ringing in an empty sky being you ring the bell and sort of follow the disappearance of the sound and into your meditation where you sit silently for 30 years or something like that or one hour or whatever then the bell rings again and the it's the quality it's not just the fact of the bell having this symbolic meaning it's the particular sound itself like it's it's really um you know it has that interesting quality and each bell is a little bit different you know the the bells are one of the easier sounds to synthesize in a way because you kind of have these resonant frequencies that then are a little bit out of tune and you follow how they decay a question that I because I'm jumping around now because go ahead jump yes you can you're welcome to jump you you've mentioned that there are certain birds that kind of stand out to you like this one in berlin and does that have any parallel because before we were saying humans used to go out and they used to communicate and commune with nature and this was commonplace and now we've kind of moved away from this for the most part I'm sure there are still cultures that do it but by and large we've kind of moved away from this and those those cultures where people do do that like the this is seen as like almost like a shaman right going out and being able to commune with animals and I would think that it works the other way that there are some animals who are adept at communicating with humans and maybe this night in gallen berlin was one of these that was something more you know it had an additional gift or some capacity to to converse in a way that yeah of course there is again back to in justin greg's recent book humanish my favorite story is about the emotional support alligator and you could tell a little bit about a little bit about the history that animals surprise us they do things we don't expect and individuals are different you know in florida alligators can be a problem they like go on your lawn they go they won't go away even the baby ones are kind of vicious they snap at you so you have to call an alligator wrangler to come get them away and you know take care of them so there's a guy who had this job he was taking care of alligators for decades pulling them off people's lawns and relocating them and so there's a few baby alligators are snapping outside someone's lawn but there's one who just stares up at him with this mournful look like huh doesn't want to snap at all he goes you know in 30 years of doing this work I've never seen an alligator like this I'm taking this one home let's see what he's like and he he raised this alligator as a pet never wanted to bite was always nice and sweet then years later the guy you got cancer had to go to the hospital he said I'm not going without my emotional support alligator I go what now he's like a big full-grown alligator and and then and then he had a friend who's a lawyer goes look we're in florida anything could be an emotional support animal here let me just write up the the form for you and so he he brings this alligator into the hospital and everyone's delighted by this this huge reptile behaving so sweetly and then you know he recovered everybody recovered was fine you know and just shows that individual animal can do exactly what their species is not supposed to do yeah yeah these kind of generalizations and stereotypes that we have you know maybe for some animals they're true in aggregate but it would be a mistake to think that all animals are this way or that way yeah exactly they're you know they're all there's so many it's so much individual variation and just like some people can surprise us many people surprise us animals can surprise us too and if you play music with them on a regular basis you play music with underwater plant sounds and with wind and the sky and water you know you gain this kind of participatory sense of how nature can embody something beautiful and challenging and aesthetic you know it's nothing new except in our in our era where we've come to accept the possibility that any sound might be musical I think we're potentially more open than ever to be able to appreciate nature's music once we dare to do it once we take the risk and go out learn to listen better take it all in and figure out if there's any place for us people sometimes ask me what's the point of this work you're doing does it is there any practical value to the perils of this planet and humanity's rapacious attitude towards massive destruction and then I would say you I mean playing music with nature isn't going to solve our environmental crises but it's one small way to take nature seriously enough so we won't destroy it before we understand it so what gives us a few a few more reasons to keep trying and not give up yeah yeah I like that a lot as well and and I guess the thing that I wonder is is there a question that you've always wanted to be asked and you're like I wonder why no one asks this question or or something you wanted to bring forth that you've never had an opportunity to talk about but you've wanted to does anything come to mind in that different times you know I get fixated on on different issues I'm very interested in this fact that humans can we see better than we hear you know we can understand some visual elements better than sonic elements so I'm always looking for better ways to visualize sound there's a history of people drawing you know birdsong with diagrams musical transcription scientists using sonograms you know sound spectrograms that divide the frequencies into two different lines on the page but I've always wanted people to get better at this to improve the visualization of sound in a way to make clearer sense of what what animals are doing and what nature is doing so I'm always looking for collaborators to work on that it's starting to happen but a lot of cool visualizations of sound don't have all that much information in them they just look cool like a lot of this is almost like synesthesia it reminds me of like the shape of sound like you're blending it's a synesthesia but it's also like musical notation like it's the idea of having to be able to write down sound you know I mean the first sound recording wasn't recording the sound it was turning it into image so we'd remember it which is kind of fascinating to think can you say more about that you know I'm working on a book about recording and it came out that the very first sound recording device whose name I've forgotten because I'm just digging it up was a way to have a machine notate the sound like write down the sound as little marks on a page people thought that would be useful because why would you want to record sound not to hear it again but to be able to reproduce it again like musical notation you know I see like like we had a different idea of what it meant to document music before there was recorded music it was to when when can we have some marks on a page so we can reproduce this sound yeah I guess there's a parallel there between like oral culture and written culture and how things used to be spoken and there was something about this and then they needed to be encoded and preserved for posterity and doing that with musical sound at the beginning at first I guess right or some of the earliest visual art is like storyboards like comics you know telling stories with images you know what I'm talking about like on greek pottery or ancient babylonian things you know egyptian hieroglyphs are telling stories with pictures rather than some words that you could recite it's like oh this happened then this happened here's check out here's the picture and then this happened like cave paintings are you know the most detailed images of animals but there's sort of little sketches of like images of a hunt or something something that happened like an image to recall a story rather than rather than uh entire like um aesthetic visual thing you know we're all trying to recall something if that makes sense yes yeah it makes it makes total sense there there's a great book that I recently read called wisdom sits in places yeah I know that one I can't remember who wrote it but I remember it's about you know this concept of kind of the importance of storying places yeah but keith basso is important yeah yes yes yes yeah keith keith basso who was also kind of a uh a musicologist I think and he was a big inspiration and good friend to edward abbey you know who was a great nature writer and and I didn't even know yeah I think it was like gary nabhan or his wife was working on the archives basso's archives and recordings and things and charles boden someone else who knew keith basso he wrote some great lines about the future blood orchid by charles boden a book you should definitely read imagine the problem is not physical imagine the problem has never been physical it's not biodiversity it's not the ozone layer not the greenhouse effect the whales the old growth forest the loss of jobs the crack in the ghetto the abortions the tongue in the mouth the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or redistribution of what we call wealth imagine it goes deeper right to the core of what we call our civilization that no one outside of ourselves can affect real change that our civilization our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness imagine the problem is not physical no amount of driving no amount of road will deal with the problem problem is not that we are powerless that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act we hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside I'm no better my guts roil with fear this is how the future comes to me how I stumble down unmapped lanes and suddenly I'm in front of that cat house where she waits unloved her face of indeterminate colors the lips smiling the eyes knowing far too much I'm always walking sometimes in a forest with pink amapas bending over me their petals carpeting the ground sometimes in the desert with every shrub and tree and plant raking my skin with thorns it's very quiet soft purr of a breeze brief bursts of birdsong whirr of insects and I hear this roar she comes as a locomotive is flying across the ground smoke belching steel wheels screaming no engineer in the cabin and behind this engine is an endless strand of box cars no tramps looking out because the doors are closed and there are no tracks never a single length of track this express goes its own way it will happen too fast for me to react too fast for me to close my eyes shut my ears turn my body and I will briefly face the future I cannot remember it and be honest because this future is unlike the past I like to pretend will be the future this time the future is alive and then it will be gone sometimes this happens in the night and I see the glow of the lights as it vanishes into the land the future is palpable no charts of economic growth or population growth can possibly suggest loot or cargo there will be no first hundred days for this future there will be no five-year plans there will be no program imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts I don't know how that connects to what I was talking about but I've always been impressed by this book blood orchid by charles boden unfortunately he's not around for you to interview him but you know he he he kind of combines edward abbey's love of the road the american west with somebody like william burroughs yeah thank you for sharing that I I'm a fan of having poetry on the podcast so yeah thank you for finding it yeah it counts as prose somehow but it's very poetic prose yeah because you know I know he also wrote about keith basso they were friends I've always been attracted to these writers and thinkers and musicians who are who are kind of rebels they they're always doing what wasn't expected of them you know something something else everyone everything suggested you're gonna go this way they say oh yeah so see you later I'm going that way instead and you live in a van you're driving around you you know what this is about you don't know where you're gonna go next but exactly I I resonate with that kind of nomadic uh liminal unknown because it feels more true it feels more real and something almost transgressive about it that it's um it's it's blurring boundaries or bending them and and I think that that kind of thing is important how often are you moving and moving every day or you you go to one place for a few weeks or how does it go it depends on when when you catch me like we're kind of held up here at the moment while we wait to depart for portugal so we're trying to get somewhere warmer and we should have been gone already but there were circumstances that came up that prevented us from leaving and should be very very soon like in the next week we'll be heading out do you know where you're going to go in portugal we'll start towards the south and where it's warmer and maybe make our way it's definitely warm there yeah yeah there's even you know it's a good time to go to the algarve does have a fair amount of tourists but there's beautiful red rocks by the water you can still swim this time of year yes it's very nice and then if you go like alenteo in between before you get from lisbon it's it's kind of empty there's just not too many people there it's really beautiful but interesting a lot of interesting characters living in the hills the hills have eyes yeah there's a place uh where there's uh these dinosaur tracks that go up this cliff what were the dinosaurs doing climbing up the cliff like no they weren't it was flat and the whole land collapsed and became vertical and these tracks you know for years uh people came up with the idea that these are the tracks of a donkey carrying the virgin mary like up to the top so they built this shrine up there where they created this whole kind of cult religion had hundreds of years of burning man type parties celebrating celebrating this story they built an opera house it expanded there were all this stuff it's now all like in ruins but the tracks you can see yeah it's a very beautiful spot this isn't it's not that famous it's not far from lisbon but it should it should be a famous story portugal is a great country for dinosaurs you know if you type in stegosaurus directions in portugal there's going to be a huge stegosaurus in a town square somewhere try it it exists and and so otherwise there's lots of interesting people hiding out in the hills if you want to meet some of them yeah like we we would like to relocate there and have a little off-grid thing somewhere in portugal because it's a great place for that and um like you said there's interesting stories and people yeah it's very nice have you also talked about or written about the journey itself or is that mostly like hidden it's it's interesting in a way the podcast is a face of the journey you know it's it's kind of documenting my travels when we're more on the move I try to do field recordings and have them be the background you know one time we were in some place where there was some really weird frog mating happening and it sounded like science fiction from the 1950s yeah and I was using that in the episode so I I like to have the place that I'm passing through be present in the recordings it's just we've been in poland for the last while now and so it doesn't make sense and I'm like right now on the street near a train crossing like you heard which part of poland are you in uh lower silesia in a place called wrocław well you should drive through prague and we can meet in person yeah if we're going down through czech republic it would be great to to pass through and say hello are you going to be there for a bit yeah I'm here oh okay okay cool thank you for passing through today yeah you your listener thank you for your support for your attention for spending some time with me and this episode's guest if you're enjoying this content please subscribe rate it like it tell your friends about it buy a billboard somewhere next to a highway promoting it I mean I'm kidding of course but your support really does mean a lot to me so thank you for listening and I will talk to you next time