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Music, Language, and Technology in More-Than-Human Sonic Cultures
Review products
BakkerKaren, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. Princeton University Press, 2022. x + 354 pp. ISBN 9780691206288 (hard cover); 9780691240978 (paperback); 9780691240985 (digital).
HaskellDavid George, Sounds Wild and Broken. Faber & Faber, 2023. xvi + 430 pp. ISBN 9780571362097 (paperback).
SteingoGavin, Interspecies Communication: Sound & Music Beyond Humanity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024. xvi + 233 pp. ISBN 9780226831336 (hard cover); 9780226831367 (paperback); 9780226831350 (digital/EPUB).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2025
Extract
I’m sat at my office desk writing this review when I receive a notification on my phone. An alert of this kind would usually be unworthy of comment. Yet, this notification informs me of a recent BBC News article on sperm whale vocalization. Intrigued, I read the story, which explains how a team of Cetacean Translation Initiative (Ceti) researchers, led by PhD student Pratyusha Sharma at MIT, are using AI technology to analyse large bioacoustics datasets of sperm whale clicks. Their analysis shows that the combining of clicks in sperm whale communication appears to parallel the grouping of phonemes to create words in human languages. What the whales’ different rhythmic sequences of clicks — called ‘codas’ — mean, however, is still unknown. Scientists have, so far, only caught a glimpse of the lives of sperm whales, and so it is impossible to know at this stage what information is carried by particular combinations of codas.1
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
References
1 Katherine Latham and Anna Bressanin, ‘The Sperm Whale “Phonetic Alphabet” Revealed by AI’, BBC News, 11 July 2024, <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240709-the-sperm-whale-phonetic-alphabet-revealed-by-ai> [accessed 12 July 2024].
2 Molloy, Claire, Popular Media and Animals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Haskell, David George, Sounds Wild and Broken (Faber & Faber, 2022), p. 287.Google Scholar
4 Bakker, Karen, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 33.Google Scholar
5 See: Haraway, Donna J., ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–82.Google Scholar
6 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. xiv.
7 Steingo, Gavin, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (Chicago University Press, 2024).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Ibid., p. 22.
9 Bakker, The Sounds of Life, p. 159.
10 Ibid., p. 174.
11 Steingo, Interspecies Communication, pp. 10–11.
12 Ibid., pp. 10-11.
13 Ibid., p. 46.
14 Ibid., p. 49.
15 Ibid., p. 53.
16 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. 16.
17 Ibid., p. 253.
18 Ibid., p. 255.
19 Ibid., p. 256.
20 Ibid., p. 256.
21 Bakker, The Sounds of Life, p. 3.
22 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. 168.
23 The plural form of the German word for ‘environment’, Umwelten, is a concept introduced by Baltic-German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944) to describe the different subjective worlds in which organisms of different species exist. His work emphasizes that reality is not a single objective entity but is sensed and perceived differently by each organism based on its biological makeup.
24 Bakker, The Sounds of Life, p. 171.
25 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. 165.
26 Ibid., p. 165.
27 Tyler Yamin and Alice Rudge, ‘“Sounds Like” Redemption? On the Musicality of Species and the Species of Musicality’, Bucknell Digital Commons (2024), pp. 1–21 (p. 5), <https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3157&context=fac_journ> [accessed 15 July 2024].
28 Ibid., p. 2.
29 Ibid., p. 14.
30 Steingo, Interspecies Communication, p. 13.
31 Ibid., p. 180.
32 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. 200.
33 Ibid., p. 254.
34 Steingo, Interspecies Communication, p. 181.
35 Ibid., p. 181.
36 Ibid., p. 184.
37 Ibid., p. 184.
38 For instance, Ozaki et al. have shown that the Kauai O’o bird’s song displays high pitch discreteness. See: Yuto Ozaki et al., ‘Automatic acoustic analyses quantify variation in pitch structure within and between human music, speech, and bird song’, PsyArXiv, 13 July 2020, doi:10.31234/osf.io/7ywxm.
39 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. 234.
40 Ibid., p. 16.
41 Ibid., p. 16.
42 Bakker, The Sounds of Life, p. 6.
43 Ibid., pp. 67–70.
44 Ibid., p. 84.
45 Ibid., pp. 201–03.
46 Steingo, Interspecies Communication, p. 57.
47 Ibid., p. 84.
48 Ibid., p. 87.
49 Bakker, The Sounds of Life, p. 56.
50 Ibid., p. 77.
51 Ibid., p. 201.
52 See: Berland, Jody, ‘“That Old Familiar Tweet Tweet Tweet”: Birdsong, Music, Affect, Extinction’, in Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures (MIT Press, 2019), pp. 175–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mundy, Rachel, ‘The Rose Garden’, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), pp. 146–67.Google Scholar
53 Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, p. 141.
54 Ibid., p. 290.
55 Ibid., pp. 153, 155.
56 Ibid., p. 148.
57 Ibid., pp. 339–40.
58 Ibid., p. 284.
59 Ibid., p. 288.
60 Ibid., p. 284.
61 Ibid., pp. 175–76.
62 Steingo, Interspecies Communication, p. 162.
63 Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).Google Scholar