Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and this is The Takeaway. If it's safe where you are, do this, close your eyes and take a little sonic trip with me because we live in surround sound and you can't escape it no matter where you live. The annoying din of traffic, the hum of planes overhead, a symphony of songbirds, at night, a chorus of crickets. Now, those last two, the sound of the natural world, are the focus of a new book called Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. In it, author David George Haskell explores the diverse sounds of our planet as well as humans' impact on the world of soundscapes. I recently spoke with David who is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South. He started off by explaining the looming crisis that he calls sensory extinction.

David George Haskell: Life is made of interconnection. Life is made of relationships. The way those interconnections and relationships happen is through the senses. Sound is one of the most powerful of those because sound connects one being to another through vegetation and turbid waters, through solid barriers, even. Sensory extinction is a process by which these life-giving bonds between creatures are broken either by being smothered or fragmented or destroyed in some way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tell me a bit about what brought you to this line of questioning and research that becomes this text, Sounds Wild and Broken.

David George Haskell: Sounds inspire me because they connect the human to the more than human world. Of course, humans are extraordinarily vocal, musically creative species. We are one of evolution and culture's great triumphs of sonic communication, but paradoxically we're also the great destroyers of sound out in the wild through the noise we make and through our clearing of habitats. A study of sound connects this joyful celebration of the beauty and the creativity of the world with some serious consideration of how can we be better at being on the side of beauty and less on the side of brokenness. Sound is one element of this logical conversation about the extinction and crisis and justice that we're having now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: So far in our conversation, we have really been centering the human experience of sound, of what we hear, but sound is not just hear for us. In fact, in your book, you write about the earliest sounds on earth. Talk to me about what those sounds were and who or what was hearing them.

David George Haskell: Yes. The most primal sounds on earth are the sounds of the wind and the rain and waves crashing onto a seashore. It's just so wonderful to me that we can go say to a seashore and hear waves lapping on the shore, or hear the boom of thunder. We're hearing a sound that is almost unchanged from how that sound was 4 billion years ago on this planet. The great physical and geologic sound-making forces are still with us and we can be in that sensory moment in a way that we can't for other senses.

You can look at a fossil, you can look at some really old rocks, but you're not there. Your senses aren't completely there in the way that you are when you're embedded in sound. Then it took hundreds of millions of years, indeed billions of years for the first communicative sounds to evolve. Bacteria evolve, they make sound, but as far as we know, they're not listening. They eavesdrop on one another, but they're not singing or calling, making sounds whose evolutionary intent is to change the behavior of another creature.

That would happen much later in animal evolution where insects and fish and frogs started making sounds whose intent was to draw, to attract a mate, or to give an alarm call to warn others about the arrival of a predator, or maybe to give a little buzz to make a predator drop you. Sound can be an alarm that buys you a little time when you're being chased. All of these different ways in which sound connects creatures evolved probably starting around 300 million years ago. Probably with the insects were the very first singers, the cricket-like creatures that had little ridges on their wings, and when they rubbed them together they made a rasping sound, not a particularly dramatic spot for vocal communication on the planet, but boy did it trigger an explosion, a great diversification of sound after that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm a person with generally normal hearing, but we might think of this in the center of the normal curve. I don't have a particularly good musical ear as we sometimes might describe it, but I do experience my world because I'm both sighted and I could hear. How does sound become part of the sensory scape for those who may be hard of hearing, whose hearing may change, or who may have been born without hearing?

David George Haskell: I think there are multiple ways to answer that. The first is a zoological approach, which is to say, to remember that the human hearing, even the people who have the widest range of frequencies hear only a tiny, tiny subset of the sounds of the world. The pigeons outside my window here can hear low-frequency infrasounds that I can't and no human can hear that. They can hear the thunderstorm before it even arrives over the horizon because those low-frequency waves travel sometimes for hundreds of miles and the same with the roar of the ocean.

There are creatures that can hear those low sounds. Then my cat, who's asleep on the couch right now, he can hear up to 50,000, 60,000 Hertz. My hearing at best probably went up to 20,000 Hertz and now it goes much lower with a lot of sounds that I can't hear anymore because I've lost a lot of hearing in the higher frequency ranges of my ears, but every species has its sensory window. The power of human imagination can then carry us into the world of the cat, or the pigeon through an act of imagination, but we can never truly be in the same sensory world as they are.

Then within humans is a diversity of how we pick up the vibrations of the world, people who have inner ears whose nerves or inner ear cells aren't functioning, pick up vibrations of the world not through the ears, but through fingertips and through vibrations that we feel in the chest and people are usually highly attuned to those forms of vibration. Then also find other ways of course, of communicating, of taking human language and turning it into a gestural language. Sign language has evolved multiple times in different cultures, usually from the ground up is a very grassroots thing among the people in the deaf community to continue the benefits of connection through language without sonic communication and air the way I'm doing now by speaking into a microphone.

Then for the rest of us, we all get to experience this narrowing of range because of a natural part of the aging process is to lose the high frequencies. For some people that happens faster than others, but it happens to all of us, which is in fact a window into evolution because the bargain that our ancestors struck with evolution was we get to have rich senses, sight, touch, smell, hearing, and we all have our strengths and weaknesses in those, but they're rich compared to say what the jellyfish senses.

We get that only at the price of having cells that can't live forever and bodies that can't live forever. The price of richness of sensory experience is diminishment over time. There's this grief in losing a lot of the ways of sensing the world that we may have enjoyed when we were younger, but that grief is a necessary part of having those senses and that applies to the sense of taste and smell and sight as well as hearing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I've been thinking about sound a lot more over the course of the past year as I went from an experience as a teacher and previously in media that is very visual. I'm standing in front of my class or I'm Zooming with them, to now hosting a radio show. Therefore only being able to communicate and build community with our audience, with our listeners sonically. What are some of the tools that we use as humans, but as you've pointed out, also in the natural world? What are the things that build connection and what are the sonic tools that encourage other beings, other lifeforms to get away from us?

David George Haskell: For humans, one of the primary tools it's a philosophy if you like, is attention. It's not technological or anything. It's just paying attention to sound itself and enjoying its physicality, it's diversity and then letting that stimulate our curiosity, which then connects us to other beings. I mentioned that my hearing is not particularly good, and it's getting worse year by year and yet when I'm with a bunch of 18-year-olds when I'm taking them out, say a group of first-year college students, and we're going outside, and whether it's in the city or in the woods, I'm hearing dozens of different species, all these different relationships because I'm paying attention.

Partly a defense mechanism in the world, right, you have to shut down your senses in order to focus and to concentrate. In a world in which we have to do that we also need a practice of sometimes deliberately opening our attention to listen to others, to be open to sound without judging it, and saying, "Oh, this is a good or a bad sound." It's not, "This is a sound. What is it teaching me? Where might it lead me? Into connection and conversation.

Sound is this paradoxical thing. There is almost nothing more ephemeral in the world than tiny little trembling waves in air, which is what sound is at least the sound that is traveling through air. If you're a whale, it's trembling waves in water. Or if you're an insect often is trembling waves in wood. Extremely ephemeral, they disappear as soon as they arrive and yet, those sounds open possibility and change the world. When insects started communicating one to another through sound, when frogs and birds did the same, they could live in habitats and in ways that were not possible before.

Imagine you're a tiny little spring frog, the size of my thumbnail, and you're trying to find a mate. With sound, you can do that in just a few minutes, because you can pinpoint exactly where that other frog is. You can assess that frog's quality, its vigor, its health, all through listening. Without sound, you'd have to wander around in the woods for weeks and weeks looking for this tiny, weeny little thing, maybe trying to sniff it out, it would take you forever, and therefore, that way of life would not be possible.

Most of the creatures that we live among the birds, the insects, amphibians, the vocal creatures, their lives, their function in the ecosystems of the world are only possible because of the way that they can connect with sounds, especially in places where it's always dark, like in the deep oceans, or the mouths of rivers where whales and fishes hang out to feed because it's rich.

It's turbid that they can't see more than one body length ahead of themselves. In the rainforest, you can't see your handheld in front of your face because the vegetation is so dense, and yet sound allows connection across dozens, sometimes hundreds of meters, or in the oceans occasionally hundreds of kilometers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Do you have a favorite sound?

David George Haskell: It's doing the rainforest. The rainforest is one of my favorite soundscapes because here we hear thousands of species all giving exalted voice to the diversity of life in this most diverse place that we know of on the planet that is a tropical rainforest all at once. Hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary creativity all bursting out at once. The other thing I really love is to hear birds singing in the city and of course, in the city, the birdlife is very much simpler.

There are only a few species that can make it but the birds have adapted their songs to the city. They sing different melodies, they sing louder, they sing at different pitches, to get around the traffic noise to fit into the city, and to exploit the resonance of being in courtyards and echoey spaces. As a kid, I grew up in Paris in France. As a kid, there was one solitary blackbird that sang outside our window, a small apartment with a courtyard behind it. To this day, when I hear that sound, I'm transported back to my childhood is the beauty of that very resonant reverberant sound of a bird that only recently has colonized cities.

Before the 19th century, there were no blackbirds and European cities, blackbirds through cultural evolution and a little bit of biological evolution figured out how to make it in the city. I hear life's adaptability and creativity and resilience when I'm hearing birds singing among the sounds of humans in the city.

Melissa Harris-Perry: David George Haskell is a Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of the South and the author of Sounds Wild and Broken. David, thank you for joining The Takeaway.

David George Haskell: Thank you, Melissa. I wish you many good sounds in the coming weeks.

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