A Book of Noises is a quirky, original, and entertaining book. It consists of almost 50 “notes,” all a few pages long, captured in four themes: “Geophony: Sounds of Earth,” “Biophony: Sounds of Life,” “Anthropophony: Sounds of Humanity” – a categorization for which Henderson credits the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause – and “Cosmophony: Sounds of Space,” the last one his own classification. This may give the impression of systematicity and scientific depth, but that is not what Henderson is after: “The entries in each category are just that – entrance points for longer journeys” (p. 2). The author is a journalist and his book is most of all a spellbinding and enjoyable collection of faits divers that all pertain, in one way or another, to sound. It thus celebrates the auraculous: “a wonder for the ear” (p. 1).

The author clearly is knowledgeable about the sciences (he has a scientist’s predilection for numbers) and their iconic practitioners as well as about music and musicians. Indeed, although the book’s title mentions “noises,” many of the chapters focus on noise varieties that are somehow rhythmic (rhythm = “any regular, repeated pattern of sound or movement” p. 145). Human bodies of course live by rhythms: of heartbeats, breathing, day & night, seasons, tides, walking, dancing … And where there is rhythm, music (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the art concerned with the combination of sounds with a view to beauty of form and the expression of emotions” p. 70) is never far away. Indeed, readers who are not intimidated by technical terms, such as “D natural minor scale” (p. 19) and “the tuning for the twelve half-tones of a scale was built by ‘stacking’ notes in fifths” (p. 20) have a slight advantage over readers that are. But Henderson lavishly quotes from artists inspired by other Muses, too. Unsurprisingly, the bibliography is long, as is the index.

The book is a Wunderkammer of fascinating facts related closely, or not so closely, to sound and music; Henderson sees no problem in diverging from his main theme when he has something interesting to tell. Did you know, for instance, that “at the time it formed, the Earth was spinning so fast that a single cycle of day and night may have taken between four and six hours” (p.  38)?; that the Northern Light sometimes makes a buzzing sound, “roughly the same volume as a human whisper” (p. 47)?; that a baby platypus is called a “platypup” (p. 70)?; that honeybees can recognize individual human faces (p. 90)?; that elephants “can feel rain thrumming on the ground as much as 240 kilometres […] away” (p. 103)?; that “Taa, which is also known as !Xoon, is reckoned to have as many as 164 consonants and forty-four vowels – or more than 200 distinct sounds” (p. 153)?; that “in England, a rural parish typically extended as far as its church bell could be heard: the boundaries were a kind of map made of sound” (p. 254)?; that Tagalog has a word, gigil, that means “the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved and cherished” (p. 275)?

The author’s taste for music is truly catholic. Coldplay, John Coltrane, Max Richter, Bach, Philip Glass, Ry Cooder … Henderson finds a reason to celebrate them, although usually for no more than a sentence or two. And he does the same for Pasolini, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, Douglas Dunn, Czesław Miłosz, Rilke, Ovid, Dr  Seuss, Aristophanes, Pliny, and dozens of others. Even more tempting are his mouth-watering descriptions of videos, which make you scurry to YouTube to check out the amazing fragments and clips he has delved up. I will resist listing all my favorites here, but allow me to whet your appetite by recommending you to check out the Konnakol duet by Shivapriya & Somashekar Jois, Omar Souleyman’s Remix of Björk’s “Crystalline,” and Henry Dagg’s toy cat performance of “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

The tone of the book is mostly lighthearted, and Henderson has an eye for juicy quotations. About the records sent out into space in NASA’s “Voyager” project, “the comedian Steve Martin joked that aliens had already been in touch to say, ‘send more Chuck Berry’” (p. 34), and he cites Peter Godfrey-Smith’s saying that “If a jaw is [..] a thumb for your face, then the bones from our jaw that evolved to be the ossicles are a car jack for your ear” (p. 69).

At first, the essays do not appear to be related by much more than the section in which they are placed. But one gradually realizes that Henderson playfully links his observations to themes that are close to his heart. In the first place, his essays on animals reveal that non-human species (bats, elephants, and whales) draw on sound (and vibrations!) for survival much more than on sight. This is a healthy reminder for humans, whose auditory capacities are so much more modest – and who therefore tend to underestimate the importance of sound and music. (As a film scholar I find it surprising how heavily the visual mode in film is privileged over the sonic and musical mode in film scholarship, for instance.) A second theme that runs through the essays on animals is the function of their hearing. Being alert to sounds helps animals to find preys (or be warned about nearby predators). No less important, it helps them communicate with conspecifics. I like this emphasis on communication, because my own favorite communication theory, relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995) builds on the assumption that communication is indispensable for cooperation between conspecifics, which in turn is crucial for the survival of the group as a whole (Forceville 2020: 25-26, discussing De Waal 2016).

Another part of Henderson’s agenda that gradually becomes more evident is his concern for the planet. Without losing his lighthearted tone, he warns that we are destroying our environment at a horrendous pace. He discusses the detrimental effects of sound pollution on animals and humans, the thunder of collapsing ice masses off the Ilulissat Glacier in western Greenland, and the diminishing variety of sounds of birds, mammals, amphibians and insects at Sugarloaf Park in California. A sub-text in Henderson’s book thus is “let’s respect and cherish other species and save the planet.” In this way, the author’s socio-political commitment shines through.

Henderson writes well, and thanks to occasional references to his personal life, he manages to create a sense of intimacy with his readers. He likes to play with language, with gems such as “a squad of squid” (p.119), “bin-based blackbird beatitude” (p. 125), and “Glory be to Creation for wonky things” (p. 128). And I liked this one: “The Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna create an amazing salad of rhythmic and harmonious sounds with gourd drums, carrot pipes, leek oboes and more. They make new instruments for every show, and turn them into soup afterwards” (pp. 189-190). He also has a preference for daring metaphors and similes (“Humans on Venus, the researchers concluded, would sound like bass Smurfs,” p. 14), which makes sense as “analogies and metaphors can enrich and deepen both poetic and scientific appreciation without blinding us to any truth” (p. 58). His enthusiasm is contagious, and despite the dozens of names (of artists, musicians, writers, scientists) that are mentioned in passing, this never gives the impression of mere name-dropping.

The book is dazzling as a kaleidoscope, and presumably reflects its author’s temperament, Henderson describing himself as possessing “a mind that jumps around like a monkey on amphetamines” (p. 57). A Book of Noises is not to be read in one go, but sampled and enjoyed in short stretches. If you’d ask me, who needs to read this book? I’d say, ‘Well, nobody ….’ But if you’d ask me, who wants to read it? I’d say: ‘Surely, everybody!’

References

Forceville, Charles (2020). Visual and Multimodal Communication: Applying the Relevance Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson (1995 [1986]). Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Waal, Frans de (2016). Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? London: Granta.