The author who listens to the sound of the cosmos

Henderson has a knack for crisp characterization (“Singing came from winging”) and vivid, playful descriptions (“Through [the cochlea], the booming and buzzing confusion of the world, all its voices and music, passes into the three pounds of wobbly blancmange inside the nutshell numbskulls that are our kingdoms of infinite space”). He also excels at injecting a sense of wonder into aspects of sound that many of us take for granted. 

It turns out that sound is not just a great way to communicate and navigate underwater—it may be the best way.

In an essay about its power to heal, he marvels at ultrasound’s twin uses as a medical treatment and a method of examination. In addition to its kidney-stone-blasting and tumor-ablating powers, sound, Henderson says, can also be a literal window into our bodies. “It is, truly, an astonishing thing that our first glimpse of the greatest wonder and trial of our lives, parenthood, comes in the form of a fuzzy black and white smudge made from sound.”

While you can certainly quibble with some of the topical choices and their treatment in A Book of Noises, what you can’t argue with is the clear sense of awe that permeates almost every page. It’s an infectious and edifying kind of energy. So much so that by the time Henderson wraps up the book’s final essay, on silence, all you want to do is immerse yourself in more noise.

Singing in the key of sea

For the multiple generations who grew up watching his Academy Award–­winning 1956 documentary film, The Silent World, Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s mischaracterization of the ocean as a place largely devoid of sound seems to have calcified into common knowledge. The science writer Amorina Kingdon offers a thorough and convincing rebuttal of this idea in her new book, Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water.

Beyond serving as a 247-page refutation of this unfortunate trope, Kingdon’s book aims to open our ears to all the marvels of underwater life by explaining how sound behaves in this watery underworld, why it’s so important to the animals that live there, and what we can learn when we start listening to them.

It turns out that sound is not just a great way to communicate and navigate underwater—it may be the best way. For one thing, it travels four and a half times faster there than it does on land. It can also go farther (across entire seas, under the right conditions) and provide critical information about everything from who wants to eat you to who wants to mate with you. 

To take advantage of the unique way sound propagates in the world’s oceans, fish rely on a variety of methods to “hear” what’s going on around them. These mechanisms range from so-called lateral lines—rows of tiny hair cells along the outside of their body that can sense small movements and vibrations in the water around them—to otoliths, dense lumps of calcium carbonate that form inside their inner ears. 

Because fish are more or less the same density as water, these denser otoliths move at a different amplitude and phase in response to vibrations passing through their body. The movement is then registered by patches of hair cells that line the chambers where otoliths are embedded, which turn the vibrations of sound into nerve impulses. The philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith may have put it best: “It is not too much to say that a fish’s body is a giant pressure-sensitive ear.”