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[“The Earth Has Music for Those Who Listen”] Professor David George Haskell shares new insights and discoveries from his latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. Dr. Haskell discusses the special “coil” geometry of the inner ear – which is filled with fluid very akin to sea water – and how an array of cilia, or special “hairs” shared by millions of species large and small, allow us to perceive the vibratory symphonies that exist all around us. However, with our specific biological evolution, we humans are only able to hear a narrow sliver of all of the vast diversity of nature’s sonic abundance with our ears – unaided by technology. But, with the many technological instruments at our disposal, we are able to detect and “hear” the subsonic and supersonic communications of our flying, swimming, microscopic, and other animal relatives.
David invites us to frequently practice listening to nature’s many sounds, and to endeavor to experience the unity of life. He also shares with us how our musical instruments – the drums, woodwinds, and strings, are often made from trees, metals, and even animal parts that are all part of the sonic experience here on Earth, and that music is therefore a deeply ecological experience. However, David tells us, the advent of industrial machines and crowded urban landscapes has introduced an entirely new sonic experience to humanity – one that may be best described as “sound pollution” and that may have, for many of us, severed the direct experience of interconnectedness and interbeing with life that was commonplace for our ancestors. Hence the vital importance of getting to the parks, the woods, and, if possible, the wildernesses outside of our cities and suburbs.
SOUND IS A GENERATIVE FORCE
Sound is a generative force, David tells us, akin to the earliest compression waves of genesis: before matter in the early universe was the plasma, and in it, the compression waves of the sound of creation. From humpback whales, whose sounds can travel thousands of miles through the ocean, to the tiniest of shrimp, and from the high-pitched call of the elk to the ultrasonic cacophony of bat colonies, our world is awash in sound… the sound of life.
ABOUT DAVID HASKELL
David George Haskell is a biologist whose work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at Sewanee: The University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature, and the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award. Dr. Haskell delivers a unique perspective grounded in modern biological/ecological science and enriched by a more prosaic and timeless cultural ethos of connection and biophilia. His 2017 book, The Songs of Trees, won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing and was named one of the Best Science Books of 2017 by Public Radio International’s “Science Friday,” and was selected by Forbes.com as one of the 10 Best Environment, Climate Science and Conservation Books of 2017. His 2012 book, The Forest Unseen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
RELATED LINKS
Podcast Episode 24 – David George Haskell The Song of Trees
Podcast Episode 64 – Bethany Yarrow, Sacred Sound & Sacred Water
Joachim-Ernst Berendt – Wikipedia (Author of Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound, and The Third Ear)
IMAGES
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth Community Podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry, and today
we’re visiting with biologist and author David George Haskel. Hey David.
Hi, Aaron. It’s great to be with you again in a remote ether here rather than in person, but it’s always good to connect.
Yeah, likewise. And yeah, we recorded an episode very early on for our podcast series right in downtown Boulder along the
creek there next to some beautiful cottonwoods with some ducks in the background. So yeah, now we’re taking advantage of some of the
communication technology to do this remotely.
Okay, well, we can just imagine the river running next to us. I love that conversation down by the river because the sounds of the river and the
docks and people hanging out is a good space.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and I’m really excited to talk about your new book and share with our audience some of the real
treasures that you’ve got in there.
David George Haskel is a biologist whose work integrates scientific literary and contemplative studies of the natural world.
He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at Sawani, the University of the South, and is a Guggenheim Fellow.
Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History Literature and the 2013 Read Environmental Writing Award.
Dr. Haskel delivers a unique perspective grounded in modern biological and ecological science and enriched by a more
prosaic and timeless cultural ethos of connection and biofilia. His 2017 book The Song of Trees won the John Burrows Medal for
Distinguished Natural History Writing and was named one of the best science books of 2017 by public radio
internationals science Friday and was also selected by Forbes.com is one of the 10 best environment climate science and
conservation books of 2017. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the
PETN EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He told me before we started recording that although he did his
undergrad at the University of Oxford and PhD at Cornell University, he got his schooling in the woods.
David, your latest book which we’re talking about today is Sounds Wild and Broken.
Sonic marbles, evolutions, creativity, and the crisis of sensory extinction and clearly you’ve
been spending even more time in a number of different natural and maybe not-so-natural settings or
more human settings put in this book together and it’s been a real joy to read it and learn from
it. And I guess I want to dive right in and ask you what do you mean by the crisis of sensory
extinction? Yeah, thank you for having me on. It’s real pleasure to be in conversation with you. I’m looking
forward to our chat. Yes, and so that’s the third part of the subtitle of the book. And I think
we live it in a time where we have Sonic marbles, beauty part of my goal with the book is to open
people’s ears up to the stories of Sonic communication, the riches of sound on our planet, and also
to highlight some of the ways in which I think we’re in a sensory crisis particularly as it relates
to sound. Part of that is a paradoxical sort of duality. Is it we’re in a time of great
silencing? So through our over extraction and through climate change, through over harvest
things, through habitat destruction, many ecosystems are losing their sensory sonic diversity.
Where once there were thousands of voices singing out, now those voices are dwindling either
being entirely lost or present at much, much lower, much less beautiful levels. On the other
hand, we were in this sort of crisis of like too much noise around human industry, human traffic,
where we are pumping out, pumping out so much sound mostly throughout machines. I mean the problem is
not human voices. The problem is tapping fossil fuels and other sources are great because
source of energy. We can pump out so much sound, but it’s mothers, the voices and the songs of other
beings. So you’ve got silencing someplace like too much noise in others and then not wrapped all
that is a problem particular to us and that is in attention. And I think that’s part of what I think
of as the crisis is if we is the most powerful species on the planet, some microbes might argue
with that particular arrogance statement, but no doubt humans are having, we’re nearly eight
billion of us in our appetites keep increasing. And if we stop listening to the voices of our
neighbors, of our non-human neighbors, of our kin, of our brothers, sister cousins, the trees,
and the birds, and the living rivers, if we stop listening how can we possibly, to a good job of being
good kin and being good neighbors. And so part of the intent of the book is to go out and listen and see
what we can learn from that. Some of what we learn will be full of renewal and joy and all
sorts of amazing connection. And some of it will be heartbreaking, but that connection is necessary
for figuring out what should we do? How should we live our lives? What is the ground for right action?
Yeah, I think I’m implicit in your writings and in the conversations that we’ve shared together is I
think a call for a lot more immersion in and connection to what we would call nature, right? And there’s this
interesting discourse about what is nature, what isn’t nature, but the natural non-human,
non-built environment, non-industrial world. And I’m really curious because this obviously has informed
your scholarship, your research, and your writing to such a profound degree. What is that
like for you, that practice of connecting with nature? And I know you’ve lived in a number of
different places and have traveled to a number of different places. How has that
part of your life and practice evolved over time? Yeah, and so, you know, my life in many ways is
unruited, right? So as born on one continent, I live on another, I’ve moved house, you know,
a dozen times for various reasons. And yet I think that’s not an uncommon thing in
the way. It’s just like an allegory for like a whole why humans have done, whether or not we
stand one place for a whole lives or not. And that is a potential disconnection from the
stories of home. And perhaps it’s because I have moved and don’t live in my place of origin.
I think it’s really important to get out there and literally to listen. And some particularly
transformative experiences for me were one going out to the woods in Tennessee where I live for
more than 20 years and I still teach in Tennessee. And so like one little patch of forest,
it’s one square meter forest. And I’ve returned to that now over many years, 15 years,
just to sit and shut up for a change and pay attention. Just like, what is the light doing
today? What are the birds saying? And like, why can’t I understand what they’re saying
still after so many years of listening? And you know, what’s happening with the trees?
And you know, I don’t have the pointers, I don’t have an agenda there. My only agenda is to try and
practice a show out and actually paying attention with all of my senses. And I literally do
it. What I think of a sensory check-in is like, okay, remember to get your hands on the soil.
Listen with your ears. Pay attention. Smell things. Get down, get the nose down on the ground and
see what the smells of the soil have to tell us today. So all of those, and such in a way,
a very, very simple practice to show up and go through the senses, including the senses
that we don’t really have names for, like the sense of, you know, when you touch a pine needle
or a leaf, you get a sense from the muscles in your body of how flexible it is,
how dry and brittle. So we’ve got dozens and dozens of different senses.
Our fingertips have got a, you know, a dozen different types of nerve receptors in them.
So what we call a sense of touch is really like, boom, there’s a whole lot of stuff going on with just touch.
Same thing with sound. Of course we hear through our inner ears, or at least many of us do,
and of course that hearing ability dwindles as we age, and we all have different hearing abilities
based on how the structure of our inner ear and what cake built these were born with.
But we also hear through our fingertips, through the soles of our feet,
for low frequency sounds we hear in our chest. So listening to sound is also an experience
that wraps up lots of different parts of the body.
So that patch of words, just, and this one I’m just showing up and trying to pay attention,
and I eventually wrote a book about that, the forest unseen.
But beyond the book, really, and I really mean this quite seriously,
is that I learned so much from the woods by doing that.
By then I taught biology at a college level for like 15 years,
and got degrees in biology and ecology, and of course those degrees are great,
wonderful mentors, and lots of great stuff to be learned through formal education.
But the education of just letting the woods ask you questions.
What are these cat pills, and what are they doing?
Why are they so bristly, and how do they affect the trees above us?
That sort of stimulus to curiosity in a way was like forest giving me a reading list,
but then because I like just like to read, I’d say most of my reading is in the scientific literature,
which of course is quite dry, and it’s in the way it’s wooded.
But the stories inside are so amazing, people who’ve devoted their life to studying the feeding ecology, cat pillars,
that’s what that is so cool, and I want to learn from that,
so that my appreciation of the cat pillars is expanded.
You know, another practice that was really important was doing a similar thing, but in cities.
So in Manhattan, in Denver, in Boulder, some, going back to the same places and listening within the environment
that is much more effective, of course, by human presence,
and realizing that human sounds, part of the larger sounds of nature doesn’t mean they’re all good,
or that we shouldn’t be thinking carefully about what sounds we do and do not want to make in future.
But that immersion, and I was born in the city and grew up in and around.
I was born in London, but grew up in Paris, and so being in an environment is a good chunk of my experience,
growing up, and I have not been a big fan of the division that many in the sort of ecology environment community
draw between nature on one side and cities on the other.
I think that sort of abandoned cities and the cities become places of great environmental injustice,
because the attention of a lot of environmental groups has been mostly on wilderness areas and places beyond the city.
As it should, right? There’s some big issues there, and the wilderness needs defenders.
But so to do vulnerable parts of the city, where highways, I mean, literally the federal government had a 90% cost share program
for putting highways through low income and minority neighborhoods in the US for decades.
And that, of course, results in habitat destruction for non-human species,
but the main effect is on the quality of life, the physical quality of life,
the mental quality of life for people who have to be breathing those trafficking and listening to traffic noise.
And so returning again and again to open my senses in the cities has renewed my love and appreciation of the marbles of human music and human culture,
but also made me realize how these environmental questions are present right in the city,
just as much as they are outside of the city.
Well, absolutely beautiful, and you just wove so many threads together.
I want to pick up one of the threads that you spoke to a couple of minutes ago,
which is this practice, this discipline of sitting in the same patch of woods in Tennessee,
and it reminds me of this Japanese tradition of Shinran Yoku, which is known as forest bathing.
I think we talked about it before, and it’s literally sitting and staying put in one spot for many, many hours,
opposed to the sort of triathlete conquering mentality of tiking as many miles as possible in a given timeframe or what have you.
It’s not quite as inquisitive or conquering in its spirit.
It’s as much softer kind of listening and opening up, and I have found increasingly as a way to deal with potential stress,
as a way to get to much greater clarity in whatever thinking and development and planning work that we’re working on with the Y in our community,
and also especially when writing.
There’s something that I’m able to access through that practice that is not nearly as reliably or readily accessed at other points in time or in other situations or environments.
And I’m really curious for you, too, as a writer, has that been your experience?
Is that where you also experienced quite a bit of inspiration, perhaps?
Yes, and yeah, I mean Shinran Yoku is a good practice to sort of evoke in this context, because it does is you point out,
draw us into a different mode of being when we’re in the community of life.
And what one condition around Yoku in on a city street with trees down it, so on.
I mean, we, you know, that divide the energy would be a different thing.
Of course, I’m walking it on, you know, an amount and meadow without, you know, other with the human buildings and things around.
The key thing is the intention and the attitude that we bring to the practice to open our senses to the place to accept whatever it is that’s happening around us without judgment,
at least not for the moment, and just to be to be in that place and let, particularly in the woods, let our bodies interpenetrate with the creatures around us.
And when we inhale, just be present for the aroma of the soil.
And when we gaze around or listen, just let those that sensory impression wash into us.
And the amazing thing is that it changes not only the way we’re thinking, but it has molecules from the forest that bind into our blood cells.
And so we carry the forest with us when we leave that.
So it’s a very physical kind of interconnection that’s happening.
And yeah, I mean, in my own work, absolutely going out in the woods is often a great way to de-stress, but it’s also a way to connect into other stresses, right?
So that when the first really cold nights come in the winter, that’s a part of the natural cycle of things.
And yet, you know that some of the birds who haven’t had an easy time of it this year say they couldn’t feed themselves, those are the nights that they’re going to kill them.
And so we open to the heartbreak just in the rhythms of life, let alone what humans are doing to the ecology of the world.
And I think it’s important to be open to and not create sort of nature is this place of always being happy, happy, it’s all peace and everything.
There is a lot of peace to be gained, very deep peace, but within that peace, there’s pain as well as joy.
That’s, of course, a great, the great tension and paradox of all life is unspeakable beauty and inexpressible pain sort of all wrapped up together.
And being out in the woods is a way of realizing that that tension exists throughout the living world.
It takes particular forms in our own lives or in the life of a salamander or a tree.
Of course, I’m, you know, I’m not trying to project human things out onto them, but to draw a parallel of tension there.
And tapping into those stories beyond the human has been, I mean, if I didn’t do that, what little value there is and what I write on pieces of paper, I think comes from spending those hours and hours,
trying to listen to the voices of non-human beings. And that’s, I think, my primary goal as a writer is to try to elevate those.
And so when I’m gone, it’s like, well, I told some stories in my sisters and brothers and hopefully that honored them and maybe perhaps it also helped them by drawing those stories into human imagination.
That’s really beautiful.
Yeah, and I want to show for our audience who are looking at the video version of our interview that here is the book that we’re speaking about today.
Sounds wild and broken and it’s so compellingly laid out.
I mean, it’s, it’s really a, I would, I would see this as, as much philosophy as it is ecology, biology, et cetera.
And the way you’re weaving together these different themes and topics, you know, from origins to the flourishing of animal sounds, flowers, oceans, milk, evolutions, creative powers, sexuality and beauty.
Human music and belonging, bone, ivory breath, right? I’m describing or I’m reciting the section titles and certain chapter titles in your book and then listening in community in the deep past and future.
You’ve really woven together so much in this work.
And one of the things that sticks out when I was reading is this whole cacophonous universe to sort of misuse the term universe of sounds going on underwater in like a saltwater flat in the Chesapeake Bay area or something.
And the way you’re describing this immense happening with millions and billions of creatures that were ordinarily maybe just walking or driving by totally oblivious to and this kind of thing repeats itself over and over again across ecologies and water on land.
And I tell us just a bit about this whole thing with the little shrimp there in the Chesapeake area because it really struck me.
Yeah, that’s, I mean, the human air, of course, is adapted to hearing on land, right? I mean, and does a reasonably good job of that. I mean, my cat can hear way higher frequencies than I can.
And so, you know, all species live within that sort of narrow range of hearing and the human, we live in a sensory multiverse in other words, multiple perspectives on the same sort of vibratory energy is happening in the world.
And the sounds underwater, because of the physics of sound, when those sounds like a whale, I mean, you know, like the most famous underwater sound probably.
The song of a humpback whale, when the humpback whale is seeing that sound comes up to the surface and then it bounces back down so it says the surface of the ocean is like this big sound reflector.
So unless you’re like right on top of where that whale is singing, you’re not going to hear it if you’re above the water.
And for a long time, certainly Western science thought that the sounds of the ocean was silent. I mean, Jacques Cousteau, his first film in the 1950s, the one that one that sort of put him on the map and one lots of awards was called Lamont DC last but the silent world.
Because his imagination was that the ocean was silent. But now we know because we have hydrophones which are underwater microphones.
You drop that hydrophone down in the oceans, particularly in very rich oceans like coral reefs or as you mentioned that the estuaries on the coast are full of nutrients.
Wow, it’s like crazy amount of sound down that of rhythms and textures and things that are totally different than what we’re used to on land.
So in one passage in the book, I drop a hydrophone down off an island where I work and teach sometimes St. Catherine’s Island off because of Georgia, big salt marsh area.
And from the to the eye, it looks very uniform, just a bunch of the same species of salt marsh grass stretching to the horizon, drop a hydrophone.
There are these little thumping sounds from from from silver perch fish. This is sort of bleeding birthing sound from the toad fish that are under there and wrapping all of that are the sounds of the snapping shrimp.
And it sounds like when you’re frying something in a very hot grill, or that sort of, I don’t really eat bacon, but if you put bacon in and cook it that sort of silly sound, it’s just like that.
And that silly sound is from hundreds of little shrimp clothes. These shrimp are like at best an inch long, often smaller than that.
And they have a clogged snap and it snaps so fast that it actually causes the an air pocket to open in the water and that air pocket like implodes and as it smashes back down, it releases actually a flash of light.
You can’t see it with a naked eye, but it’s like a really, really powerful implosion and then it makes sound.
And then the sound of hundreds of these together creates this to me, it sounds like a silvery cloud of sparkly sounds. And in many warm waters, this is so loud that it actually interferes with navies who are spying on each other.
Like the military have lots of got lots of microphones down in the ocean. And around snapping shrimp, they can’t hear what’s going on.
And in WWII, the US Navy actually parked and hid some of its submarines amid the snapping shrimp bed so that they couldn’t be found.
So, and then of course they’re a memory mammals, dolphins and seals and whales adding their thing that thousands of species of fish that we now know make sounds extraordinary.
And this is stuff that it’s really only in the last few decades and particularly I’d say the last 20 years that people have realized how ubiquitous and important the sound is.
There’s a study just came out this week from Australia where they found that the little larvae of oysters, so these are microscopic little larvae floating around.
And most theologists would say they can’t hear, they don’t have ears, but turns out when you play the sound of a healthy oyster reef, the little larvae attracted to it and sent them there, they can pick it up because their bodies are covered in these tiny little hairs that pick up sound vibrations.
So, and still to this day in the literature, you see people say, well, most insects can’t hear.
That’s just nonsense. Most insects don’t hear the way we do.
And some insects have got specialized like eardrons on their legs and things like that, which you know, very cool crickets and then other insects don’t happen, but every insect has got little hearing organs in the joints of their legs to pick up vibrations coming up from the ground into their legs.
Some of them have at the base of the antennae, I wish I had some antennae to show you here and point it in my head for those listening on the podcast here.
There are like a dozen different places where insects can pick up sound and of course some of those ways of listening only hear like say very low frequency sounds, they don’t hear like the human voice would be mostly inaudible to them, but for that species maybe the human voice is not to be relevant.
But what’s relevant is the movement of the trees and the whole buzzing sounds that other insects make with their legs and make the leaves and the twigs tremble.
Remember, hooking an accelerometer up to a cottonwood tree in bolder to record the sounds of the tree movement within the tree to accelerometer picks up sounds inside the twig in the trunk.
And I heard these little buzzing sounds like what is that?
So I sent a soundfought to Rex Krokov to his at the University of Missouri and it was a world expert on vibrational communication among insects.
And he said, yeah, absolutely, that is a little insect making a sound, but you can’t hear what the area is because the sound is transmitted through the twig, not through the air.
We don’t know what species it is because we lack a complete inventory of all the sounds of, I mean, like cottonwood trees are pretty common in highly populated areas.
I mean, so we know the songs of all the birds of North America. Do we know the songs of all the insects? Not at all.
So there’s below the water and then the twigs of trees and in the leaves are all kinds of sounds waiting to be explored and appreciated.
Wow. So I want to ask the flash of light that comes from the, is it the snapping shrimp?
Yeah. What is what’s causing that? How does that even work?
I think so I would need to re-read the paper to give a definitive answer on that.
But so this, this, it’s through because there’s so much energy released when that little air pocket that is created.
So when the, when the claw snaps shut, the movement of the claw is so fast that it creates a little air pocket behind it.
And then that air pocket almost immediately then collapses again because it’s in the water, right? There was no air there before.
And then that collapse releases sound energy, but also a teeny-weeny little flash of light as well.
That’s remarkable. So it’s, you know, for a shrimp claw that is a fraction of a millimeter.
Now, those shrimp use the claw to, to, to communicate, but also to feed because if you’re a little invertebrate plankton and you’re right in front of that claw,
you get killed by that impact. Even if you’re not in the claw, it’s like this sonic shockwave of bam.
So, you know, they catch their food like this. I’m, you know, glad I’m, I get to appreciate it as a bigger creature with a hydrophone and not as a teeny-weeny little thing floating around.
Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of teeny-weeny things, I want to get to the microbiology you’re speaking to, but before going there, can you tell us you mentioned hairs as part of the ability to hear which is picking up waves transmitting through various media, right?
And you, you discuss the term Celia in, in the book and in this section sensory bargains and biases.
You talk also a bit about our ear and how it has developed. Can you just give us a quick kind of like run through of that physiology and how that might compare and contrast with many of these other creatures that are also picking up waves?
Yes. So, when, when we think like when we’re talking right now, the vibrations in air go through the through little holes on the sides of our head and then get transmitted through some bone tiny little lever bones to a coil inside our heads.
That’s the inner ear. And inside that coil is fluid, essentially roughly the same composition as seawater.
And inside that call a tiny little hairs that gets stimulated by the sound waves. And amazingly, they arrange like the keys of a piano from like from high to low.
And so low frequency sounds stimulate the hairs that are tuned to low frequencies high frequency sounds stimulate stimulate the hairs that are tuned to higher frequencies.
And that then gets each hair then connects to a nerve that shoots a message to the brain. So every time we hear using our inner ears, we’re using these tiny little hair cells.
And this is a leading cause of hearing loss. And I have some of this in my ears. And we all do as we get older, we lose a lot, especially the high frequency sensitive cells.
Just through the aging process, but also if we’ve listened to too much loud music or had guns shoot off nearest without hearing protection, power tools, all these things that can damage out the hairs in our ears.
So one amazing thing about those hairs is that essentially those coils in our ears are direct descendants of the inner ear of fish.
If you look inside the head of most fish, they have almost the same structure. It’s not coiled in the same way, but it’s little sacks and tubes filled with fluid that have hairs in them and they use this to both here and also to figure out how they’re moving through fluid.
Same with us, right? Our sense of balance also comes from the inner ear.
So even though we are in superficially very, very different bodies underneath it, we’re hearing in a very similar way using essentially the same structure.
Even more amazing, those hearing organs in the legs of insects, or in the antenna of insects, also have the same hair in the little siliary hairs.
Silia is just a biological term for this specialized kind of hair.
So the same cellular structure, a little toughy hairs, picking out of the cell, is used as the foundation of hearing across the animal kingdom.
And even in non-animal creatures like little affiliates and other single-celled creatures that you would find swimming around in ponds and in the ocean, they also have these hairs on them and they use the hairs to feed themselves and to move.
But the hairs also pick up motion in the water around them and so you can think of that as a form of hearing in a single-celled creature.
So yes, these little hairs seem like a sort of a pretty obscure little physiological detail. For me, it’s like this great example of both the unity of life that all of the animals are hearing based on the same kind of fundamental cellular structure.
And life’s incredible mind-blowing diversity is that the human ear, even though it has the same structures, hearing very different frequencies in different ways than the leg of an insect or a little swimming lava of a baby oyster.
So this tension between unity and diversity, I think, is present throughout life, throughout biology, throughout human cultures.
And as part of it, I think one of the most beautiful things about being alive is to appreciate that tension and to revel in both ends.
Absolutely, yeah. You know, my mind’s running in multiple directions here with some of the other pieces in your book that I want to ask about.
Let me ask about this. One of the things you point out is that generally speaking, the frequencies that are used among different species, more or less, corresponds or correlates with body size.
And maybe I don’t know if this is limited to mammals or extends beyond mammals, but talk about rabbits and so on.
And then there are some aberrations, like with the help, for instance. Can you tell us a bit about what’s driving this body size thing in general and then where, why are we seeing some of these exceptions?
Yeah, I think we have an intuitive understanding of this from like looking at an orchestra. Like the base is much larger than the violins and the violins are bigger than the cellos, which are kind of intermediate.
And so for any vibrating structure, the smaller it is, generally the faster it’s going to vibrate and that’s going to make a high pitched sound, which is why the base, which has its big long strings and big pieces of wood, generally makes very, very deep notes.
Unless you really shorten the string on it or do something else like that. And the same is true across the animal kingdom.
The lowest sounds in the world, you know, elephants and things can make a really low frequency sounds, whereas small insects tend to make very high frequency sounds.
It’s a crude correlation, but it’s a correlation nonetheless. It’s based on the physical laws of sound making.
And then of course, as life always does, it produces some little twists and turns, breaks the rules, and the elk in the Rocky Mountains, one example of this,
elk are huge. And based on their body size, they should be making really big, deep rumbles.
But if you’ve heard them doing their bugling sound in the fall, it’s like, really high pitched at the frequency that you’d expect a rabbit to be making its sound.
So it’s like they’re making, it’s almost like the base in the orchestra is making the sound not just of the violin, but of like a piccolo or some like super high pitched instrument crazy.
And actually, we don’t fully understand how they do that. Somehow they’re really shortening and tightening their vocal folds.
And in fact, there have been some physiological studies on people who go elk hunting, and then they donate the larynx of the elk for people to study it in the lab.
And it’s still a bit of a mystery how they pull that off.
Now, also a mystery is why they do that. And there are two not mutually exclusive reasons. One is it could be a sexual selection thing.
So the elk is showing off to one another, and maybe it’s sort of like a peacock’s tail of the throat.
If I’m really strong and don’t have many parasites, I can make this high frequency sound in a way that a weaker elk cannot.
Maybe a display of vigor or of body size in some way. Paradoxical one because a big, a big elk would actually generally on average make a lower sound.
So, but entirely possible that they’re making it to as a sexual display.
It also happens, particularly in the mountains, that high frequency sound carries very well over the low roar of the wind in the trees.
And anyone who’s been up in the rock is knows that when the wind gets going through the ponderos of pines and then higher elevation in the spruce and fur can really raise an extreme be loud, but low frequency sound.
And so a lot of the animals that live in that environment make songs that are higher pitched than that low frequency sound.
The other example, a great example that I love hearing in the Rockies are the red crossbills birds that are these crazy birds that they literally they called crossbills because their beaks are crossed at the front like a like a wrench with that’s kind of gone a skew.
And they use those to pop open pine cones and spruce cones and feed on the seeds inside.
They make this beautiful warbling song often in the late winter early spring when they’re still snow on the ground.
And the still on the wind and it carries right over the top of that mile of low frequency sound.
Now, it’s really an amazing thing to hear that.
And that’s a higher pitched song
that we would expect to make them to make
based on their body size.
So those are two examples of a more general theme
in sonic communication, which is the voice
of most singing animals is adapted to their home environment.
So if you go to the seashore,
where there’s lots of waves crashing
and making all kinds of sounds,
the shorebirds and the goals that make
very loud piercing high-pitched calls
so they can carry their voices across that.
The same with birds that breed
along rushing mountain streams
and any other kind of noisy places.
Birds that breed in dense forest
make slow, whistled songs
that can travel through the degradation of the forest.
A dense forest tends to smear the sound
because every leaf is a little sound reflective.
So a very complicated sound
would get completely erased and messed up.
So what a forest-nesting birds do?
They have a nice slow melodious song
whereas birds out in the prairie
they’re singing super high-pitched up and down, up and down.
It’s almost like watching the end of a rapier
in a dueling contest
when people were waving their swords around.
So we hear in the voices of the red cross-bills
and the forest-nesting birds
the imprint of the habitat.
The mountain quite literally lives inside the forest of the bird.
So beautifully put,
you’ve mentioned that there are many sounds
and sound frequencies that we humans don’t pick up
and that there’s a good number of species out there
who won’t really pick up our human voices
in the range of our frequencies.
Do you have a set for any particular creatures out there
who have an exceptionally broad range of ability
to hear and discern?
Yes, bats are the absolute champions
because they use super high frequency sounds
for echolocation.
And those crazy things about really high frequency sounds
is that they degrade really quickly in the air.
So bats, when they’re shooting out,
these are sounds that, let’s say,
humans at best can hear up to 20 kilohertz.
So 20,000 hertz.
I can’t hear about eight, that’s right.
And that’s true from those old people.
bats are hearing well over 100 kilohertz.
My cat is hearing 50, 60 kilohertz
but bats are way out there.
So they have to blast out that echolocating sound so loud
that it would definitely, if they actually heard it.
So what they do is they disconnect their ear bones
to little inner ear bones.
When they blast out that sound, they disconnect them
and when the sound bounces back,
they reconnect those bones.
Crazy, bats are just crazy in terms of how their bodies
have adapted to this echolocating life
for they’re using sound as the same way
that we would use a search light beam
to see things in the dark.
But you know, cats and dogs,
every day, companions for many of us
have extraordinary range of hearing.
They hear down pretty much to the frequencies
and the low frequencies that we can hear.
But then they hear much higher.
And particularly for cats, they hear very high.
And that probably helped them when they were out hunting
little birds and insects and mammals
because a lot of the sounds that the prey make
in the vegetation are very high-pitched rustling sounds.
So if you’ve gotten ear that can pick up
those high-frequency sounds,
you’re probably going to be a better hunter.
Same thing, of course, with the mice and the rats
that are trying to avoid getting eaten by it,
but you know, they want to hear one another as well.
And to me, this is an amazing example
of the limitations of scientific approach to life.
And that is we now know that mice and rats
are singing to each other.
And there have been probably hundreds of millions
of mice and rats kept in laboratories
around the world for medical research.
And yet until very recently,
nobody thought to put a microphone that was sensitive
in the super high frequencies that we can’t hear.
People thought, well, they’re just silent.
And sometimes they make little squeaky sounds
that we can hear.
If you record them, they make this incredible language
of full of subtleties, of communicating one to another,
but it’s all above what we can hear.
So if there’s an acoustic realm now,
even in very common animals like rats and mice
and cats and dogs that we just have not yet plugged into.
And technology can help us expand our imagination
into those realms.
But first, we need to open the imagination to say,
hey, I wonder if that rat is singing to the other rat?
Wow, I can just imagine I remember here in years ago
at the campus of the University of Colorado here
in Boulder that we had more mice and rats on campus
in terms of population numbers and we had humans
because of all the research going on in the labs
or whatever.
And it’s just wild to think that there’s these creatures
in captivity and in the wild who are communicating
so very much in ways we are absolutely oblivious to.
Yeah.
And of course, we are quite good at being oblivious
even in the range that we can hear.
One of my goals is a teacher,
and I think one of the more important things
that if I do any important, as a teacher,
to keep people off the streets,
is introduce people to the sounds of birds and trees
in our local environment.
I really think every graduate of elementary school,
let alone college, should be able to pick out the sounds,
the voices of a few common birds and insects
and trees of their home environment.
Because it means that you can never again walk across town
and not be tuned into the rhythms and the vibe
of what’s happening in the more than human world.
And you can do it while you’re just walking
and looking at other things,
you’re just hearing the voices of other beings.
So, but of course, our former education program values,
things that can be tested universally on standardized tests
and the idea that students in Colorado should learn
or could learn the voices of Colorado birds,
but those in New Orleans or in New York
should be learning different things.
That’s just alien to the kind of universalizing,
homogenous view of education that is so dominant still now.
And I’m all four universals in general,
it’s great that people learn about some of the laws
of physics and the really only laws of biology
because life keeps breaking the rules,
but the sort of the suggestions and the rules
and the patterns of biology,
it’s great to learn how those apply across the world,
but it’s also good to have some particular local knowledge
because of course, our lives are lived entirely
in local contexts.
And even though we’re drawing resources from around the world,
we are embodied in particular places and times
and it’s good to connect to those stories.
As sources of joy as well as those like,
whoa, something’s a little broken here
and I need to figure out what I can do to fix it.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, that ecological knowledge is so imperative.
And one of the themes we hear from many of our indigenous elders,
friends, colleagues, wisdom keepers is that the depth
and breadth of local and regional ecological knowledge
that is maintained through those cultural traditions
is an essential of vital set of resources.
If we want to call it that,
it’s really cultural treasures that I think
are so very important, especially right now
as we’re seeing the need for the regenerative,
restorative efforts all around the planet.
And yeah, for the most part, it seems many,
much of the sort of mainstream industrialized culture
has really lost touch with a lot of that.
And there are some exceptions, of course, but by and large.
It seems that a lot of us are living completely disconnected
from these rhythms like you’re speaking about the deep cold nights
or lunar rhythms or other celestial and seasonal rhythms
and songs and rhythms.
I, you’re making me think of my grandfather,
bless his heart and memory.
And I remember sitting with him when I was a little boy
and he would communicate with the robins.
Like this.
And when he would hear certain songs from them,
he would say things like, oh, it’s going to rain soon.
Or, you know, he was really tuned into what they were saying.
And so it’s not that it’s got to be lost to all of us forever.
These are things we can pick back up,
I think, relatively easily by slowing down
and paying attention as you suggest.
And yes, and listening to one another,
finding teachers and guides from, as you mentioned,
indigenous communities in the US and around the world
have kept a lot of that knowledge.
Others have discovered it in other ways.
And the transgenerational teaching is really important.
And I think it goes multiple directions.
The traditional way, of course,
is that the elders of teaching younger people
who are coming up and my grandparents taught me things
about getting food from how do you work with seeds
and how do you work with vegetable plants to feed yourself.
And also, what did they remember from their younger days
about the voices of birds that we don’t hear anymore?
And so in a way, they transmitted the memory of the 1930s
into my mind, even though I wasn’t once a lot well after that,
because they told me those stories and those stories.
Stick with me because they came from within the family
for people whom I loved and respected.
But also, we need to remember the cross-generational,
particularly those of us in roles as teachers
to listen to what young people are telling us
about the nature of the crises that they are experiencing
or what they have learned about, what the birds and the mushrooms
and the trees and the forests and the living rivers
are telling us.
So this cross-generational connection and listening,
I think, is, of course, takes can be formalized in education,
but needs to expand well beyond that and flow both ways.
Yeah, absolutely.
I agree with that completely.
I want to pick that thread up from much earlier
in our conversation about the microorganisms
and joking about something like who’s in charge here, really.
You mentioned in one of the chapters
that the certain microorganisms had their growth rates surge
when loudspeakers were played to them,
basically projecting sound from their own growth patterns
and other situations.
Is that the right way to describe that?
Yeah.
Yeah, so all bacteria, well, I shouldn’t say all,
because we’ve only studied a handful of them,
but we know that bacteria make little sounds
probably because the bacteria, as they’re living out
their lives, the surface of their cell is moving
because they’ve got all this inner dance
of molecules going on and so on.
So they’re vibrating, they’re pulsing, they’re flexing
and that pushes sound out into the world around them.
As far as we know, they’re not using those sounds
to communicate, like to sing or to convince other bacteria
to do things, but honestly, it’s pretty early days
because almost you can count on one,
maybe the fingers of two hands,
the number of papers that have actually examined this
because very few people have studied sound
in microbial communities.
So there’s no current evidence of communicative sounds,
but we do know that, as you said,
they are sensitive to the sounds that they themselves make
and are stimulated by it, at least in some species.
You play those sounds back to them
and they seem to respond positively.
Same is true for single-celled organisms,
bigger ones like a neighbor and silly aids,
they make little sounds and they seem to be sensitive to it
but what all that means in terms of communicative networks,
I should say, as a stimulus to imagination,
perhaps, and to caveat,
is it sound of that tiny microbial scale
is really different than sound as we experience it?
Because each one of these cells is so small,
it lives in a world where the viscous qualities of water
really dominate, so we experience water is very fluid.
If we were tiny little microbes
because of how the rules of motion
and physical laws of the universe work,
or at least the universe on this planet,
when you get down to those small scales,
the water starts acting in a much, much more viscous way
and it’s almost like swimming in molasses.
And so sound waves would then be experienced
not so much as vibrations in air or even fluid,
but as little pulses of motion in that flexible fluid.
So it’s kind of like,
I mean, it could be a pleasing thing to be immersed
in this nice warm bath of fluid
with these pulsing kind of sounds around.
I mean, already I can feel my shoulders kind of loosening up
as I think about that.
So maybe, I could come back as an E. coli
and experience that for a bit.
But yes, the microbial world has sounds within it
and there are a few papers that suggest that these microbes
are not insensitive to those sounds.
You know, this is making me think also about the whole
neurology of what’s going on with creatures
who have neuro systems.
And my daughter actually did her undergrad degree
in neuroscience and is in med school now
and has done work with a group of doctors
who apparently have found certain frequencies of sound
that can be projected locally around the brain
and demonstrably accelerate and improve things
like language acquisition
when somebody’s learning a new language.
And it seems to me, I know there are some famous things
from some very interesting characters
like Edgar Casey who said a century ago
that the medicine of the future will be sound.
I have this sense that we’re just on this frontier
as a species of discovery and kind of a vast new set
of potentials when working with sound
and understanding and experiencing sound.
And you kind of get at some of the mysterious potency
of sound when you’re talking about human music
and also when you’re talking about kind of this wild thing
going on with waves larger than galaxies
and ancient primordial sounds still somehow resonating
inside of our bodies producing thoughts.
And I don’t know, it’s almost like you’re verging
on the esoteric or the mystical here with some of this
of which I love.
And I’m very interested to hear from you
about your thoughts when it comes to what we might do
with sound going forward and what is going on
in this human realm of music making
and what’s going on in this interaction
between matter and sound and creation.
Yeah, well, that’s a big question.
But an excellent one.
And I think first we should just start with what sound is.
So a sound and acousticians and physicists
have different definitions,
but essentially sound are pressure waves,
compression waves flowing through matter.
So my vocal folds are trembling as I speak
and then make little waves, compression waves in the air
that are now transmitted to microphone
and that comes through the wires and the ethernet and so on
to you, which makes other little waves
that eventually wind up in your ear.
And those waves happen as we discussed in solid matter
like in the trunks and twigs of trees and in water.
There were also waves present before in the early universe
before they were even any atoms.
When the universe was like compressed down so small
that was so hot that all you had was protons and photons
and electrons in this essentially like a really hot kind
of plasma or lava.
And there were sound waves flowing through that
through irregularities in the plasma.
So and that was as far as we know,
some of the earliest sound in the whole universe.
As the universe expanded that plasma cooled down
and atoms formed, but the remnants of those waves
are still with us in the cosmic microwave background,
excuse me, cosmic background radiation of the universe,
which is in the microwave part of the spectrum.
We can’t perceive it except by putting satellites
out into outer space and there’s so much radiation
distracting instruments here on Earth
that you can’t pick it up.
So we launch satellites and you can pick up,
and what do you hear?
You hear these waves flowing through this background radiation.
And also in the spacing of the stars,
the galaxies and when people go and astronomers
measure them from instruments in the desert,
south-west in the US, these incredibly sophisticated,
huge telescopes mapping the position of galaxies in the sky.
And it turns out these galaxies are spaced
about 500 million light years apart on average.
Of course, there’s a lot of variation,
not 400, not 600, 500.
And that is the spacing of the peaks
of these early sound waves that got pressed into the matcha
of the early universe.
So yeah, I mean, it sounds mystical,
but it’s also just straight up physics and astronomy.
And of course, that’s what physics and ecology do
when you listen carefully enough.
They take us back to some of the same questions
that our culture has labeled as mystical.
And their mystical approaches into that personal revelation
and so on, that they interact with the external processes
of science.
So you know, mysticism and physics and ecology
is all like wrapped up together.
And even more so at the subatomic level,
an area that I don’t pretend to understand,
except to be amazed and inspired by what I hear from that.
And so the sound was present in the early universe.
Sound is present when we look at the night sky
and see the stars.
And the sound is also present as a powerful force
in our everyday, of course, through human language
and human music, we’re connecting one person to another.
And through that connection comes possibility and creativity.
The same as those early sound waves of the universe created
some of the patterns in the stars
and the background radiation of the universe,
it was a generated force, sound back then.
Sound is a generated force now.
And this is perhaps just my bias,
but I think music and particularly instrumental music
does that in an especially powerful way
because we unite our bodies, the human body,
the human breath, human fingertips
with the bodies of other creatures,
like bone and ivory and wood,
and then materials from the earth, like metal ores,
and we create this crazy,
high-meric union, the union of more than one body
into one to produce sound.
And so when we hear a violin play, for example,
we’re hearing, of course, the artistry of human musician
and composer, but we’re also hearing horse hair
and spruce wood and maple wood.
So we’re hearing animal lives, our cousins are the mammals,
and we’re hearing the voice of a forest emerging
from that violin.
And from many violins that were built in the 18th and 19th century,
we’re hearing forest wood that grew before we
started drilling for oil.
So we’re hearing the voice of the pre-industrial earth
emerging from an orchestra stage
or from a bluegrass fiddlers skill.
Even when you plug in an electric keyboard, what are you doing?
You’re using plastic keys, which are made from oil,
which, of course, is just ancient algae,
fueled by coal or natural gas or hydro power or solar panels,
whatever it is, wherever you get your power from,
you’re also connected to the college of the world.
So music is a deeply ecological experience.
And now when I go here live music, live music, especially,
I’m in the music for what it is.
There’s a human experience, but I’m also transported out
into the world beyond the human.
And I’m imagining what it would have been
like for the first instrument makers.
And one really moving experience for me
was to visit the caves in some, what is now,
some Germany.
But back in the ice age, people carved
what had now the first known musical instruments.
This was 40,000 years ago.
People living in these ice age caves took mammoth ivory,
took the wings of bone, bird bones, bird bone wings,
excuse me, hollowed them out and made flutes.
And so the breath of the hunter
flowed through part of the body of the prey.
And of course, the breath is understood
in most religious traditions as extremely sacred,
powerful thing is what gives us life.
That breath flows through the body of another being
and then beauty emerges from that beauty
that connects one person to another.
So that was some powerful experience then
to be the first humans to hear that music.
And it’s a powerful experience that we can have to this day
by just going to listen to someone play a flute
or play their violin.
We are united, but not alone.
We’re united through these other species.
And I think that’s really important in that we live in houses
that are made from wood and other materials.
We read books that are printed on trees.
So trees and other beings are necessary
for human interconnection.
I think there’s a sort of deep lesson in that
about interbeing, about ecological connectedness
and interdependence.
Absolutely beautiful.
I’m madly scribbling a couple of notes here
for the show notes.
And let me take the opportunity, David,
to remind our audience.
This is the YonEarth Community podcast.
I’m your host, Aaron William Perry.
Today we’re visiting again for a second time
with David George Haskel.
This time, talking about his latest book,
Sounds Wild and Broken, Sonic Marvel’s
Evolution’s Creativity and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction.
You can get more information about David’s work
and his books at dgHaskel.com.
And that’s Haskel with two L’s at the end there.
And I want to also be sure to thank
the YonEarth community supporters
and our sponsors and partners,
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And you did hear David talking about coming back
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We can get some farm to tub soaking experiences right now
in our human form with the Waylay Waters products,
which are amazing.
And David, we’ve covered a lot of territory.
And you’ve got me right now thinking about some
of my other favorite authors and books, like Yohim and Bana
and Turek, this wonderful book called Nada Brahma,
the world of sound back in the 50s.
And he wrote another one called the third year,
kind of picking up on this mystical tradition of the third eye.
And then, of course, Frijoff Capra with his Dau of Physics,
really dove deeply, I think, into some of the spiritual
and maybe esoteric traditions, how that was relating
to insights coming out of physics.
And later his book, Web of Life on the E. coli,
these have woven together so many, I think,
important themes for us.
And with your work, you’re taking a lot of this
to an even higher and deeper and more nuanced level
instead of experiences from city and Paris
to the wilderness in a lot of different localities
that you’ve had these experiences.
And I want to ask you, I’m really curious
when you’re thinking about the future
and you’re thinking about where we’re headed
and you’re thinking about what might be needed.
If you could wave your magic wand,
maybe it’s made of bone or wood or whatever,
if you could wave your magic wand and help us fix and heal
some of what’s broken right now on the planet,
what would you love to see happen?
In whatever time frame, my year, 10 years, 2013, whatever.
What would you love to see happen when it comes to sound
and our connection with sound and that interdependence
that you’re speaking of in that ecological interbeing?
Well, if I can use both ends of the wand,
I will have a couple of wishes.
And one is we’ve talked on already
and that is for practices of listening
and embodied attention being more deeply woven
into how we educate ourselves and whether it’s young people
or people, I do think re-embodying, remembering
that we’re not just brains floating in jars connected
to the computer that we live here in bodies
in a magnificent and yet threatened world.
So if kids could learn songs and birds
and learn the smells of trees and the taste of water
in their local environment, we’d go along.
And that would be sort of a radical literally
back to the roots way of not teaching particular lessons
about particular, here’s the answer
to this particular environmental question
by giving people the resources they need
to be good neighbors and kin.
And the other is tropical forests.
I think the tropical forests right now are in deep crisis.
Some of the silencing of the world’s forests, of course,
there are problems in many different places,
forest fires and invasive diseases,
particularly affecting in North America.
But the tropical forests host so much biodiversity,
so important for human rights,
but in the indigenous cultures that live in those forests,
as well as for the ecology of the planet
and are still being cut and degraded at very high rates.
So of course, tropical forests, conservation
and indigenous land rights in tropical forests
is a very large and complex issue.
But I think that is an area that,
I’m glad to see you get more attention
and there’s something I’ve tried to do
in a couple of my books is list up some of those stories.
In North America, we use an awful lot of tropical wood
and we use gasoline and other things
that are coming dug out of the drilled
in many tropical areas.
And yet our imaginations are often disconnected
from tropical forests.
So I think taking responsibility for those actions,
standing in solidarity with and helping people
who are working to protect their lands and the tropics
is very high on my list.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that with us.
And before we sign off, I want to mention and tease
for our audience that we’re going to,
after concluding the podcast episode,
have a few minutes of our behind the scenes conversation,
David, to pick up on a few of these extra themes together
that is made available for our ambassadors
in our ambassador network.
You have to get the special access code
to get these behind the scenes segments.
And you can go to yinterf.org to learn more
about becoming an ambassador if you’re interested,
networking with community all around the world,
working on these ecological, regenerative,
social enterprise healing projects together.
And so we’ll do that in a few minutes, David,
but yeah, before we sign off on the podcast episode,
I just want to open the floor up to you.
If there’s anything else you’d like to say,
speak to, mention that we didn’t get a chance to cover yet,
the floor is yours, my friend.
Well, thank you.
I guess I close with an invitation.
And that is for listeners to pick a spot,
I mean, it might be on the balcony outside your apartment
or a street corner or a city park or somewhere out
further away from human habitation.
And just return again and again over the coming weeks
and months for even for a very short period,
like one minute and just pour your attention into your ears
and let the soundscape come into your consciousness.
In other words, this is a listening meditation
but repeated again and again at the same place.
And see what kinds of sounds you hear at first
and then what sound was hidden behind the one
that you didn’t quite notice at first,
what sound is off on the horizon,
what shapes and textures do they have.
And through this process of repeated listening at that place,
and in essence, you’re befriending it
because how do we make friends in the human context?
We listen to other people.
Of course, we talk a little bit ourselves
in this practice we’re doing mostly listening.
I mean, you can talk at your spot as well if you want,
say hi.
So the invitation is to pick a place
and do some acoustic meditations
and see where that leads you.
What questions it might stimulate curiosity
and might suggest things about your work or your life
or it might just be an experience of being in the moment
and then you can move on to other things.
Absolutely beautiful.
What a joy to visit with you, David.
It’s a real pleasure, as always.
And thanks again for sharing on it.
With us sounds wild and broken.
And thanks for being on the podcast again.
Thank you, such a great pleasure
and I wanna thank you, Aaron.
Thank you, David.
Bye-bye.
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