The Sound of Wind on Mars

   

InSight Spacecraft with solar panels that vibrate in Martian winds

In 2016 the long-sought proof of gravitational waves arrived in the form of a cosmic sound, a “chirp” signaling the merging of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away from Earth. A couple of weeks ago, we were treated to the “sound” of wind on Mars. Wind moving across the InSight spacecraft’s solar panels caused fluctuations in pressure that vibrated the panels, and the vibrations were recorded on the spacecraft’s seismometer. These vibrations occurred at a low frequency, out of the range of most human hearing; but by shifting the frequency up an octave they could easily be heard. One of the scientists of the InSight project compared the panels to a flag waving in the wind, creating pressure oscillations that the ear hears as flapping. When I listened to it, however, it sounded like Earth wind noise recorded by a microphone—which doesn’t sound like wind as normally heard, at a distance, but as if close and blowing directly into and across the ear. Making the strange thus familiar is, oddly, comforting when one thinks about what it would be like to live in the Martian environment, with its atmosphere chiefly of carbon dioxide, as if eons ago the inhabitants of Mars were overcome by a “greenhouse effect” far worse than Earth’s—although if we keep burning fossil fuels while global warming releases other CO2 into the atmosphere we may be on our way to an irreversible Martian atmosphere eons hence.  

Echo and Reflection

That sound can turn space sacred is one of the principal reasons music is so central a part of ritual performance. (See this blog, April 18, 2011: "Sound Sacralizes Space.") Most Euro-Americans do not often think of sacred space in the world of Nature. A few anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, poets and folklorists study indigenous cultures that do think in those terms. Some music composers, particularly environmental sound artists, also tend to think this way. Recently, I've become interested in echo both literally and as a figure for that sacralization of sound. And thinking about echo led me to mirrors and reflections. 

Echo, I have been thinking, is to hearing what reflection is to seeing. Reflection challenges our normal perception of space. Echo transforms our perception of both time and space. Both are doublings (though not exact imitations); original and near-copy are both present, the reflection simultaneously with the original, the echo later, though usually overlapping in time. (That is, the original sound remains in memory, if not still present to the ear, when the echo is heard.) 

Echo Lake, New Hampshire

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was fascinated by both echo and reflection. He wrote about his encounters with echo chiefly in the woods and on or around lakes. His interests were aesthetic and appreciative, curious and scientific. He liked to hear the echo of his own voice, as well as the echoes of other sounds--church and school bells, axe blows, the shouts of children, the sounds of thunder, the tapping of the woodpecker, a falling branch, the song of a bird. Why was an echo "good" (strong) at one time and place, and weak at another? How did American Indians use echo to measure distance and guide them on their journeys? (He had a chance to observe this in his trip to Mount Katahdin, Maine, and he wrote about it in his Journal and in The Maine Woods.)

Frederic Edwin Church, Mt. Katahdin (Maine) from Lake Katahdin (1850)

More generally, Thoreau asked what happens to sound as it travels over distances? Echo helped him develop a proto-theory of ambient sound; he may well have been one of the first to do so. 

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Lake Scene (1861)

Thoreau wrote about his encounters with reflections in pools and lakes. For example, "The lake is a mirror in the breast of nature, as if there were nothing to be concealed. . . It is the earth's liquid eye. . . I should wither and dry up if it were not for lakes and rivers. I am conscious that my body derives its genesis from their waters. . . " (Journal, Dec. 2, 1840). Here he writes from a perspective of naive realism, as if the reflection were an exact copy of the original. Years later, a more careful and scientific observer, he is puzzled that the lake reflection he sees is not an exact copy, and wonders in his Journal from what standpoint (not his own) it might be. He concludes that there is no standpoint from which the reflected image would be an exact imitation of the original.

Asher B. Durand, Thanatopsis (1850)

While Thoreau in the mid-19th century was living out his pastoral at Walden Pond and writing about echo and reflection, American luminists were painting echo and reflection into their pastoral visions of forests and bodies of water. This cannot be coincidental. Rather than portray Narcissus looking at his reflection in the pool with the nymph Echo by his side, they painted natural landscapes with lakes and rock formations, rivers and ocean estuaries, cliffs and mountains, echo and reflection in the same scene.

Thoreau's vibrating to the sounds of the natural world is the aural equivalent of Emerson's transparent eyeball, in which the sense of self disappears into the ecstasy of hearing (or, following Emerson, of seeing). It is the same when sound sacralizes space and time. Every good musician has felt those magic, ecstatic moments, when the self or ego disappears and you are at one with your voice or instrument: you are your voice or instrument. In those moments time and space become something other, and you experience the music playing (or singing) you, not the reverse. 

Martin Johnson Heade, Thunderstorm on Narrangansett Bay (1868)

The luminists achieved a similar effect, as if they had become transparent eyeballs, eliminating the appearance of their painterly selves by removing from their paintings the marks of their creation. They did so by concealing their brush strokes, as in Heade's arresting painting of the thunderstorm on the bay above, an example of the Romantic sublime. Durand (above), Fitz H. Lane, Heade, and, in some of his paintings, such as his "Eel Spearing at Setauket," William Sidney Mount were among those who brought this luminist vision into being.

In Heade's thunderstorm the artist has vanished inside the painting much as the musician has become the music, the voice merged into the echo. Here, reflections are doubled: the water is dark, reflecting the sky, and this darkness contrasts with the white reflections of the boats' sails. Meanwhile, we see the jagged lightning and, in our mind's ear, we hear the echoing thunder. Listening to those paintings one may hear the co-presence of sound that is characteristic of sacred space.

     "Each more melodious note I hear
       Brings this reproach to me,
       That I alone afford the ear,
       Who would the music be."
                                -Thoreau, from "The Service"

Musical Being and the Wealth of Nature

Today's news programs noted that an independent Japanese commission, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, issued a Report on the incident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on March 11, 2011, just after the earthquake and tsunami. It was the largest nuclear disaster since the 1986 incident at Chernobyl. After reading the Report, it's difficult to continue calling this disaster a nuclear "accident." As Haroko Tabuchi wrote in the New York Times, the commission's chair, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, concluded that "What must be admitted, very painfully, is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan.’ Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity." 

No doubt; but the Report overlooks even more fundamental causes. Nuclear disasters are not caused by particularities of Japanese culture, though they may be exacerbated by them. They are embedded in the cultures of modernity, of the so-called developed world. The fundamental causes for this catastrophe are to be found in the reasons for the developed world's reliance on nuclear energy in the first place: One, the assumption that humanity could and should control Nature rather than try to live in harmony with Nature's economy. Two, that human happiness increases as material wealth does. And Three, that happiness is chiefly a technical problem, one that will be solved by continuing economic growth, fueled by increasing quantities of energy.

I remain convinced that what I have written about elsewhere (“Knowing Fieldwork,” in Shadows in the Field, ed. Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 87-100.) as “being in the world musically” is an antidote to this way of thinking. Very briefly, insofar as sound sacralizes space, our space, and time, our time, we live in harmony with Nature's economy; we do not invent our own. But how to realize that permanently? How to turn those moments into the norm? How, in other words, to realize sustainability through musical being-in-the-world? In this research blog I have usually discussed music and sustainability in terms of cultural policies meant to sustain people making music. But now I am writing about music sustaining people. 

Logocentrism is so ingrained that it is unmarked, the default mode: we are in the world in our heads, thinking one word at a time. How, instead, to re-orient consciousness to sonic-centrism? I don't mean to be taken so literally as to be suggesting that if we spent all our time grooving and flowing and dancing to melodies going through our brains and bodies all would be well. Rather, sonic-centrism as a default mode of awareness invokes not only the harmonies of musical melody but also the harmonies Thoreau heard in Nature's economy: in the wind and rain, the birds and frogs, and in the crickets' earth-song. It leads us to appreciate the wealth of Nature, not the wealth of nations.