WHEN I was a plastic-minded impressionable boy, I had a vinyl record. I wish I still had it so that I could tell you what it was called. But it was a recorded story, voiced by TV presenter Johnny Morris. I loved Johnny – he presented a kids’ animal show, Animal Magic, and this record similarly played to this persona. He was telling a story in the first person, of him waking up in bed and listening to all the sounds he could hear while lying there before getting up to start the busy day. What made this such enthralling listening for me was that this imaginary street was populated with animal families and he then proceeded to describe what they were all doing via a collection of recordings from what was probably the BBC wildlife sound archive.
The sea lion family next door, with Mr Sea Lion gargling in the bathroom, an anthropomorphic image conjured up by a real-life-recording, and the fallow deer across the street, trying to kick-start his scooter; to this day, I just have to hear the burbling, coughing, throaty roar of a fallow buck, calling in the rutting season, and I get a mental image of a deer sitting astride a 50 cc Vespa, desperately trying to kick it into life.
I would often find myself lying in bed doing pretty much the same thing, just without so many exotic animals to listen out for; there was something comforting – and there still is – about getting a handle on the world via your ears before you get up and stagger into it. I recall lying under my duvet, the pale-blue light of dawn just getting in around the curtains. I would listen out for the milkman and the purr and clink of the electric milk float. I would listen to the milkman’s footsteps and try and count the number of bottles being picked out of the crates, and then in my mind’s eye try and link the count to the bottles I would see on doorsteps on my way to school. I’d listen to my dad get up and go to work, the metallic fumbling, of, first, the keys, then the door handle, then the starter motor – four turns before the Vauxhall woke up – and then I’d hear the purr of the Viva’s 1.8-litre up the road, Dad working his way through the gear box. This was the dawn chorus for the earlier years of my life, inspired by Johnny.
Then when we moved to the countryside proper, my ears popped, as if they had been full of water, and suddenly cleared. The music of nature was much closer to my window, which, together with the old single-glazing, no curtains and iron frames, meant I could really let my imagination fly out of the house to the sounds I heard. Here the dawn chorus was less about machines and the trappings of an urbanised world of tarmac, concrete and machine. It was as it should be. I really heard birds for the first time. As before, I would lie in bed but I would layer the familiar household pre-dawn sounds with those characters sitting in the honeysuckle, oak and thorn.
The mighty wren, an angry little man, the ticking alarm of a robin, the freewheeling bicycle, the dark cowl of the blackbird, his song as rich and deep and classy as his plumage. I was beginning a process, building a picture, telling myself a story, getting to know the characters by their acoustic signatures alone. Unconsciously, I had started practising the beginning of what some would fancifully call ‘mindful listening’.
In the same way as a person can recognise the voices of those people familiar to them, the voices of their parents, brothers or sisters, I could recognise the song thrush, repeating his phrases, as if trying them out to see if they fitted the melody, then getting bored and discarding them for the moment. I could hear the cock bird at the top of the big oak and I could also recognise his neighbours, rivals for the attentions of the hen birds. In other oaks across the field, and still further away, there was another of the same kind singing in woodland by the old sandpit by the badger setts.
The thing is I didn’t know what they were at this stage, I hadn’t watched the spotted breast swell with its music, and similarly, all the other birds of this acoustic landscape were still strangers as far as spotting them was concerned. But that didn’t stop my winding thoughts and imagination tangling with their melodies, I was really listening to them, trying to make out each and every breath that vibrated through their windpipes. I was telling their stories as I listened to their comings and goings, picking out the differences between their various different vocalisations, trying to match the song, the contact call, the alarm call. I recognised individuals, too; that song thrush across the field had a few unique inflections and a couple of phrases that my neighbouring one never used. I imagined how and where they were perched, their size and what they might be communicating to each other in the twilight. My imagination was run through with the song of their lives. I had built the beginnings of an acoustic ecology, started to notice the players without so much as setting my eyes on them. It was rich pickings for my hungry ears, and it still is.
The practice of listening deeply to a landscape, not just birds but the whole interconnected ecology of sound, is such a vital part of our natural connection. The wind playing across the hills, tuned by the species of vegetation it encounters on its way, each grass stem, twig and branch, a reed sounding and lending its own individual qualities to the acoustic landscape. Add to this the animated minstrels: the stridulations of grasshoppers, the scrape of lizard or squirrel claws on rock and bark, the mating music of birds, amphibians.
There are even sounds quieter than the whine of a gnat’s wing, secret sounds easily missed: worms, pistons in their burrows, gurgle with the push and pull; barnacles fizz and pop; snails rasp; place your ear to the hulk of a dead tree and you can almost hear the decay; the scouring of countless beetle larvae jaws; listen attentively to a pond and you may hear the common but rarely heard singing of water boatman beneath the surface.
Each of these parts adds richness to the world. They are instruments in the whole, the players in the orchestra that gives everywhere a sense of sound. A unique web of noise, a sound sense of place.
Just as many self-help gurus preach the art of listening to strengthen your business relationships and increase the effectiveness of your dialogue, we can apply the same to our relationship to nature. We’re all in a dialogue with nature, a conversation of some kind, but it may not be one in which we’re doing much of the listening; we are full of our own prejudice and bias, preconceived ideas of what things sound like. Listening is hard work, it takes a lot of concentration and to be in the moment for a modern human in his or her frantic life might seem a very odd place to be.
So, like any skills, and to develop fully this ability yourself, you need to practise. Initially, you might want to go out of your way to do this, to find time with this exercise specifically in mind. Go out on a sound-search; find a place and breathe into it. Go looking for a rich soundscape that is most likely to reward you. Eventually, you’ll be able to do this anywhere you happen to be: in the garden, the park, at the bus stop, even the tube station. But, for now, find somewhere quiet, and by this I mean free of people where you won’t feel too self-conscious and where other folk won’t distract you. Make it a time dedicated to your ears, give yourself time when you can relax and when you might find it easy to empty your mind of all other concerns and distractions.
The rules are only one, and it sounds almost too straightforward: you simply have to listen – but listen in a careful and attentive way. You need to be able to listen mindfully. Most of the time we hear unconsciously. We need to be able to turn off autopilot and flick our audition into manual – to take control.
The practice of mindfulness is met with scepticism by many; ‘mindfulness’ is a word associated with alternative therapies and medicines and isn’t, perhaps, taken seriously by the mainstream. However, when you change your reference point and realise that many of the martial arts are based on this practice as a form of focus and meditation, it does change the flavour of the word somewhat.
To mindfully listen is about paying attention in a particular purposeful way; it’s about being in the moment, a neutral now, free from preconceived ideas, and leaving behind anything that might clutter or cloud your thoughts.
Get as far away from technological audio contamination as you can, mute your devices – mobile phones, pagers, anything that might invade your moment and interrupt your concentration. The aim is to let your ears and thoughts leave your head; you need to get out of yourself. To make this sensory journey you have to free your mind of any judgements. Try not to predict what you might hear before you’ve heard anything. Empty your head and go with what you discover. This is that ‘being in the moment’ again. Sit or lie down, take a moment or two to free yourself from mental clutter, take a few deep breaths, settle in, get comfy and go exploring – I often shut my eyes for this. Your floozy easy-eyes are tempted to take over and distract from your ears. This mindfulness is about letting go of all distractions even those that come from within. Just the feeling of the breeze on your skin or the sun on your face can generate sensations that trigger extraneous thoughts that can sneak in from nowhere and ambush the auditory circuits of your brain. It’s hard.
You have to really focus in on a sound. Explore it, listen to it as if it’s a piece of music that you’re hearing for the very first time on some expensive speakers or noise-cancelling headphones. Use your ears like you might use your eyes; go listening around and then, as you might use your hands while exploring, try and pull it apart, tease out its tones and timbres. Is it a dry sound, a harmonious one, or does it have discordant qualities? I often see sounds as colours or imagine tracing a line with a pencil, but I’ve been told this just might be down to the way my brain works.
No matter – simply find what works best for you. Imagining the sound-making mechanism sometimes helps. I don’t only mean what’s making the noise. Don’t just think, ‘Oh, that’s a cricket’ or ‘There’s a frog’. Try and climb into the sound, get sucked into its waves, ride the pressure ridges and wallow in the troughs. Imagine the actual physical qualities of the sound-making instrument. Is it a dry chitinous exoskeleton rubbing against the same, or a reed vibrating as air is forced over it? Get to the substance of the sound.
When you’ve got one type of sound and you’re happy that you’ve exhausted its possibilities, in your own time, move on. While keeping an awareness of the first, go acoustically hunting for another. Change your tuning. As we’re visual monkeys, only a visual analogy seems applicable, but it’s as if you’re focussing your ears. Over a period of time, try and find as many sounds as possible, count them (carefully, don’t let the numbers take over), jump about, revisit old sounds and listen out for changes in energy; speed and volume will impart different qualities to the sounds you are hearing and change the experience.
The goal for this kind of mindful listening is to wake up your ears, not just by getting away from and eliminating everyday distractions. It’s about silencing thoughts and worries other than those focussed on the sounds you are hearing. As you practise, you will start to hear the whole landscape and its audible connections. You’ll intertwine with a thriving, throbbing, humming, whirring, swishing, snapping, smacking, scratching and fluting acoustic whole; a sound view, a noisy vista, an acoustic ecology. Once you’ve tuned in and you’ve dampened your personal kinetic noise, you’ll become aware of even more levels of detail.
When you start hearing things you’ve never noticed, you’re getting there, you’ve woken up from your unconsciousness. To be fully acoustically aware, to be truly sound savvy, takes things to a whole new level and opens up a whole realm of possibilities when it comes to increasing the intimacy in our relationship with nature.