NATURAL HISTORY OF SILENCE

Now hear this.

An eco-acoustic researcher at the Natural History Museum in Paris, Sueur has long been listening to the sounds of the earth, animals, and humans. Inspired by the work of the late Canadian soundscape composer R. Murray Schafer and Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist and author of The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), Sueur has traveled on “acoustic quests” to remote French forests and distant jungles in South America. One place he visits, the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Alps, prohibits noise in a surrounding zone of silence—as mandated by a 1975 decree. With humor and passion, Sueur describes his fascination with flora, fauna, dinosaurs, and genetics. One might call Sueur a sophisticated listening machine who sought the absence of sound and noise and discovered that, in fact, “sound and noise are everywhere.” He writes, “Silence is by no means an emptiness or a negation. It is rich and contains information essential to animal communication and to the structuring of natural systems. It is a contested resource and a space to be filled.” Helen Morrison’s translation preserves the vitality and charm of Sueur’s original French text. “Making noise is exhilarating,” he acknowledges. “Who has not experienced a certain sense of power on a moped, a motorbike, in a car or a boat travelling at speed and defying the passing of time?” And yet Sueur hopes we can cut out the “acoustic waste” in our lives and “reintroduce natural sounds”—of crickets, frogs, owls, and any number of creatures. And of plants and trees in the forest that, as he beautifully puts it, “become the instruments and musicians of the wind.”

A lively and learned celebration of sonic environments.