The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination, Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen, Reaktion, 2025, £14.99

‘In the beginning was the Word’ – but aeons before that ancient imperative there were other aural commands, within ourselves, rumbling in the gulfs of the earth, and echoing across the universe. Our age of the eye underrates the ear, yet soundwaves may move us more deeply than the most striking sights. Even ‘silence’ is a sound that we fill with private meanings. Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen have produced an informative and romantic gazetteer of the sounds that resonate in our souls.

Today’s technology allows ever closer listening to sounds previously impervious to analysis. Ultra-sensitive microphones are injected into the intestines of the earth and lowered into the lightless levels of the oceans, while agog aerials and gaping dishes await reports from space. Scientists are studying the ‘singing sands’ of beaches and desert quarters – the wails and whistles made by silicate grains rubbing against each other at certain frequencies – and the enigmatic ‘hums’ that many people claim to hear like collective tinnitus, from New Mexico to Scotland. Film engineers experiment with ever more inventive sound effects – folklorists collect Irish keening tunes, and songs inspired by the calls of cicadas – and nostalgists bid farewell to foghorns, whose infinitely suggestive mist-muted moans have been rendered redundant by GPS.

Artists respond with soundscapes that, although strikingly original, also hark back to Pythagorean notions of a ‘music of the spheres’. The Icelandic singer Björk has recorded music based on cymatics – the patterns made by dust agitated by music – a reprise of experiments made by Galileo and Robert Hooke. Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard records the Moloch-like roars of crematoria, and the precise slices and snaps of surgical operations. At Svalbard in Norway, the Global Music Vault programme aims to preserve auditory archives forever, transferring recordings onto glass plates less likely to succumb to fire, flood or radiation. There are even attempts to conjure never-heard noises, like the artist Marguerite Humeau’s creation of the voice-boxes of extinct animals. These can be poignant exercises, as the authors know: ‘What was said in the final call of the last mammoth, ringing across a realm of fir and whirling snow? Did it trumpet out in vain, in hope for an answer that would never come?’

Ironically, many of these newly-known noises are in danger of being drowned out by the din of the Anthropocene, as we fill the planet with the pulsating rackets of ‘progress’ – drilling, engines, industry, cacophonous culture, and chattering social media. Sonic sewage clogs the life-or-death communications of wildlife – birds calling for mates, whales making mnemonic maps of the seabed, the echolocations of bats hunting moths (and the counter clicks emitted by some moths to avoid being eaten). Even ice creaks and groans are at risk of being silenced, as true cold continues its long withdrawal. We suffer, too, from the onslaught of our own noise, through sleep deprivation, cognitive impairment and hypertension. The Sound Atlas makes a too rarely considered case for a quieter kind of ecology, within which essential sounds can have broadcasting bandwidth.

‘The isle is full of noises,’ Caliban says soothingly – so, too, the whole world, with what the anthropologist Iégor Reznikoff calls ‘an earth or mineral meaning of sound’. Echo in the old story turned into a stone after Narcissus rejected her, and still forlornly repeats our syllables. The universal ur-sound is impossibly old – static from light years away and billions of years ago, streaming interminably from black holes and supernovas. We know of these noises because of sonification, the process whereby data from other sources (like X-rays or gravity) are converted into soundtracks – a process as artistically imaginative as it is scientifically instructive. Pace Pythagoreas, there is no actual ‘music of the spheres’, but there are correspondences of planetary orbits, and grand galactic ‘dances’ that can be scored as harmonies.

The eye did not always have primacy over the ear. ‘Spiritual hearing’ was long prioritised over ‘spiritual seeing’ in more than one religion. In Europe’s antiquity and into the Middle Ages, the ear was seen as the seat of memory. In Christian art, the Holy Ghost is sometimes portrayed as a dove flying into the Virgin’s ear. In Pharaonic Egypt, the right ear received the ‘air of life’, the left the ‘air of death’. In India, ears were associated with birth, perhaps because their whorled shape resembled vulvas; the god Karma emerged from his mother’s ear. Elongated earlobes were auspicious in Chinese symbology, representing authority, greatness and intelligence.

The ethereal sounds made by winds were of great matter to the Greeks, from Æolus who gave Odysseus a bag of winds to blow him home, to the zephyrs that rustled oracular leaves in sacred groves. The wistfulness of wind-music has ever since inspired, seen in England in Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’ – ‘a soft floating witchery of sound’ caused by wind passing through strings, enchanting his country cottage and family. He wondered, ‘…what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely framed?’

A more surprising love of wind-noise was evinced by Thoreau, for whom the telephone line newly erected across his Walden Pond seemed to carry rumours of ‘a far-off glorious life’. That image ineluctably evokes another sample of American audio, another lonesome romantic hearkening to a line – Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman of 1968: ‘I hear you singing in the wire / I can hear you through the whine.’ After the Japanese tsunami of 2011, many relatives of those who had died found comfort by weeping into the ‘wind phone’ in the town of Ōtsuchi – an unconnected phone in a kiosk set up by a landscape designer so he could ‘talk’ to his drowned cousin.

Many material purposes are served by sounds – the carefully devised tones of computers, phones and public address systems, factory klaxons, the ceremonious (although ultimately unavailing) conch in Lord of the Flies, Alphorns calling down cattle from the highest pastures, hunting horns heard across frosty fields, bagpipes skirling soldiers over the top. But sound has also been harnessed by humans seeking to entrance themselves, and others.

Didgeridoos blew basso-profundo Dreamtime to the earliest Australians. Archaeo-acousticians have found connections between concentrations of Neolithic cave art and those chambers’ sonic qualities. Prehistoric caves seem to have been imaginatively transporting, supercharged wombs within which art, chanting, darkness, drumming, firelight, flutes and hallowed ritual combined to bear auditors out to other regions. Medieval music was filled with precisely gauged tonalities – plainsong and polyphony aimed at bringing monkish minds up from their cold quotidian, with approved composers avoiding dissonances that would break the charm, most notoriously the ‘devil’s interval’ (three notes that span six semitones – famously deployed by Black Sabbath in their eponymous 1970 song that birthed heavy metal).

Later church musicians leant heavily on the organ, one of the oldest and most powerful of musical devices, a breathing instrument etymologically associated with the intellect through Aristotle’s Organon, and emotionally with St Cecilia, patron saint of music. That uber-clavierist J.S. Bach had a lifelong yearning for a ground-shaking organ sound he called Erdenschwere (‘earth-heavy’), but it was largely unattainable because 18th-century metallurgy did not allow for large enough pipes, and even now is scarcely heard – a sound perhaps too sonorous for our unserious era.

Church and temple bells called the faithful, and warned of dangers, but were also thought to set up psychic forcefields to dispel evil. In the 14th–century Vittala temple at Hampi in India, 56 granite pillars each give different notes when tapped – otherworldly sounds that can be played in complex combinations to detach worshippers from earth, and induce ecstasies. Shiva himself could not help moving to music, dancing to his own drumming across space and time, from Sanskrit scripture to his statue outside the CERN laboratory in Switzerland – an avatar of immemorial vibrations that makes all particles move.

The Sound Atlas ends off-planet, with the Golden Record, the audiovisual discs launched into space aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977 and still accelerating away from us, bringing putative extra-terrestrial audiences tunes by Bach and Chuck Berry, messages from Jimmy Carter and Kurt Waldheim, greetings in 55 languages, and recordings of wind, rain, whales, hyenas, heartbeats and the laughter of the cosmologist Carl Sagan. The Voyagers are almost at the edge of our system, and the end of their lives, but their acoustic cargo may survive for ever, even if never to be heard – a far-flung testament to the most earthbound sense of all.