Sound as Connection: Listening Across Species and Deep Time

Sound is a great revealer. It passes through barriers, flows through darkness and stitches living beings into webs of information and communication. Attentive listening can reveal ecologies, histories, injustices and future possibilities.

Beginning with human voices and music, David George Haskell explores the connections carried in sound, showing how our sonic creativity arises from deep evolutionary history and present-day ecology. How do our mammalian origins shape our voices? What can we learn from the first musical instruments on Earth?

These human experiences echo the creative roles of sound in the more-than-human world. Listening to the textures and forms of bird and insect songs, for example, reveals how animals relate to the physical structures of their homes. These interconnections suggest ways we might use listening — individually and collectively — to reconnect and defragment our lives.

To get a sense of the sonic worlds that inform David George Haskell’s work, visitors are invited to explore a collection of sounds connected to his book "Sounds Wild and Broken."

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About the speaker

An adjunct professor of environmental sciences at Emory University, David George Haskell is a writer and biologist acclaimed for his lyrical explorations of the living world. His most recent book, "How Flowers Made Our World," explores the creative powers of flowering plants. Haskell is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, in 2012 for "The Forest Unseen" and in 2022 for "Sounds Wild and Broken." His 2017 book, "The Songs of Trees" won the John Burroughs Medal. His scientific research on animal ecology, evolution and conservation has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the World Wildlife Fund, among others. He has served on the boards and advisory committees of local and national land conservation groups.

This event is co-sponsored by The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, School of International Letters and Cultures, and the Department of English.

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