Covering the Land of Lincoln

Inside Out | Sounds in scenery | Parks-recreation

Our music industry today is highly dependent on technology. We’ve entered an exciting new age where impactful music can be created using electronic instruments, recorded quickly and heard at a high quality on the phones in everyone’s pockets.

Artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, The Beatles, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Panic at the Disco, Aerosmith, Prince, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd (to name a few) have all taken advantage of modern technology in their music-making, but they’ve taken advantage of another resource as well: natural sound.

As our technology develops, it gets easier and easier to record sounds we hear in nature and imitate or use them in our music.

Birdsong is usually the natural sound with which people are most familiar. And while birdsong is one of the most popular sounds to sample or imitate, it’s certainly not the only one.

For instance, the Harlem Shake of internet fame contains recordings of lions roaring, and Beethoven depicted a brook and a thunderstorm in his Pastoral Symphony (which also contains a cadenza imitating bird calls).

Additionally, it’s not uncommon to listen to ambient mixes of natural sounds to relax or meditate.

In fact, some researchers believe that early humans first learned to make music through their relationship with nature, and it’s true that many forms of animal song follow similar principles to human music — they have themes, they have rhythm, and they follow scales like ours .

The same sounds that we capture in our music can also help soundscape ecologists evaluate the health and biodiversity of an ecosystem.

The music we hear — or don’t hear — in an environment can be the proverbial canary in the coal mine for things such as invasive species, pollution and even extreme weather.

Maybe we stop hearing a certain bird call as that bird’s population shrinks dramatically, alerting us to a deadly disease.

Or maybe an insect’s distinct chirp is concealed by sounds only humans could make, indicating our dangerous encroachment on a previously balanced environment.

You see, we may be using natural sound as a form of entertainment or even blocking it out completely, but for wildlife, sound is a matter of life and death.

Sounds convey valuable information about danger, food, mating and territorial lines.

The more noise that humans make, the more our ecosystems have to compete.

The wildlife messages try to send will get drowned out or misinterpreted in the noise from our traffic or construction, even as they expend increasing amounts of energy to be heard.

Noise pollution also has negative effects on humans, raising stress levels and increasing the chances of hearing loss, cardiovascular disorders and sleep deprivation.

Grace Hanson is a day camp educator with the Champaign County Forest Preserve District. She is working on her bachelor of arts in biology and her bachelor of music in education.

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