Afterword

How have humans made sense of the sounds of nature?Before recording we had to talk and write about them, this is why the nineteenth century had such wonderful words for nature's tones.I. M. Rawes, director of the London Sound Survey, assembled a wonderful book called Honk, Conk, and Squacket: Fabulous and Forgotten Soundwords from a Vanished Age of Listening (London Sound Survey, 2016) that compiled some of these colourful, generally forgotten terms, such as:Belder: to roar as a bull Chitterling: the loud multisqueaking of a swallow Lounen: to make a noise like that of the crane Purl: to make the murmuring sound of a stream Quobble: to make a sound like boiling water Randivoose: to make a loud commotion Reemish: the loud sound of a dead body falling Shuck-shack: the sound of walking in wet stockings Troze: the sound made by a school of fish breaking the surface of the sea (7-145)Our words for sound used to be so much more colourful because we needed to bring these noises, natural or not, to life with our speech and our writing, because that was the only way to write them down.In the twentieth century people experimented with graphic, nonlinguistic or nontraditionally musical ways to diagram complex arrays of sound, like this graphic score for Dgonflement by Jean-Franois