222 = Diane Ackerman

ity. Sometimes the agents lose their way, become traitors, destroy
themselves. A young, beautiful woman, Beatriz, who visits him in
the asylum, we ultimately learn, is one of those lost agents who have
become dangerously infatuated by the beauty of human sensory
experience, unhinged by hearing a clarinet solo, "corrupted by sun-
sets, by certain fragrances . . ."

EARTH ULliNC
We think of music as an invention, something that fulfills an inner
longing, perhaps, to be an integral part of the sounds of nature. But
not everyone perceives music in that way. About eighty miles north
of Bangkok, in the foothills of Wat Tham Krabok, is a Buddhist
temple where a group of concerned monks help drug addicts to
recover. They use a combination of herbal therapy, counseling, and
vocational training. One of the monks, Phra Charoen, a sixty-one-
year-old naturalist by disposition, also busies himself in the music
room, where, with electronic equipment, he records the electrical
phenomena of the earth, which he then translates into musical
notation. Charoen and his team of monks and nuns trace the fluctu-
ating sound patterns onto transparent paper, then transfer the
graphs to thin strips of cloth that can be catalogued and rolled up
for storage. The graphs match up with the traditional eighteen-bar
phrases of Thai music. These "pure melodies" are then played on
a Thai instrument with an electronic organ as backup, and the result
is recorded. Charoen's group are not musicians themselves, but they
believe that music is not an imaginary thing, nor even something
produced only by people; music falls out of the earth's rocks and
roots, its trees and rain.* One western woman wrote that "under the
temple trees, with birdsong filling the musical pauses, the visitor sits
... and hears the earth of ancient Ayuthaya sing, or the stones of
the Grand Palace, the sidewalks of Bangkok-or the cracks in the
Hua Lampong Railway Station forecourt."

'In The Heart of the Hunter, Laurens van der Post reports that Bushmen speak of someone's
death like this: "The sound which used to ring in the sky for him no longer rings."
 Hearing = 223

This would no doubt strike a familiar chord with the American

composer Charles Dodge, who, in June and September 1970, re-
corded "the sun playing on the magnetic field of the earth" by
feeding magnetic data for 1961 into a specially programmed com-
puter and synthesizer. The performance has a subtitle-"realiza-
tions in computed electronic sound"-and three "scientific
associates" are prominently mentioned on the album's cover. The
result is at times booming, at times squeaking, but consists mainly
of shimmering, cascadingly melodic violin and woodwind sounds.
Harmonious and breathy, they often create small flourishes and
partial fanfares; they don't seem random at all, but rather energized
by what, for lack of a better word, I'll call entelechy, that dynamic
restlessness working purposefully toward a goal we associate with
composed music. 1 also have a recording of Jupiter's magnetic field,
a gift from the TRW corporation to visitors to the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory during the encounters of Voyager 1 and II with Jupiter
in 1980. An electric-field detector aboard the spacecraft recorded a
stream of ions, the chirping of heated electrons, the vibrating of
charged particles, lightning whistling across the planet's atmosphere,
all accompanied by an aurora we hear as a hiss. Gas from a volcano
on the moon 10 adds a tinkling and a banshee-like scream of radio
waves. Fascinating as this concert is, and useful to scientists, it
doesn't sound like music, nor is it supposed to, but music could easily
be woven from or around it. Artists have always looked to nature for
their organic forms, and so it's not surprising to find a rather pop-
sounding composition called "Pulsar." Over four hundred pulsars
are known, at various distances from Earth. Using the recorded
rhythmic pulses of once-massive stars about 15,000 light-years away,
the composer offers Caribbean-like melodies, in which his "drum-
mer from outer space," as he puts it, supplies percussion. The pulsars
are identified on the record sleeve by number-083 - 45 on side one
and °329+54 on side two-as if they were indeed side men who
sat in on the session. On another occasion, Susumu Ohno, a Califor-
nia geneticist, assigned a different note to each of the four chemical
bases in DNA (do for cytosine, re and mi for adenine, fa and sol
for guanine, and la and ti for thymine) and then played the some-
114 ... D i ane Ackerman

what limited-sounding result. Our cells vibrate; there is music in

them, even if we don't hear it. Different animals hear some frequen-
cies better than we do. Perhaps a mite, lost in the canyon of a crease
of skin, hears our cells ringing like a mountain of wind chimes every
time we move.
When the earth calls, it rumbles and thunders; it creaks. In towns
like Moodus, Connecticut, swarms of small earthquakes rattle the
residents for months on end. The seismic center of the quake storm
is a very small area only a few hundred yards wide near the north
end of town . I'm amazed there haven't been horror films about a
devil's sinkhole, or some equal abomination. Ground grumblings of
this sort are now called "Moodus noises," but long ago, when the
Wan gunk Indians chose the area for their powwows because it was
there the earth spoke to them, they called the spot Machemoodus,
which meant "place of noises," and their myths told how a god made
the noises by blowing angrily into a cave. Cluster earthquakes can
sound as light as corks popping or as relentless as cavalry charging.
"Thunder underfoot" is how some have described it. "It's like you
got hit on the bottom of your feet with a sledgehammer," one
resident complains. The Moodus quakes are noisier than most be-
cause they're shallower (only about a mile deep; quakes along the San
Andreas Fault are usually six to nine miles deep). Normal deep
quakes lose much of their voice to the ground, which dampens and
stills it. It may also be that the earth around Moodus simply con-
ducts sound well. Since the town is located between two nuclear
power plants, its residents grow anxious when the quakes rage for
months, shifting and cracking the earth and sounding like a chroni-
cally rattling pantry.
At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a pipe organ plays the
sounds of San Francisco harbor as tide sloshes through its hollows,
ringing with a thick brassy murmur. Now that the Russians and the
Americans are planning a joint trip to Mars, I very much hope they'll
take a set of panpipes along with them, so perfect for the windswept
surface of Mars. Pipes would be an especially good choice because,
although every culture on our planet makes music, each culture
seems to invent drums and flutes before anything else. Something
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about the idea of breath or wind entering a piece of wood and filling
it roundly with a vital cry-a sound-has captivated us for millennia.
It's like the spirit of life playing through the whole length of a
person's body. It's as if we could breathe into the trees and make
them speak. We hold a branch in our hands, blow into it, and it
groans, it sings.