{"id":11426,"date":"2025-08-26T18:04:57","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T22:04:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-secret-lives-of-ponds-and-the-mysterious-musicality-of-the-world-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T18:04:57","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T22:04:57","slug":"the-secret-lives-of-ponds-and-the-mysterious-musicality-of-the-world-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-secret-lives-of-ponds-and-the-mysterious-musicality-of-the-world-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret Lives of Ponds and the Mysterious Musicality of the World \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cThe book of love is full of music,\u201d sings Peter Gabriel. \u201cIn fact, that\u2019s where music comes from.\u201d <\/p>\n

The book of love is written in the language of wonder \u2014 our best means of loving life more deeply. To love anything \u2014 a person, a pond, the world \u2014 is to see the wonder in it, to hear the music in it. Both love and wonder are in mysterious conversation with the deepest substrate of us, the complete message of which is unintelligible to the analytical mind, inaccessible by any explanatory model. Both require a surrender to the musicality of the experience \u2014 a trust that the music is the message. <\/p>\n

In the late 1960s, just before philosopher Thomas Nagel challenged our notions of more-than-human consciousness with his catalytic essay \u201cWhat Is It Like to Be a Bat?\u201d and long before Robert Macfarlane challenged our notions of animacy by asking whether a river is alive<\/a>, the Finnish sound researcher Antti Jansson began wondering about the inner life of water, of its unheard creatures. As John Cage was discovering the musicality of silence<\/a> while listening to his own nervous system in a sensory deprivation tank, Jansson \u2014 possibly a distant relative of beloved Moomins creator Tove Jansson \u2014 discovered the musicality of ponds. He grew particularly interested in the water boatman beetle Cenocorixa<\/em>, capable of producing an astonishing 85 decibels \u2014 the noise level of New York City traffic \u2014 by rubbing its genitalia against its own body, much as cicadas play themselves<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Here was a whole new universe of bioacoustics, never before heard by human ears. <\/p>\n

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Sonogram of water boatmen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Half a century later, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg picked up where Jansson left off, bringing rigor and tenderness to the world of animal sounds. After his fascinating exploration of why birds sing<\/a>, he turned his compassionate curiosity to the most neglected recesses of nature\u2019s sonic consciousness \u2014 the ponds that punctuate forests, savannas, and suburbs alike. <\/p>\n

As the human world grew quiet in the early pandemic, Rothenberg decided to drop a hydrophone into his local pond and just listen. To his astonishment, he discovered a portal into a secret universe of what he calls \u201cundersound,\u201d evocative of Rachel Carson\u2019s landmark 1937 essay Undersea<\/em><\/a>, which invited the terrestrial imagination for the first time to consider the hidden lives of the water world. <\/p>\n