Contents
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What Is Life? What Is Life?
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What is water? What is water?
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What Is Sound? What Is Sound?
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Glaciers Sizzle As They Disappear Into Warmer Water Glaciers Sizzle As They Disappear Into Warmer Water
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Cite
Extract
What Does Biology Sound Like?
If biology points to fleshly bodies, it might sound like bark beetles nibbling on piñon trees, dolphins echolocating their way across a bay, asthmatic humans breathing in polluted cities.1Close
If biology refers rather to the scientific study of such bodies, it might sound like field recordings of birdsong, laboratory whirrings of centrifuges and gene sequencers, classroom lectures punctuated with Latinate names.2Close
If biology signals, more narrowly, the technical activity of apprehending signs of life, it might sound like the lub-dub of a heartbeat through a stethoscope, the vibration of yeast cells amplified through laboratory speakers, the supra-audible pinging of an ultrasound device outlining a fetus in a human body or populations of zooplankton in the ocean.3Close
The watery media through which such apprehensions arrive—blood and muscle, brothy stews in Petri dishes, the sea—suggest a deeper dive into the question, What if things biological are not just saturated, but also shaped, by sound? In 1967, the physician and theosophist Hans Jenny coined the term “cymatics” (from the Greek κῦμα, “wave”) to refer to the study of sound made visible in tangible media (e.g., as with particulate matter or liquid pulsing in resonance with frequencies emanating from a loudspeaker [see cover for an abstract rendering of such vibration]). Jenny thought that examining cymatic patterns might reveal biological process as sonic process: “What we want to do is, as it were, to learn to ‘hear’ the process that blossoms in flowers, to ‘hear’ embryology in its manifestations.”4Close “Life,” hypothesizes the Jenny acolyte and acoustics engineer John Stuart Reid, originated on “sonic scaffolding” and “formed in the stillness of cymatic patterns, on the surface of microscopic bubbles.”5Close
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