Roald Dahl’s “The Sound Machine”, first published in the September 17, 1949 issue of The New Yorker, proposes a device that can pick up high frequency sounds and convert them into the range audible by humans. The inventor of the machine first hears shrieks of roses being cut by a neighbor. Taking an axe to a beech tree the next day, he is surprised to hear “a harsh, noteless, enormous noise, a growling, low-pitched, screaming sound…”
A radio dramatization of the story is on archive.org in MP3 format.
Several short films have been inspired by the short story. Two on YouTube are embedded below.
Featured in the May 2011 issue of Smithsonian magazine is an article about the vocalizations of different species of mice. Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, biologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, is a behavioral ecologist with expertise in how animals use sound. While working a California field site in 2004, she used an ultrasonic recorder ( analogous to Gordon’s Bat Box ) to capture nighttime sounds, some of which she suspected to be those of mice she was studying.
Bringing the recordings into the computer, Matina’s team noticed a fairly loud four-note song that turned out to be from a deer mouse. A slowed down recording of the mouse song sounds eerily akin to whale song. Have a listen.
What is ‘sentience’? When a person or animal is injured they react by experiencing pain, marshalling the body’s defense systems to repair the damage and begin the process of recovery. The question, surely, is whether we know enough about sentience to be quite certain that plant life does not have it.
Every ecologist out there, and even amateur gardeners, have been known to swear that plants, too, ‘feel’ things, but it is only recent research that has demonstrated just how ‘intelligent’ they really are. Plant life has a heritage far older than mankind, and in some respects, it makes we humans seem inadequate! Is it not about time to take more notice?
