This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

We know humans are a funny bunch, we tend to think that if we cannot observe something,

we cannot perceive something, it doesn't exist.

Compared with our cousins on the tree of life, humans are relatively poor listeners.

A lot of the sound of nature happens in the high ultrasonic.

So that's the realm of bats and dolphins and some whales and many rodents and even some

of our primate cousins.

At the other end below, the low end of our hearing range is the infrasound.

Those are long, slow sound waves that are so powerful they can travel through soil and

stone, even buildings.

That is the realm of elephants and whales but also thunder and tornadoes, capping glaciers

make infrasound.

Animals can hear many of these sounds but we cannot.

That's Karen Bacher.

She's written a remarkable book called The Sounds of Life.

It explores the messages exchanged by other living things that we're oblivious of.

But more than that, her book also tells the stories of researchers who are using the sounds

of life to explore ecosystems and even to repair them when they're damaged.

And she talked with me about how artificial intelligence may soon lead to our being

able to literally converse with other animals.

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