Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

This week, we're re-featuring when the Earth started to sing by biologist and acclaimed author David

George Haskell.

This audio story is both a narration and a sonic journey, an experience that is made entirely

of the tiny trembling waves in air, the fugitive, ephemeral energy that we call sound.

Spoken words, human breaths shaped by muscle and bone carry a story.

The voice combines with other sounds to invite our senses and imaginations to go outward

into an experience of the living earth and its

history. I recommend that you listen with good headphones if you can. Let your ears experience,

explore, and enjoy in an open-ended way. During the course of this sonic experience, David brings us all the way back to the

beginning of sound and song on planet Earth, asking, what did the earth sound like when the rocks

beneath our feet were formed? How did the vast and varied chorus of modern sounds, from forest to oceans, to human music, emerge from life's community?

When did the living Earth first start to sing?

We invite you on a journey into deep time and deep sound that will ask you to open your ears and your imagination.

Sound is more ancient than planet Earth, more ancient even than atoms.

13 billion years ago, the first sound waves pulsed through the hot plasma of the early cosmos.

At that time, the universe was a compact, blazing mire of protons and electrons. Waves of high and low pressure seeed through this plasma,

the first sound waves in the cosmos.

These waves seeded the first stars.

...