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.

David George Haskell is a biologist and the author of numerous acclaimed books, including the forest unseen and the

songs of trees.

Adapted from David's latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity,

and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction.

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

...