Thoreau’s ear

Abstract

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was the only nineteenth-century American writer of the very first rank who paid prolonged and intense attention to sound-worlds, particularly non-human ones. As a naturalist, Thoreau’s fieldwork not only involved botany but also sound-collecting. Relying on his Journal and other written work, I show how Thoreau understood music as sound, paying particular attention to his writings on ambient sound and animal sound communication in acoustic ecological niches; showing how he understood sound announces presence and enables co-presence; and pointing to his development of a relational epistemology and alternative economy based in sound. His responses to the vibrations of the environment through prolonged and deep listening, more than 150 years ago, make him valuable for sound studies today.

Keywords:

• Thoreau
• presence
• co-presence
• sound
• animal communication
• ecomusicology
• relational epistemology

Henry David Thoreau (1818–1862) is well known as the canonical nineteenth-century American author of Walden and other works of literary pastoral; as the writer whose ‘Civil Disobedience’ influenced Gandhi, King, and the non-violent resistance movement; and as a natural historian, environmentalist and proto-ecologist.¹ Not so well known is that this nineteenth-century polymath paid unusual attention to environmental sound. His writings are of interest for sound studies, particularly in the areas of acoustic and soundscape ecology, the anthropology of the senses, and animal sound communication.² Attentive to ambient sound and the way sounds are transmitted and changed by different media such as air, water, and wood, his most ecstatic experiences occurred in response to sound vibrations. Early on a transcendentalist disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson, his thinking gradually moved away from spiritual correspondences and toward scientific truths experienced as patterns in nature. Unusually oriented to sensory experience, listening became an important means toward this knowledge.

Why should sound studies scholars pay attention to Thoreau? First, he regarded human music as a manifestation of the more inclusive and significant category, sound. To him, music was chiefly a human echoing of environmental sounds. Although a musician, in his writings he paid far more attention to the sounds of insects, animals, wind, rain, bells, echoes, and other ambient sounds than he did to human music. His writing turns our attention to the relations among sounds in a given environment; that is, to soundscape ecology. Second, Thoreau helps us understand that sound waves vibrate living beings into bodily experience of the presence of other beings. When that experience and awareness is mutual, sounds vibrate beings into co-presence with one another. Sounds vibrate living beings into a way of knowing that proceeds by interconnection, a community of relations: a relational epistemology. And third, Thoreau’s writings aid in understanding how sound’s enabling of co-presence and a relational, subjective epistemology sets up an ecomusicology in opposition to the dominant subject–object economy that many view as the underlying cause of our current environmental crisis. Economic man, the cornerstone of classical, neoclassical, and neoliberal economics, desires to accumulate, possess, and control as many objects as feasible, thinking that in this material possession consists wealth. Thinking with Thoreau helps us construct an alternative economics: one that proceeds through sound towards an ecological world of interconnectedness, reciprocity, and respect. It is a world in which humans are in nature and nature is in humans as in all living beings. It is no longer the human-centred economy of economic man; it is instead an ecological world of earth’s household, of nature’s economy. Thoreau’s underlying epistemology is thus relational and phenomenological, a world view of interdependence based on the experience of presence and co-presence. He was led to these ideas, as others have been, through resonance.³ Sound enables humans to construct a world worth wanting, and keeping.

Thoreau’s early experiences with music and sound enabled him to experience the ecstasy of the natural sublime and write about it imaginatively, understanding natural facts as metaphors of spiritual truths as any proper transcendentalist would do.⁴ Drawing on ideas from Coleridge, Wordsworth, and especially Swedenborg’s correspondence theory, Emerson had written in Nature that words were signs of natural facts, and that particular natural facts were symbols of particular spiritual facts (or truths); thus nature was to be understood as the symbol of spirit.⁵ Emerson famously pictured himself communing with Nature as if he had become a ‘transparent eye-ball’, the poet seeing and then naming the spiritual facts found in the natural ones. Thoreau certainly used his eyes but, far more than any of his contemporaries, he used his ears. If we think of Emerson as a transparent eyeball, we might think of Thoreau as a vibrating body. He vibrated in resonance with the cries of crickets, frogs, and birds; the tolling of bells, and the cries of children at play; and the sounds of rain and wind, especially moving air as it vibrated telegraph wires and gained amplification through the poles, turning it into what he called his Aeolian telegraph harp.⁶

Literary and cultural critics seldom have discussed the significance of sound and music in Thoreau’s writing. If they notice Thoreau’s attentiveness to sounds, most are content merely to report that he was a good listener.⁷ The few who go beyond listening present sound in Thoreau either as a means of expressing transcendental correspondence between the factual and spiritual, or as a means toward fashioning cultural symbols. (Instead, I will claim that sound in Thoreau serves as fact for his natural history, as a means toward ecstasy, and especially as evidence for his developing acoustemology.) F. O. Matthiessen wrote that for Thoreau music represented ‘a close correspondence, an organic harmony between body and spirit’.⁸ Sherman Paul’s essay on ‘Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in Thoreau’ claims that sound represented an area of ‘controllable insight’ between ‘nature as fact’ and ‘nature as merger’.⁹ For Paul, Thoreau’s frequent references to the sounds of crickets, wood thrushes, and the telegraph-harp are chiefly symbolic and ‘carry the weight of his cumulative experience with nature’.¹⁰ Unsympathetic with Thoreau’s frequent scientific observations of sound in the natural world, Paul initiated a line of criticism that viewed Thoreau’s increasing preoccupation with natural history as a diminution of his poetic powers. The early ecocritic Leo Marx agreed with Paul’s assessment of Thoreau’s turn towards science, but made a passage from the ‘Sounds’ chapter of Walden into a symbol of Thoreau’s ambivalence toward the Industrial Revolution.¹¹ Of the Fitchburg Railroad Thoreau wrote:

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my [Walden Pond] woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard. . . . When I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know) . . ¹²

Here the train (a sign of progress) is likened to a bird of prey and then to a dragon as the machine intrudes into his pastoral garden. Marx, like Lionel Trilling and Henry Nash Smith before him, believed that the greatest American authors were those whose works expressed, in symbolic terms, the major tensions and contradictions of American culture and society in their times. Thoreau was skilled with tools and technology; after all, he earned his living as a land surveyor, devised natural history experiments, constructed everything from Aeolian harps to gardens and buildings for Emerson, and had invented an improved manufacturing technique using graphite for lead pencils that enabled his father’s pencil factory to prosper. Thoreau nevertheless refused to join the family business. He was not ambivalent about American industrial progress; he despised it, as a reading of this locomotive passage within the context of Walden’s indictment of his townspeople’s economic materialism makes plain, like numerous comments and observations throughout his other writings. Later ecocritics, such as Lawrence Buell, take a more positive view of Thoreau’s scientific turn, but ignore Thoreau’s ear. Buell, a Thoreau specialist and one of the leading ecocritics of his generation, wrote perceptively of Thoreau’s interest in natural history:

The idea that natural phenomena had spiritual as well as material significance had a lifelong appeal to Thoreau, although he increasingly took an empirical and ‘scientific’ approach to nature after 1850. . . . Thoreau became increasingly interested in defining nature’s structure, both spiritual and material, for its own sake, as against how nature might subserve humanity, which was Emerson’s primary consideration . . . [To do this, Thoreau] had to overcome not only his classical education and his early Transcendentalist idealism, but also an intense preoccupation with himself . . . . This narcissism he surmounted by defining as an essential part of his individuality the intensity of his interest in and caring for physical nature itself.¹³

This is well said, but it overlooks the way in which Thoreau’s listening body integrated self and nature. It was not so much a surmounting of narcissism as an understanding of the relations between self and environment by means of listening and co-presence.

Thoreau’s interests in music attracted notice from his biographers, chiefly Bradford Torrey and Walter Harding, but the most direct assessment came from the American literary and cultural historian, Perry Miller, who disparaged Thoreau’s musical education, taste, and abilities. ‘Thoreau had an insatiable hunger for music,’ Miller wrote.

His untutored flute-playing has become a legend. He could invoke Beethoven, but he knew little about music, had virtually no chance to learn. . . . [His writing] is pathetic in its revelation of musical illiteracy. [But] what he could learn of music, aside from his little ‘music box’ and Emerson’s Aeolian harp, was only what he might hear through the windows of some burgher’s house wherein a daughter of respectability was practicing her piano lessons.¹⁴

Poor Thoreau. Was he truly limited to music boxes, Aeolian harps, and listening through a window to some respectable young neighbour lady practising the piano? Over and over again on some battle-piece? What, exactly, was Thoreau’s musical background? Born in 1817, he spent most of his youth in rural Concord, Massachusetts. He played the flute, loved to sing popular and folk songs, and enjoyed dancing (his mother had sent him to dancing school as a boy). In fact, his father played the flute; and according to Harding, Thoreau’s father John Thoreau took great pleasure in it, playing it in his church parish choir. His sister Sophia was said to have played the piano well, and his sister Helen gave piano lessons in Concord. In short, Thoreau was raised in a musical family; and it is almost inconceivable that in this setting he would not have at least learned musical rudiments and treble clef notation for the flute. He was renowned for his unusually keen ear; he could discriminate among different birds singing simultaneously and had a knowledge of each one’s song (that is, he could sing it back) and invented a mnemonic language for recording and remembering it.¹⁵ His flute playing may have been free – he preferred what he called ‘unplanned music’ – but it had likely been tutored in his family. He did most of his flute playing outdoors; taking it along on his daily and nightly walks, and when boating on lakes and ponds. In his journal he writes that he plays it in a meditative, improvisatory way:

My music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river, and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock. Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts, the very undertow of our life’s stream.¹⁶

As a young man, Thoreau went to dances and other entertainments.¹⁷ He did not study music at Concord Academy or Harvard University, but as far as I can tell formal education in music was not available to him then in either institution. In his journal Thoreau confided his puzzlement upon being given a book about the history of music.

Most lecturers preface their discourses on music with a history of music, but [they might] as well introduce an essay on virtue with a history of virtue. As if the possible combinations of sound, the last wind that sighed, or melody that waked the wood, had any history other than a perceptive ear might hear in the least and latest sound of nature!¹⁸

Thoreau was familiar with the theory, attributed to Pythagoras, that as the heavenly bodies rotated, they made music based on their astronomical ratios. It was said that only Pythagoras could hear the music of the spheres, but Thoreau believed that anyone could hear it in the sounds of the natural world.¹⁹ ‘Music,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘is the sound of circulation in Nature’s veins.’²⁰ Miller’s condescending comments about Thoreau’s musical education are perhaps best understood as barbs directed at bourgeois Victorian musical taste; but as Thoreau had a much broader concept of music, Miller’s critique is somewhat beside the point. Thoreau’s idea of music has more in common with contemporary composers who work in the medium of ambient and environmental sound art.

Thoreau did not write in his journal about the many soirées in the family home when he played flute and his sisters played the piano, or the many social occasions when he was called on to sing popular songs and ballads. We have the reports of others to go on, and they say his singing was well regarded. His writings do not chronicle his Concord town social life. He did write about times when he and his companions, boating on rivers and lakes, broke into songs of camaraderie; and he offered some of the lyrics. We recognize these as occupational folksongs of the sort that folklorists later collected from sailors and loggers. And he also wrote about those times when adrift in a boat on a lake or pond he played his flute in a meditative way, the scene usually compared to pastoral. Seldom does he comment on concert-going, although we know he did go to concerts in Boston. He mentions Beethoven and other Western art music composers very occasionally, and usually in a complimentary way. But most of his writing about music concerns the sounds he hears in the natural world: frogs, crickets, birds, the sounds of the wind and rain, and also the ambient sounds of children playing, church bells tolling, and people chopping wood, and surveyors hallo-ing through the woods to mark their location. His hearing was acutely sensitive and until the last years of his life he could recognize very soft sounds over long distances.

Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was not, like Beethoven’s, a representation of pastoral; it was pastoral. After all, Thoreau did not merely write about pastoral but had lived it in his cabin at Walden Pond. And so Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was the music of the whole of the environment, humans included, with which he vibrated sympathetically. As Charles Ives wrote:

Thoreau’s susceptibility to natural sounds was probably greater than that of many practical musicians. . . . Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony’.²¹

St Francis, it is said, spoke to the birds as he fed them. Did they sing back to him? What could Thoreau hear in the sounds of the natural world? Could he sing back?²² Obviously, sounds presented the environment to Thoreau’s consciousness; but through that presence was there the possibility of knowledge? Toward what epistemology does sound lead? The question fascinated Thoreau. His answer was found in presence and co-presence. Presence is in experience. It is something felt or sensed.²³ The concept of presence is key in phenomenology. As Don Ihde puts it, phenomenology aims ‘to isolate, describe, and discern the structures of immediacy or of fulfillable experiential presence’.²⁴ For Erving Goffman, who introduced the term co-presence in 1963, co-presence was face-to-face communication in which humans were ‘accessible, available, and subject to one another’.²⁵ Today, though, postmodern communications theorists use co-presence to mean the ‘sense of being together’ at a distance – that is, a combination of presence and absence – particularly with other people in a shared virtual environment.²⁶ Thoreau, of course, would extend co-presence to all living things in the environment, including animals, trees, and stones. Rather than regard him as an animist, it is more useful to think of him as developing relational epistemologies.²⁷

Relational epistemologies are, literally, mediated; and Thoreau was, predictably, interested in sound media and their interactions with sound vibrations. He was struck by the speed and amplification of sound travelling through the solid pole of his Aeolian telegraph-harp, and he paid particular attention to sounds travelling through air and ‘conversing with every leaf and needle of the woods’, as he put it:

I hear Lincoln bell tolling for church. At first I thought of the telegraph harp. Heard at a distance, the sound of a bell acquires a certain vibratory hum, as it were from the air through which it passes, like a harp. All music is a harp music at length, as if the atmosphere were full of strings vibrating to this music. It is not the mere sound of the bell, but the humming in the air, that enchants me, … There comes to me a melody which the air has strained, which has conversed with every leaf and needle of the woods. It is by no means the sound of the bell as heard near at hand, and which at this distance I can plainly distinguish, but its vibrating echoes, that portion of the sound which the elements take up and modulate, – a sound which is very much modified, sifted, and refined before it reaches my ear. The echo is to some extent an independent sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of my voice, but it is in some measure the voice of the wood.²⁸

Here Thoreau is developing a proto-theory of ambient sound, one that was not lost on John Cage, who, beginning in 1967, read Thoreau and was delighted to find his own ideas about sound already there: ‘Reading Thoreau’s Journal I discover any idea I’ve ever had worth its salt.’²⁹

Thoreau wrote frequently about bird song and how it affected him, but toward the end of his life he became preoccupied with that relationship. ‘What is the relation,’ he wrote in his journal,

between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody. … Certainly they are intimately related, and the one was made for the other. It is a natural fact. If I were to discover that a certain kind of stone by the pond-shore was affected, say partially disintegrated, by a particular natural sound, as of a bird or insect, I see that one could not be completely described without describing the other. I am that rock by the pond-side.³⁰

The relationship Thoreau is describing here is one of co-presence in which the one (the bird, or the water medium) cannot be fully described without the other (the ear, or the stone). In this co-presence, each is incomplete without the other: they are complementary. When he writes ‘I am that rock’, he means that he is like that rock; that his ear is to the bird melody as the rock is to the water that changes its shape. But he also implies that one completes the other and that therefore in a sense they are fused into a larger being.

As Thoreau came closer to the end of his life, he intensified his observations of the natural world, and concentrated his thoughts on emergent patterns within nature. Among his last completed projects was a scientific paper on the succession of forest trees. He concluded that the dispersal of seeds by wind, water, and animals enabled particular plant species to arise in places where they had not been before. For Thoreau, nature’s economy proceeded through interdependence and interrelationship, in this case between the seeds and the wind, water, and animals that carried them. He quotes an English book on planting walnut trees: ‘The seed should be laid in a rot heap, as soon as gathered, with the husk on; and the heap should be turned over frequently in the course of the winter,’ and concludes that the authors

appear not to have discovered that it was discovered before, and that they are merely adopting the method of Nature. … So, when we experiment in planting forests, we find ourselves at last doing as Nature does. Would it not be well to consult with Nature in the outset?³¹

Co-presence is key not only in human sound communication but in sound signalling throughout the animal kingdom. Thoreau’s curiosity about cricket sounds led him to explore predator–prey relations and inter-species acoustic communication, including false signals and honesty guarantees, a topic of special interest to moral philosophers as well as animal communication biologists.³² ‘I hear a cricket in the Depot Field, walk a rod or two, and find the note proceeds from near a rock,’ Thoreau wrote in 1850:

Partly under a rock, between it and the roots of the grass, he lies concealed, – for I pull away the withered grass with my hands, – uttering his night-like creak, with a vibratory motion of his wings, and flattering himself that it is night, because he has shut out the day. He was a black fellow nearly an inch long, with two long, slender feelers. … They are remarkably secret and unobserved, considering how much noise they make. Every milkman has heard them all his life; it is the sound that fills his ears as he drives along. But what one has ever got off his cart to go in search of one? I see smaller ones moving stealthily about, whose note I do not know. Who ever distinguished their various notes, which fill the crevices in each other’s song? It would be a curious ear, indeed, that distinguished the species of the crickets which it heard, and traced even the earth-song home, each part to its particular performer. Those nearest me continually cease their song as I walk, so that the singers are always a rod distant, and I cannot easily detect one. It is difficult, moreover, to judge correctly whence the sound proceeds. Perhaps this wariness is necessary to save them from insectivorous birds, which would otherwise speedily find out so loud a singer … .³³

Thoreau understood that co-presence of living beings results from sound communication in what soundscape ecologists today call acoustic niches, based on frequency, pitch contour, timing, timbre, and so forth. The acoustic niche hypothesis suggests that species are adapted to communicate with one another in their particular acoustic niches so as not to interfere with one another.³⁴ Thoreau’s journal records just such an observation:

Just before sundown [we] took our seats before the owl’s nest & sat perfectly still & awaited her appearance. We sat about 1/2 an hour, and it was surprising what various distinct sounds we heard from there deep in the wood–as if the vistas[,] aisles of the wood were so many ear trumpets–the cawing of crows–the peeping of hylas–in the swamp–& perhaps the croaking of a tree-toad–the oven bird–the yorrick of Wilson’s thrush–a distant stake driver–the night warbler–& black & white creeper–the lowing of cows–the late supper horn–the voices of boys–the singing of girls–not all together but separately & distinctly & musically from where the Partridge–& the red tailed hawk & the screech owl sit on their nests.³⁵

Co-presence in the soundscape, with each species communicating freely in its acoustic niche, describes a soundscape commons, which is to say a shared acoustic resource.³⁶ Roman law, from which English and American law derives, recognized as res communes those resources which by their very nature could not be ‘captured’ or owned; the air mantle and the oceans were the usual examples. On the other hand, of course, ‘earth’s productions’ could be captured, and when they were, they were to be considered res privatae.³⁷ Thoreau was well aware of commons, particularly in the economic arena. With what was left of the commons under siege from the business mentality prevalent in Thoreau’s time and place, the environment and human life were being degraded by the same process. In one of his last essays he wrote:

Among the Indians, the earth and its productions generally were common and free to all the tribe, like the air or water, but among us who have supplanted the Indians, the public retain only a small yard or common in the middle of the village. … What sort of country is that where the huckleberry fields are private property? When I pass such fields on the highway, my heart sinks within me. … I cannot think of it ever after but as the place where fair and palatable berries are converted into money, where the huckleberry is desecrated. … As long as the berries are free to all comers they are beautiful, but tell me that this is a blueberry swamp which somebody has hired [and we] commit the berries to the wrong hands, that is to the hands of those who cannot appreciate them. This is proved by the fact that if we do not pay them some money, they will cease to pick them. They have no other interest in the berries but a pecuniary one. Such is the constitution of our society that we make a compromise and permit the berries to be degraded, to be enslaved, as it were.³⁸

Thoreau here contrasts nature’s economy, where resources are ‘free to all comers’, with his townspeople’s economy, based solely on a pecuniary interest. His comparison of degradation to enslavement during this Civil War period took on a particular poignancy. He understood better than most that environmental destruction was the result of an economic system erected on the ideas of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, particularly the assumption that human beings by nature act out of self-interest and engage in trade in order to accumulate material wealth.³⁹ Thoreau suggests an alternative economy to ‘economic man’, one based in a managed commons, open to all, that includes earth’s productions like berries as well as acoustic niches enabling interference-free communication.

In the soundscape Thoreau had described, each species was communicating in its acoustic niche ‘separately and distinctly and musically’. Sound interference blocks those communications channels; contemporary soundscape ecologists have made recordings before and after airplane flyovers, for example, showing the degradation and recovery times.⁴⁰ The same kind of interference, or noise pollution, whether in the oceans from vessels or naval sonar, or in built environments from industry, police sirens, and so forth has been a live issue for acoustic ecologists, particularly in Europe, since the mid-twentieth century. Of course, noise pollution is part of the ongoing environmental health crisis.⁴¹ A recent appeal for treatment of the soundscape as a managed and sustainable ecological commons for all living creatures was based partly on Thoreau’s insights.⁴²

Thoreau’s major contributions to sound studies lie in the areas of acoustic and soundscape ecology, the anthropology – and science – of the senses, animal communication, and phenomenology. Thoreau

anticipates Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics of the embodied mind, and shares with Peirce and James a concern for problems of knowledge as they arise within the horizon of practical experience. Ever so gradually, contemporary philosophers are discovering how much Thoreau has to teach – especially, in the areas of knowledge and perception, and in ethical debates about the value of land and life. His affinities with the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, and the enormous resources he offers for environmental philosophy, have also started to receive more attention.⁴³

Steven Feld found what he called an acoustemology (acoustically grounded epistemology) among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea.⁴⁴ Colin Turnbull reported on one among the African Mbuti in the mid-1900s.⁴⁵ Experience-based acoustemologies are more common than one might expect. Thoreau fashioned one in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-1800s. He was well aware of the transformative possibilities of a sound-based epistemology: ‘It is remarkable that our institutions can stand before music, it is so revolutionary,’ he wrote in 1857 as he was coming to understand that his goal had been an experience-based, ecological epistemology all along.⁴⁶ When he died of tuberculosis at the age of 43 he left unpublished journals of more than four million words and an equal amount of notes and drafts from his extensive reading. He died before he could achieve the synthesis that he intended, his great Kalendar of natural history. Yet his pioneering contributions to sound studies make him a worthy ancestor here as elsewhere, one whose work repays study and increases in relevance, inspiration, and influence decade by decade.

Notes on contributor

Jeff Todd Titon is Emeritus Professor of Music, Brown University, where from 1986 until 2013 he directed the PhD programme in ethnomusicology. The author or editor of numerous essays and eight books, his most recent work is in music and sustainability, and in soundscape ecology; it may be tracked on http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com. During the spring semester of 2016 he will hold the Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric, and Science at East Tennessee State University.

Notes

1. Earlier versions of this essay were given as public lectures: the Sidore Lecture at the Sustainability Academy Symposium on Sustainability and the Humanities, at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, 22 March 2012; the Distinguished Lecture in Musicology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 23 October 2012; and the keynote address at the Cultural Sustainability Symposium, Sterling College, Craftsbury Common, VT, 16 August 2013. I am grateful for suggestions and encouragement from Aaron Allen, Denise Von Glahn, Mark Pedelty, Lewis Hyde, Burt Feintuch, Leslie Gay, Marta Daniels, and Mary Hufford.

2. Pinch and Bijsterveld, Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, 6–10, 48.

3. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance.

4. ‘The fact will one day flower out into a truth.’ Thoreau, Journal, December 16, 1837. Because of numerous editions of Thoreau’s journals, it is most useful to refer to entries by Thoreau’s date of entry.

5. Emerson, Nature, 5.

6. In his Journal for 12 September 1851 Thoreau wrote that while walking near Walden Pond near the newly constructed telegraph line, he heard a loud humming. Realizing that the blowing wind was sounding the wires, as if the telegraph line were a giant Aeolian harp, he ran to it and pressed his ear and the side of his body to a telegraph pole, which was amplifying the vibrations. He wrote that day in his journal that the experience thrilled him, and he wrote about returning to listen and vibrate ecstatically with the telegraph harp in 30 subsequent Journal entries.

7. See, for example, Cavicchi, Listening and Longing, 55–56.

8. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 84.

9. Paul, “Wise Silence,” 511.

10. Ibid., 520.

11. Thoreau, Walden,Walden; Marx, Machine in the Garden, 250–53.

12. Thoreau, Walden, in A Week, 414–15.

13. Buell, “Thoreau and Natural Environment,” 171–2.

14. Miller, Consciousness in Concord, 156.

15. Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 354–55; 265, 195.

16. Journal, August 18, 1841.

17. Ibid., 73.

18. Journal, March 8, 1842.

19. Thoreau, A Week, 141–43.

20. Journal, April 24, 1841.

21. Ives, “Thoreau.”

22. After Thoreau died, acquaintances recalled that when they were children Thoreau amused them by taking them into the woods, showing them how to forage, how to find animals, and how to sing with birds (Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 190–95).

23. Presence is also a key concept in theatre and performance studies; see, for example, Giannachi and Kaye, Performing Presence, 1–25.

24. Ihde, Listening and Voice, 25.

25. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 13–22.

26. Zhao, “Taxonomy of Copresence,” 445–55; see also Lombard and Ditton, “Heart of It All.”

27. Titon, “The Nature of Ecomusicology,” 14–17.

28. Journal, October 12, 1851.

29. Cage, M, 18.

30. Journal, February 20, 1857.

31. Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 426, 428.

32. Bradbury and Vehrencamp, Principles of Animal Communication, 19–112.

33. Journal, August 20, 1850.

34. Pijanowski et al., “Soundscape Ecology,’ 203–16.

35. Journal, May 12, 1855 (text is from the Princeton edition website).

36. Commons has received an enormous amount of attention in the past 25 years, whether historically (European agricultural commons and enclosure movements), or in contemporary life, as on the Internet (a digital information commons), or as a cultural commons (threatened by enclosure through intellectual copyright law). See Hyde, Common As Air; Rose, “Romans, Roads”; Titon, “Sound Commons”; and http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com passim.

37. Rose, ‘Romans, Roads,’ 89–110.

38. Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, 493–94.

39. Reder, Economics, 110–15; 236–37.

40. Krause, Great Animal Orchestra, 179–80.

41. Noise Effects Handbook.

42. Titon, “Sound Commons.”

43. Furtak, “Henry David Thoreau.”.

44. Feld, Sound and Sentiment.

45. Turnbull, Forest People.

46. Journal, October 17, 1857.