The Sounds of Life

How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants

By: Karen Bakker

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook narrated by Suzanne Toren takes you on an amazing journey into the hidden realm of nature’s sounds

The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.

At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?

The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity’s relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature’s sounds, we will never see walks outdoors in the same way again.

©2022 Karen Bakker (P)2022 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“Can we mobilize digital tech to fight back against biodiversity loss? The Sounds of Life gives us a rare gift: hope in a time of environmental emergency.”—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything

“Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and packed with insight. A wonderful invitation to expansive listening.”—David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction

“The whole world is communicating and singing. Even plants are in on the conversation. This astonishing book will forever change the way you hear the world. More important, it will make you a better listener. Karen Bakker’s writing and storytelling are fully up to the subject, and her scholarship is impeccable.”—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel and Becoming Wild

Amazing content, well researched, great audio reading

Amazing content, well researched, great audio reading
A Mind opening understanding of how sound vibrations that we can hear and not hear affects much of our world, both plant and animal. E.g., flowers produce more nectar when bees are buzzing around 🤯. Excellent well written book.

Extremely interesting across many areas of world and animal sounds

Great book highlighting the unexpected importance of sounds across the globe and in species from bees to whales.

Interesting but you can skip the last hour

The topic is very interesting, but I feel the author spends too much time retelling well known advances in ethology and glazes over the hard science of recent advances.

The last hour was pure pain of repetition.

If this is your first encounter with bio-acoustics or animal behavior you will be inspired (except for the last hour or so ;-) ).

A book on the same topic, published only a few weeks before this book is "How to speak Whale". That author has a whole different level of story telling. If you only plan on reading one book on this topic I would recommend opting for the "How to speak Whale".

Poor narrator

Very little objective report of science. A lot of negative interpretation of collected data. Narrator’s tone always dire.