Grasshopper

In M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Village , a young woman, Ivy, sets off on a journey into an unknown forest. She has persuaded the elders of her tribe to let her find other people on the far side of the forest, get medicine, and return to save the life of her sick lover. She has no knowledge of anything beyond the several acres of her village, except that beyond their meadow and inside the forest are chilling, otherworldly beasts that occasionally invade the village and carve up one of the pets.

As if this quest were not harrowing enough, there’s an important fact I left out: she is blind. Now, the village leaders know the truth about what’s beyond their meadow–no beasts (but the costumed elders themselves), just woods, and then modern civilization, from which they’ve sheltered their children. That’s why they allow her to go into the forest. But no one of Ivy’s generation knows this. And neither do we, the moviegoers. We’re terrified for her. As it turns out, terrifying things do happen to her in that forest, because a monster (really a man from the village in a monster costume) secretly follows her, and eventually attacks her.

The movie would be considerably less dramatic if our female heroine were deaf, rather than blind. Instead of a woman waving her arms and tramping about through the thorny tangles, we’d be watching a woman walking normally through the forest, keeping to deer trails. In fact, many of us regularly do just this, wearing headphones and blasting music as we deafly, yet deftly, jog through our local park. This would not quite elicit the thrill Shyamalan had in mind. A deaf person on a forest quest does not make a good movie. Being deaf just doesn’t seem like much of a big deal compared to blindness. If not for the inability to hear speech, we might hardly miss our auditory systems if they fell out through our ears.

Then again, there’s another twist to the story that may change one’s feeling about audition: our young blind heroine defeats her attacker. She kills him, in fact. She may look out of sorts crashing into trees, but her hearing makes it impossible for her attacker to sneak up on her. Especially in the forest. Had she been deaf, not blind, her attacker could have whistled “Dixie” with an accordion accompaniment while following her through the woods and still taken her completely by surprise.

If deaf‑maiden‑alone‑in‑the‑forest is not spine‑tingling to movie audiences, it is only because we tend not to appreciate all that our ears do for us beyond language. Providing a sneakproof alert system is just one of the many powers of audition.

The greatest respect for our ears is found among blind kung fu masters. Every “Grasshopper” learns from his old blind master that by attending to and dissecting the ambient sounds around oneself, it is possible to sense how many attackers surround one, their locations, stances, weapons, intent, confidence level, and which one is the enemy mastermind. I once saw, in an old movie, one of these scrawny geezers defeat six men using only a baseball bat wielded upside down. But you don’t have to be a fictional blind kung fu master to have a mastery of audition and know how to sense the world with it. We all do; we just don’t get all “Grasshopper” about it. Our brains have a mastery of it even if we’ve never thought about it.

In fact, when I first began pondering whether speech might sound like natural events, I had great difficulty thinking of any important natural‑event sounds. I was initially dumbfounded: what is so useful about having ears that nearly all vertebrates have them? It seemed to me that I primarily use my ears for listening to speech, and that obviously cannot explain why all those other vertebrates have ears as well. Sure, it is difficult to sneak up on me, but one hardly needs such a fine‑tuned ear and auditory system for a simple alarm.

After some months of contemplation, however, I came to consciously appreciate my ability to use sound to recognize the world and what’s happening around me. I began to notice every tap, clink, rub, burble, and skid. And I noticed how difficult it was for me to do anything without making a sound that gave away what I was doing, like eating from my daughter’s Halloween stash. When you’re next at home and your family is active around you, close your eyes and listen. You will hear sounds such as the plink of a spoon in a coffee mug, the scrape of a drawer opening, or the scratch of crayons on drywall. It will typically take some time before you hear an event that you cannot recognize. In the late 1980s, the psychologist William Gaver played environmental sounds to listeners, and asked them to identify what they heard. He found that people are impressive at this: most are capable, for example, of distinguishing running upstairs from running downstairs. Research following in the tradition of work done by the psychologist William H. Warren in the mid‑1980s has shown that people are even able to use sound to sense the shapes and textures of some objects.

Our ears and auditory systems are, then, highly designed for and competent at sensing and recognizing what is happening around us. Our auditory systems are priceless pieces of machinery, just the kind of hardware that cultural evolution shouldn’t let go to waste, perfect for harnessing. In this chapter, I sift through the sounds of nature and distill a host of regularities found there, regularities that apply nearly anywhere–in the jungle, on the tundra, or in a modern city. The idea is that our auditory system, having evolved in the presence of these regularities for hundreds of millions of years, will have evolutionarily “internalized” them; our auditory system will therefore work best when incoming sounds conform to these regularities. I will then ask whether the sounds of speech across human languages tend to respect these regularities. That’s what we expect if language harnesses us.