Join Canadian scientist Karen Bakker, a UBC professor and Rhodes Scholar, as she explores the unheard sounds of nature through bioacoustics. Discover how advanced technology is uncovering rich animal communications, challenging our perspectives on sentience. From whales diverting ships with their songs to coral reefs benefiting from acoustic enrichment, her insights reveal how understanding non-human conversations raises new ethical dilemmas. Bakker encourages us to rethink our place in the ecosystem and the implications of listening in.
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insights INSIGHT
Expanding Human Hearing Horizons
The world is full of sounds beyond human hearing, conveying rich ecological information.
Advances in bioacoustics and AI enable us to listen to and decode non-human communication on new scales.
insights INSIGHT
Digital Devices Democratize Listening
Miniaturization and cost reduction of digital listening devices have democratized bioacoustic data collection.
Devices like AudioMoth allow scientists and amateurs alike to monitor ecosystems extensively.
insights INSIGHT
Many Modes of Natural Communication
Bioacoustics, biotremology, and ecoacoustics capture sound and vibrations through air and solids.
This multi-channel listening reveals complex ecological data critical for understanding species' communication.
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How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants
Karen Bakker
Karen Bakker's "The Sounds of Life" explores the revolutionary field of bioacoustics, revealing how digital technology is expanding our understanding of animal and plant communication. The book details the advancements in hardware and AI that allow scientists to record and analyze sounds previously beyond human perception. It showcases the surprising complexity of non-human communication, challenging anthropocentric views of intelligence. Bakker also discusses the ethical implications of this technology and its potential for conservation efforts. The book ultimately offers a hopeful perspective on how technology can foster a deeper connection with the natural world.
The world around us is constantly vibrating with sounds we cannot hear. This magical soundscape evades our senses, tempts us by its elusive presence and beckons us to look deeper.
Our ability to listen in is rapidly evolving. Over the last decades, scientists have begun installing digital listening devices in nearly every ecosystem. This process of deciphering what nature is saying is called “bioacoustics” and “ecoacoustics”. Massive advances in both hardware and artificial intelligence are permitting us to go where no artificial ear has gone before.
Recent breakthroughs unveil that many more species are speaking in ways we didn’t know were possible, with far richer behaviors than were previously known.
Karen Bakker - Canadian scientist, author, Professor at UBC and Rhodes Scholar - tells us how bioacoustics is poised to alter humanity’s relationship with our planet by expanding our sense of sound.
We can develop mobile protected areas for animal climate refugees. Simply by singing, a whale can turn aside a container ship. Acoustic enrichment can help corals regenerate.
Acknowledging these forms of communication requires us to confront our entrenched ideas of sentience and intelligence. This seeks to understand non-human communication on its own terms and brings up new ethical and moral dilemmas. Who grants us consent to listen in to the conversation of bats? And as we inhabit such different lifeworlds, might we have enough shared concepts that would enable any kind of translation?
Lifeworlds 