Sounds and sweet airs that give delight

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence.

Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.)

Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an honourable mention to the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, whose eruption in 1883 burst eardrums 40 miles away.)

Bees (playful). Frogs (ardent). Bats (unbelievably loud). Sounds of the cosmos give way to sounds of the Earth. Life follows, bellowing, and humanity comes after, babbling and brandishing bells. The 48 forays into sound that make up A Book of Noises are arranged with the sort of guileless simplicity achievable only after the author-compiler has been beating his head against a wall for some years.

Everything trembles. The world sounds and resounds. Elephants flee the noise of helicopter blades turning 80 miles away. The root system of the common pea will move towards the sound of water in a pipe. But there’s something missing. If ever a book cried out for an accompanying Spotify playlist, it’s this one. Maybe a kind reader will put one together. What the heck, maybe I will.

Ransacking A Book of Noises affords hours of listening pleasure, or at any rate bemusement. There’s Max Richter’s album Sleep to ease us in; then Sam Perkin’s ‘Alta for Two String Trios and Electronics’, capturing the ephemeral crackles that sometimes accompany the Northern Lights.