Holly Haworth wrote an excellent essay recently for Nautilus, “What an Oyster Hears,” that might, in an earlier draft, have been titled “What an Oyster Might Hear,” since as she acknowledges early on, the oyster has no ear. However, the oyster does resemble an ear, and thus provides Haworth’s rangy article with plenty of opportunity to reflect on the creature as a living metaphor for so many forms of sonic reception.
There’s its presence at the shoreline, where the two very different habitats of our planet meet. There is the dense audio world beneath the ocean’s surface, which she experiences thanks to the use of a hydrophone. There is the work of acoustic ecologists to use sound for us to better understand the alien realms we live amid. And there is Jonathan Sterne’s proposed connection, from his book The Audible Past, between the rise of canned goods and of canned music (including a quote from John Philips Sousa that sums up modern anxieties many have about Spotify, AI, and their combination.)
To read the article is to witness Haworth’s own perceptions change, improve, elevate, and sharpen. She writes:
“The headphones amplified the sound of the oyster reef while they also made me feel alienated from my surroundings. I quickly noticed that I could hear much of the snapping without the help of the machine. By amplifying the noise and concentrating it in my ears, the headphones had helped to tune my listening, a useful technology. Now I realized what I could hear without them.”
The full piece is at nautil.us.