Interspecies Music

This piece was featured first on Apr 9 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

For various reasons, I have been searching for artists who work with whale songs. Like so many others, the sounds of the humpback whale were an inexplicably important part or my childhood. These were songs, I learned, which is really a statement. They were communication and art.

And that’s how I encountered the magical productions and imagination of Jim Nollman, who moved to the Bay Area in 1970. Nollman made music with animals. The only album he has on Spotify, first released in 1982, gets right to the point. It’s called Playing with Animals: The Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves, and 20 Orca Whales. Can you imagine such a credit to your name? What a thing!

Nollman wrote books, too, and a wildly compelling account of his adventures playing (or attempting to play) music with many kinds of animals in CoEvolution Quarterly, that successor to the Whole Earth Catalog. Crucially, his music was not mixed after the fact. It was not a blending of his human music with the recorded sounds of animals, but some kind of collaboration, with not and.

Sometimes these experiences were failures, musically, as when a kangaroo rat refuses to come play with him.

“I have already sat here for three hours, nearly motionless, and just twenty feet in front of one rat’s maze of burrows,” Nollman writes. “The silence of the desert seems nearly complete, and but for the roar of an occasional jet flying overhead, all I hear is the sound of my own nerves whining away between my ears.”

Other times, it took a while for him to find the right frequencies to attract the interest of the animals, as with a particular wolf, Arctic, in a pack of wolves.

“Very slowly I lift my head high and quietly chant with Arctic, trying my level best to follow his voice with a precise harmony. Finally, it seems to me that my harmony is truly harmonious for the very air around us begins to shimmer in sound,” Nolan writes. “Arctic seems to notice also, for at that moment he sings out louder than before. I take this action as an encouragement to sing out. Such an incredible feeling of elation, chanting an ancient song to the descending night, with a large group of wolves and coyotes.””

What I love in this work is the raw respect for the individual lives of these other animals.

This feels like the opposite of Sea World’s shenanigans, where we force brilliant animals who would cruise the oceans into a circus show for tourists. Nollman, instead, is willing to be in the animals’ environments, working with their desires, and to no end other than partnership in this thing we call life.

Nollman founded an organization that ran until 2014 called Interspecies and I cannot recommend browsing its archival website strongly enough. This is a remarkable body of work and following the bread crumbs they laid down will lead you to some of the most interesting and esoteric places in Bay Area ecology.

In the future, I think Nollman’s efforts will be seen as a milestone in a timeline that is just emerging of animal-human communication. When (or if) the day comes when we can understand the grammar of sperm whales or humpbacks, it will be not only because our pattern-matching computers got powerful enough, but our own human minds were able to stretch to understand the experience of another species. To collaborate with animals is to try our level best to understand their ways of being.

Alexis Madrigal signature
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum