From Sea Lions to Sight-Singing: What Sea Mammals Know About Music

Sea Lions of the Georgia Aquarium, April 2025

Pinnae, the externally-located parts of the sea mammal’s ear, are parallel to auricles in humans. As the Georgia aquarium explains, pinnae help sea lions (and by extension seals and walruses) with their directional hearing, especially when they're on land. And, when the pinnae are pinned back, the animals are streamlined, able to twist and turn in the water in what observers (my husband and I) might describe as a “caffeinated state.” So much motion! So little splash!

So, if sea lion pinnae and human auricles are alike, might not the sea mammal be the next freshman ear-training Wunderkind? It sure seems plausible, to judge by the scholarly literature of late!

For one thing, the more-mobile pinnae could readily serve to give sea mammals better concentration than your average freshman. How so? Well, if sea mammals have the ability to close their ears to keep out water, they might perhaps perform that same action to close out aquarium noise. With decibel levels hovering regularly in the mid-80s, the noise of the general public must surely be annoying to our mammal companions on display. Perhaps that’s why they spent so much time submerged; listening to the roar of an enthusiastic crowd may easily be imagined to “get old fast,” particularly when a mammal is capable of so much more. Close off the pinnae, reduce distraction. I bet freshmen wish they had a tool like that on tap?

Not only that, but sea mammals are also capable of changing vocal expressions in learned behavior (Reichmuth and Casey, 2014). They can imitate complex sounds. For instance, Hoover, a captive harbor seal, famously mimicked human speech with a recognizable New England accent, including favorite phrases like “Hey! Hey! Come over here!” That old expression monkey see, monkey do here becomes “Seal repeats phrases that trainer over-uses.”

Likewise, studies have reiterated that sea mammal vocabulary was volitional – done at will – and influenced by status, with dominant animals vocalizing more often than their subordinate peers. This “voluntary control over sound emissions,” the authors argue, “is likely related to respiratory adaptations for diving.” If I am following the argument here, a sea mammal might readily be moved into that sight-singing class, since they can learn to repeat what they hear, and the more self-important the beast, the better the outcome. Yup, sounds like freshmen to me!

Not only have the ear-to-voice translation capacity of our freshmen, sea mammals also are good candidates for voice department training. The elements of shaping a good singing voice are found in the “jaw, tongue, lip, and soft palate movements,” am I right? Oh wait, these “articulatory gestures” are exactly the ones that the captive harbor seal used in Goncharova’s study of the way that “wawa” sounds are shaped (Goncharova et al., 2024).

Teacher: Move that soft palate forward, and make it sound like this…
Captive Seal: like this? …
Teacher: That’s right, but give it a little more lift at the end…

So far our sea mammal student shows trainability, and the capacity for vocal shaping. But we all know that rhythm is a big bugaboo for the freshman ear training student. What of that?

Oh right, sea mammals have that covered as well! Yes, it turns out that sea lions can be taught both simple and complex rhythms. How so? Investigators (Rouse et al. 2016) taught Ronan the sea lion to nod her head in time to repeated rhythms. They then provided deliberate disruptions to her click-track. It turns out that Ronan could adjust to tempo changes and other disruptions, getting back on beat within a measure or two.

The authors suggest that the mechanism is one of auditory-motoric entrainment – that is, a coordination of the motor unit with rhythmic sounds – through neural oscillation. Moreover, because that capacity is so broadly found in the animal kingdom, they argue that “rather than being a derived ability, this faculty is instead broadly conserved.” From elephants to cockatoos to, yes, sea lions, many animal species can bop to the music. In other words, investigators found that musical skills might be much more natural and widespread in the animal kingdom than traditionally thought.

What does this say? It suggests to me that the ambitious ear training instructor might well look to their local aquarium for species-broadening outreach.

So, if your institution wants to know the public impact of your music school, just tell them this: from sight-singing, to vocal sound production, to rhythm, the sea mammal is a ready-made model for teaching and learning those modern-day ear training skills!

WORKS CITED

Goncharova, Maria, Yannick Jadoul, College Reichmuth, W. Tecumseh Fitch, and Andrea Ravignani, “Vocal Tract Dynamics Shape the Formant Structure of Conditioned Vocalizations in a Harbor Seal.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences vol. 1538, issue 1 (2024): 107-116.

Reichmuth, Colleen, and Caroline Casey. “Vocal Learning in Seals, Sea Lions, and Walruses.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 28 (Oct 2014): 66-71.

Rouse, Andrew A., Peter F. Cook, Edward W. Lage, Collegen Reichmuth. “Beat Keeping in a Sea Lion as Coupled Oscillation: Implications for Comparative Understanding of Human Rhythm.” Frontiers in Neuroscience (2016), DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2016.00257

19th Century poetic earlids and the Ovid rumor-mill (11/26/24)

 

Image of James Henry, poet of Menippea (1866)

Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213

If one is to spend time on earlids -- and evidently that’s on the current docket, as my previous posts show (see here and here) – one could do worse than to spend time with doctor-and-poet James Henry. His not-particularly-well-known poetry collection Menippea is a staunchly 19th-century product, and one of the untitled poems from the middle of the collection spends 54 lines considering earlids and their absence. 

I quote it here in its entirety:

…. “Nullis inclusit limina portis. Nocte dieque patent… Nulla quies intus, nullaque silentia parte.”

[There is no closing the thresholds of the gates. They are open day and night... There is no peace within, and no silence outside. -- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk 12, ll. 45-50]

Is it just in Heaven to favor so the eyes
With lids to keep out dust and glare and flies,
And leave the poor ears open, night and day,
To all each chattering fool may choose to say,
To all assaults of sturdy hurdygurd,                                          5
And grand-piano octave, chord, and third,
And rapid volley of well-quavered note,
Out of wide gaping, husband-seeking throat,
And fiddle squeak, and railway whistle shrill,
Big drum and little drum and beetling mill,                            10
Trumpet and fife, triangle and trombone,
And hiss and shout and scream and grunt and groan?
Be gracious, Heaven! And, if no law forbid,
Grant the distracted ear such share of lid
That we may sometimes soundly sleep at night,                    15
Not kept awake until the dawning light,
By rattling window-sash, or miauling cat,
Or howling dog, or nibbling mouse or rat,
Or cooped-up capon fain like cock to crow,
Or carts that down the paved street clattering go,                  20
Or nurse, in the next room, and sickly child,
Warbling by turns their native woodnotes wild.
Judge us not by thyself, who darest not sleep,
But open always, day and night, must keep
Both eye and ear, to see and hear how go                              25
All things above the clouds, and all below;
Lids for thine ears, as for thine eyes, were worse
Than useless, an impediment and curse;
We, with less care, our eyes are free to close
At night, or for an after-dinner doze,                                      30
And for this purpose thou hast kindly given,
And with a bounty worthy of high Heaven,
Each eye a pair of lids. One lid might do
For each ear, if thou wilt not hear of two,
One large; well fitting lid; and night and day,                        35
As bound in duty, we will ever pray;
And thou with satisfaction shalt behold
Our ears no less protected from the cold
Than our dear eyes, and never more need’st fear
That to thy word we turn a hard, deaf ear;                              40
Never more fear that discord should arise
And jealous bickerings between ears and eyes,
Both members of one body corporate,
Both loyal subjects of one church and state;
Never more see us, on a frosty day                                         45
Stuffing in cotton, or hear caviller say:
“I’d like to know why fallen less happy lot
On ear than on snuffbox and mustardpot;
What is it ever ear thought or ear did,
To disentitle it to its share of lid?”                                          50 
Earlids, kind Heaven, or who knows what --?? But no!
Silence, rebellious tongue, and let ear go
And plead its own case. Lidless, Heaven’s own ear,
And, whether it will or not, must always hear.

James’ use of Ovid as epigraph is only that of metaphor; Ovid doesn’t call to “earlids” specifically, but he does explore the realm of rumor. Rumor is available night and day, says Ovid; there’s no threshold closure to keep rumor out. Indeed, such murmurings amplify as we attend to them (as we must). In other words, gossip will have its sneaky way with folks.

Ovid, Metamorphoses Book XII [= Ovid on Rumor]

Orbe locus medio est inter terrasque fretumque
40 caelestesque plagas, triplicis confinia mundi;
unde quod est usquam, quamvis regionibus absit,
inspicitur, penetratque cavas vox omnis ad aures:
Fama tenet summaque domum sibi legit in arce,
innumerosque aditus ac mille foramina tectis
45 addidit et nullis inclusit limina portis;
nocte dieque patet; tota est ex aere sonanti,
tota fremit vocesque refert iteratque quod audit;
nulla quies intus nullaque silentia parte,
nec tamen est clamor, sed parvae murmura vocis,
50 qualia de pelagi, siquis procul audiat, undis
esse solent, qualemve sonum, cum Iuppiter atras
increpuit nubes, extrema tonitrua reddunt.
Atria turba tenet: veniunt, leve vulgus, euntque
mixtaque cum veris passim commenta vagantur
55 milia rumorum confusaque verba volutant;
e quibus hi vacuas inplent semonibus aures,
hi narrata ferunt alio, mensuraque ficti
crescit, et auditis aliquid novus adicit auctor.
Illic Credulitas, illic temerarius Error
60 vanaque Laetitia est consternatique Timores
Seditioque recens dubioque auctore Susurri;
ipsa, quid in caelo rerum pelagoque geratur
et tellure, videt totumque inquirit in orbem.

There is a place in the middle of the world, ’twixt land and sea and sky, the meeting-point of the threefold universe. From this place, whatever is, however far away, is seen, and every word penetrates to these hollow ears. Rumour dwells here, having chosen her house upon a high mountain-top; and she gave the house countless entrances, a thousand apertures, but with no doors to close them. Night and day the house stands open. It is built all of echoing brass. The whole place is full of noises, repeats all words and doubles what it hears. There is no quiet, no silence anywhere within. And yet there is no loud clamour, but only the subdued murmur of voices, like the murmur of the waves of the sea if you listen afar off, or like the last rumblings of thunder when Jove has made the dark clouds crash together. Crowds fill the hall, shifting throngs come and go, and everywhere wander thousands of rumours, falsehoods mingled with the truth, and confused reports flit about. Some of these fill their idle ears with talk, and others go and tell elsewhere what they have heard; while the story grows in size, and each new teller makes contribution to what he has heard. Here is Credulity, here is heedless Error, unfounded Joy and panic Fear; here is sudden Sedition and unauthentic Whisperings. Rumour herself beholds all that is done in heaven, on sea and land, and searches throughout the world for news.

Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library  (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

ANALYSIS:

James Henry may have been inspired by Ovid, but he goes his own way in the poem. He considers in the beginning the difference between eyes (with lids) and ears (without), and alludes to Ovid’s chattering fools who amplify rumors in so many difficult ways, but he moves quickly (lines 5-12) to the music that might be blocked out – the hurdygurdy, the piano and its chords, the voice and its ornamental runs (sung by a young lady to impress the men). Fiddles, percussion, brass band, and an array of other noises (“hiss and shout and scream and grunt and groan”) assault the ear.

He turns (lines 13-22) to thinking of the earlid, which could help us sleep by protecting us from household and neighborhood noises (blowing windows, cats and dogs, vermin, the neighbors chickens, night-time carts, and children – the urban equivalents through sheer pervasiveness of woodland sounds). We are not like God (lines 23-33), who needs to be always available and is omniscient; we’re able to tune out, to drop our attention and ignore the world around us. Even a single lid would be better for us, and we’d give thanks through prayer for having such a tool (lines 34-40). This happy circumstance would let us treat sight and hearing in parallel, both with the option of closing down at need. Thus, if snuffboxes and mustardpots warrant lids, don’t we humans too? (lines 41-50). But no, the poet concludes, we should be satisfied as-is; lidless ears we have, always open to the world around us – for good or for ill (51-54).

Earlids here are functioning as a poetic meditation on human vulnerability and connection. They start as a whimsical notion – a solution to the cacophony of life – but evolve into a reflection on how we stay open to the world around us. Henry’s playful logic – his comparisons to mustardpots and snuffboxes – underscores the absurdity of wishing away our inherent human-shaped design. Instead, the poem turns our "deficiency" into a virtue: our lidless ears remind us of our shared humanity. Because of their absence, we are (happily) unable to fully shield ourselves from the beauty and the clamor of existence. In a world of noise, our earlidless status keeps us tethered to both the chaos and the harmony around us. We are always listening, always, therefore, alive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

• Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213

• Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

Earlids of the early 1900s (11/21/2024)

Earlids of the early 1900s (with image of an ear)

The question of earlids being on my mind, and the airport being boring so boring, I decided to troll around the historical corpus of writings and see what earlids meant to the world before R Murray Schafer brought them to our habits of modern thought. I have five examples for today’s post, each doing something different.

EDISON – EARLIDS AS CONCENTRATION
The first is an anecdote about Thomas Edison. Many of us remember that he had been made partially deaf by maltreatment – a box to the ears from which he never fully recovered.

In our “earlid” anecdote, the interviewer asks Edison about his deafness, and he (like my exam-taking sister of my earlier earlid post) finds the concentration that partial deafness affords to be a strength. He’s asked if he plans to take the surgery which medical wisdom of the day thought would provide a “cure.” His response? “What! And give up the great advantage I have over the rest of you fellows!”

The interviewer then opines: there is a strong need, he thinks, for earlids as well as eyelids in this world.

In this world, then, earlids provide a form of concentration. They’re akin to headphones, filtering out the irrelevant so one can think one’s thoughts in peace.

TELEPHONE – EARLIDS AS SHUTTERS
Another take comes from the same journal, responding to the new technology:

This telephone business brings out strongly another of those little defects in the design of the human body which are becoming apparent nowadays. The ear is an exceedingly intricate and generally satisfactory piece of apparatus, but it was its limitations. Occasion has been taken before to speak of the regrettable absence of earlids for the shutting out of unpleasant sounds. The man at the telephone to whom some one else is trying to speak at the same time suddenly discovers that although he has two ears they will not work separately. It looks like a waste of natural material for a man to have two ears and to be obliged to listen with both at once. How much better it would be if he could listen to the telephone with one and take in conversations in his immediate neighborhood with the other!

So, if earlids could shut out unwanted sounds, we could use them to mute the external world while we communed on the telephone. Of course, here a century later, that’s such a habit that it’s now practically invisible. The anonymous observer of the earlier 20th century had a better outcome in mind, though: wouldn’t it be better if we could listen to two conversations at once? (I suspect that our Gen-Z colleagues would think that under-ambitious! So much swiping! So many intersecting worlds! So many simultaneous windows open!)

GOSSIP – EARLIDS AS A MORAL TOOL
Medical doctor and essayist George Abbott, on the other hand, is thinking about earlids as a doctor’s tool – to handle preventative moral intervention. In a column devoted primarily to the glass dropper method of cleansing the ear with enzymol, he tells a story about earlids that he suggests be shared with the child patient. Two college co-eds were talking, and one asked the other, “would it not be fine if there were earlids as well as eyelids? Then when anyone said anything against one, they could shut their earlids.” Her interlocutor is having none of it: “yes, but who’d shut them?” We’re nosy, in other words, we want to know.  

Ah, Abbott encourages us, the skillful doctor could then use this story to reinforce the important moral lesson: the pus he’s cleaning out with the enzymol is not as poisonous as vile stories, and the caring doctor should thus tell the child: stay clean and pure; close your earlids against gossip. To him, pretending you have earlids is the moral choice. He wants his colleagues to share both story and lesson, because a doctor is like a godfather to the child. He’s bowing to Ovid’s discussion of rumor (Metamorphoses, Bk XII), of course, and for him, earlids (Ovid’s closed doors on the threshold) are about ignoring “vile stories” and tending only to good and moral thoughts.

BABIES AND THE ABSENCE OF EARLIDS (Saleeby’s theory of 1905) – EARLIDS AND URBAN NOISE, EARLIDS AND EVOLUTION
A surprisingly influential observation about the human absence of earlids was made by eugenicist and physician Caleb W. Saleeby. Two years before he helped to launch the Eugenics Education Society (yeah, ick), he had already developed a popular presence in the press with his medical opinings. One of them, that received quite a few follow-ups, was an essay that investigated (and I use that term loosely) why it is that humans lack earlids:

For sleep it is desirable to exclude light and sound: but whilst we have eyelids, no apparatus for closing the ears is known save, I believe, in certain animals which inhabit the sea, and whose ears are of small auditory importance. In these days, when barrel organs assail us with the “Ave Maria,” playing Bach’s accompaniment in G and Gounod’s air in somewhat more than G, and when the motor car makes night hideous, one sighs for earlids.

And I have even wondered why natural selection has not so endowed us: for it might seem an advantage to be able at will to protect one’s nervous system from sound as from light.But it occurred to me that I had not appreciated the significance of the “infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry” – crying, however, not for the light but for its food. It would be a sorry business if a child had to rely for its nocturnal refreshment upon the willingness and ability of its mother to keep awake, or to waken spontaneously when wanted. This, perhaps, may partially explain our deprivation of earlids.

Crocodilian researchers would protest at the characterization of their field as “small auditory importance” since, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the excellence of hearing, its tracking ability which has proven to include directional hearing via pressure differential in the middle ear cavities – which is cool! A single alligator ear can tell direction! Wow! (Bierman et al. 2014).

But also, Saleeby gives us context. We want earlids because of urban noise, and that noise is defined in part in musical terms – the oppression of an out-of-tune barrel organ playing a too-popular hit – and then in technological ones, with the nighttime noise of that newfangled automobile a contributor to what we moderns might call noise rot – the ugly deterioration of a once pristine soundscape.

And why don’t we have them? Because mothers need to tend to crying babies. It’s an adaptive trait, he’s claiming, to not be able to shut out noise at night.

Of course, people pushed back on his claims of sleep; his notion that humans only indulged in surface sleep is easily debunked, and his gendering of the nighttime-listening claims are equally fraught. But one didn’t need evidence to be influential, and that influence even made its way across the channel into France.

PARIS 1907: EARLIDS, URBAN NOISE,  AND THE LUDDITE PERSPECTIVE
In a short column for The Musical Courier, an anonymous essayist picks up Saleeby’s complaints about urban noise. In doing so, he evokes “the agitation over here [Paris] on the noises of cities,” and claims that concern about these intruding noises “has reached a point of insisting upon official investigation.” We’re in crisis because, he points out, “The automobile and the motor-bus are not respecters of the public ear.” Once upon a time, the horse car ran with “a minimum of noise,” but now all those modern inventions are a hazard, “both as to dust and to noise.” The essayist notes that there’s been scientific investigation of the sanitary aspects of noise, and calls (sensibly) for tires that will minimize noise in the landscape, but he’s also quick to jump to the “nervous ailment” that is the result of all that newfangled stuff. Our health is at risk from all these infernal machines.

The author cites Saleeby by name (and preaches his brand of evolutionary thinking), but is perhaps a bit more nuanced (or more aware of others’ critiques about sleep) than was Saleeby himself. The Musical Courier correspondent reminds the reader that the noise “of the ‘bus, of the elevated, of the milk cart, of the rumbling coal cart, can be dismissed by the mother and will not affect her sleep, but only a movement, a change in the rhythm of the breath of the baby, and she is awake.”  We can tune out the systematic background noise, but the unexpected or the worrisome sound will intrude and poke us awake by way of our sense of hearing.

What the author does do that is important (and approved by OSHA, I’m sure!) is to consider the way in which urban noise might impact the musician. The delicacy of the musical ear, he claims, and especially its need to differentiate “infinitesimal tonal allusions,” is at risk by all this landscape noise. Even talking loudly can lead to the “corruption” of the listening faculty. How much more dangerous is that “havoc” from the technological noises descending “into the streets and roads every day.” This is at heart a Luddite perspective; the new technology is bad and damaging, and we should do what we can to shut it down. The early call in the essay for better tires (that would make less noise) gives way for an imagined future of air travel, the “only relief” that the writer can imagine.

(He’d clearly never yet heard an airplane’s roar! On the early development of flight in Europe, see https://applications.icao.int/postalhistory/aviation_history_early_developments_in_europe.htm. The air is imagined more as a hot-air balloon kind of space than one with motors and engines to clutter up the soundwaves. Oh, the irony of thinking about this in an airport context! Sooooo much noise!)

I spend time on the Musical Courier essay because it does raise the issue of soundscape in the context of the earlid theme that’s got my attention at the moment. This author positions the earlid as a kind of Luddite tool, one that could have blocked technological noises specifically, not just urban ones. He isn’t interested in blocking out “unwanted” noise, but rather the damaging noises that come from these newly invented tools that are overrunning the landscape. Motors cause noise and dust. The practical solution is to investigate and regulate them; the fantastical solution is to invent our way out of the damaging sound-moment in history. This isn’t pure Luddite --there’s perhaps a salvic capacity in technology of the far future – but it’s at the least a technology-resistant perspective. Motors here are all noise and no benefit, and their appeal is invisible. We are left to their noisy consequences.

CONCLUSION
These five glimpses of earlids from the first decade of the twentieth century are interesting to me for several reasons. 

First, the conceptual notion of the earlid is clearly in the early twentieth-century conversation; it’s coming up in engineering, in medicine, and in music. That cross-disciplinarity suggests the power of metaphor as meme, spreading and shaping thinking of the period. (Thank you Peter Bailey 1996 -- important legwork on how to think about such things in history!) 

Second, the multivalency of earlids is important too, for they are at once moral filters and anti-technology assessments, a screening tool or a focusing one. They – in their absence -- are even read as an evolutionary tool. The earlid as a point of reference shows the crossover of various strains of thought in a time of intellectual ferment. 

Third, these imagined earlids reflect early 20th-century anxieties about controlling soundscapes and are in a way a precursor to today’s focus on noise-canceling technologies. We have headphones and those little foam dispensaries in libraries and at construction sites; we practice mindfulness and build apps that let us move away mentally from noise and chaos to at least an inner stillness. They had words, and complaint processes, and regulations, and essays. But what is clear to me from the earlid discussions then and now is that we all share a concern about the soundscapes we inhabit.

A BRIEF EARLID BIBLIOGRAPHY

1900s literature on Earlids, a sampling:

•  [Anon.] “Reflections: On Paris, London, Nordica and Mahler.” The Musical Courier No. 1424 (July 10, 1907): 5.
•  [Anon.] “Views, News and Interviews [on Edison].” Electrical Review 38 No. 17 (April 27, 1901): 520.
•  [Anon.] “Views, News and Interviews [on the telephone].” Electrical Review 38 No. 26 (May 18, 1901): 626.
•  Abbott, George E. “The Doctor and the Child.” The Southern California Practitioner 22 (1907): 15.
•  Saleeby, C.W. “Helpless Infancy.” The Academy (28 Jan 1905): 87.

Soundscape Readings on Earlids:

•  Bailey, Peter. "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise," Body & Society, 2(2) (1996): 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X96002002003
•  McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
•  Myers, David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000)
•  Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.

Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:

• Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
• Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
• Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.

19th Century poetic earlids and the Ovid rumor-mill:

• Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213
• Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library  (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

 

I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person (11/15/24)

Image of a crocodile in lights from ZooLights at Lincoln Park Zoo

Earlids, or rather their absence, are a common trope of Soundscape literature. The idea is a stand-in for sound’s penetrative abilities; without earlids, the narrative goes, we cannot block noise.

The idea takes shape in its modern iteration from R Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1977/r1994, p. 11):

The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids. When we go to sleep, our perception of sound is the last door to close and it is also the first to open when we awaken. These facts have prompted McLuhan to write: “Terror is the normal state of any oral society for in it everything affects everything all the time.” The ear’s only protection is an elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering out undesirable sound in order to concentrate on what is desirable….

While it is Schafer who is most often quoted, McLuhan and Fiore had introduced the image a decade previous in The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001 p. 111): “We can’t shut out sound automatically. We are simply not equipped with earlids.” (Emphasis mine).

Neither “willful” closing of the ear (Schafer) nor an “automatic” closing (McLuhan) being allowable by virtue of our biology as humans, we moderns must inevitably be bathed in the surround-sound of the world around us. Or so we have come to assert.

Well, crocodiles do have earlids. This somewhat (to me) astonishing revelation has been widely discussed since the mid-nineteenth century. Crocodiles, Wever determined in 1971 (PNAS), have excellent hearing, which is best in the midrange and drops off strongly in the lower register. The tympanic membrane or “round window membrane,” he points out, is protected by the earlids that shape out the crocodile’s head.  Likewise, Montefeltro, Andrade and Larsson in 2106 pursued a comparative study (J of Anatomy 2016) in multiple species in the crocodilian group in which they investigate the “Large meatal chamber concealed by a pair of muscular earlids that shape a large air-filled middle ear chamber.”

Earlids as muscular tools, protective of excellent hearing: I didn’t know that I secretly wanted to be a crocodile.

Or maybe I already am.

Let me back up. One of the other commonalities of the “earlid” discussion is the notion that the hearing-impaired might have the human equivalent in their hearing aid devices (for example, Myers 2000, p. 13). I know how that works from my sister (who is legally deaf). She used to talk about reaching up to click off all the classroom noise during exams. (She may also have confessed to clicking off a scolding or two as well, ahem.) She wound up valedictorian, so there might be some use to that strategy.

But I’m not that person. Rather, I have the Schafer form of “earlid,” that focused intensity that slams shut the world around us. I “go deaf to the world” when reading a particularly good novel, for instance (T. Kingfisher, George Eliot, Nicola Griffith, Kelly Barnhill, Casual Farmer, Jane Austen, S.A. Chakraborty…. And whatever else floats past my event horizon on the book front). The same zoning out practice happens when I pick up my scholarly projects. I have “come to” with (adult) children standing patiently in front of me holding paper signs saying “Mom?” (Okay, it was funny, but it happened more than once, eek).

The interesting thing about this kind of concentration is that I do obviously process sound at some level. “Were you talking to me?” and “Was that a siren?” and “Do we need to take cover from the storm?” are a few of the questions I’ve had on my lips as I’ve emerged from my stupor.

The sound was there. My brain took it in. But the slammed-down wall of concentration didn’t let any of those sounds penetrate my concentration. The earlids of the mind are clearly located somewhere between one’s ear drum and one’s consciousness, and they work even better than eyelids, which leak light. The time delay for even urgent sounds to penetrate can be 90 seconds or so -- all my sound questions are justifiably phrased in the past tense. A flash of lightning can grab me out of the concentration space; the rumble of thunder is less likely to do so.

This experience of closed earlids is, at least for me, separable from flow. Flow can happen with or without the earlids closed. I frequently encounter flow while on the trail, for instance, but part of that flow is processing the forest sounds and leaning into the acoustics of the landscape. Flow is also enjoyable in music – whether I’m listening to a recording or attending a concert, following a score or recreating the music in my head. There are lots of details of the work to which I am listening coming in on that emotional-analytical channel, but I can do it with earlids open or earlids closed. More often, music is an earlids open kind of experience for me; I am in the music but I am reachable (sometimes frustratingly so – sorry, family!).

But sometimes the music is earlids closed; only the music is in the brain’s consciousness, and it is all-consuming, fully occupying all attention and setting up for the delivery of those perfect moments that are the “reason” for the passage, the movement, the symphony as a whole; the coloratura run, the swell on the held note, the fade into ineffable beauty.

Earlids closed happens most naturally with music I know and love, but it can sometimes happen with music I am hearing for the first time, and even with music I don’t like. Working on developing an interpretive understanding of the music seems one trigger; following the “idiom” of the music as if it were another dialect and I was straining to follow its vocabulary is another. Both include an intellectual component, so maybe that’s part of the earlid mechanism – a left-brain kind of processing. And maybe there’s an intellectual component to loving that Brahms moment too: I am following the music in the moment, but also projecting the familiar music’s future, so that I am having a multi-temporal appreciation of the particular moment, and surely that must have a left-brain “understanding” component as well as the right-brain “O what beauty!” element.

Bringing it back to that book-reading, I suspect that there’s both an element of analytical and appreciative activity that plays into the earlid function. I follow the story, imagine its world, and revel in its revelations. Busy brain, busy brain, no room for distracting thing like conversations about what we should do for dinner or whether the computers should be unplugged in advance of the storm. The emergency isn’t here yet; my brain has its earlids tightly closed.

These three cases, then, seem to suggest that flow – that highest form of concentration – is distinct from the earlid function. Sometimes flow is *about* sound, either at large (hiking) or in selective part (music). Sometimes earlids are open (hiking and music) and sometimes they are closed (music and some of the best reading). I can read in a flow state that is interruptable (if with some irritation), or in a flow state that is not, except through touch or patience. The earlids are a different KIND of concentration from “flow,” I suspect, and bicameral in its function. (I’m betting it involves both left and right brain – and those both as cause of earlid clamping and as effect.)                       

What am I arguing? I believe that like a crocodile swimming in the ocean, or like my sister shutting off her devices, my brain can use its muscles to shut out the unnecessary distractions.

Whether my family agrees with my brain’s judgment about what qualifies as “unnecessary” (and thus when my earlids can be shut) is another question entirely!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Soundscape Readings on Earlids:

• McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
• Myers, David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000) - on earlids, p. 13.
  
• Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.

Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:

• Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
• Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
• Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.