A review by seclement
The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants by Karen Bakker

4.0

A book in a similar vein to The Hidden Life of Trees and the Inner Life of Animals, this is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of acoustic ecology, animal and plant communication, and many other elements relating to the sounds of nature. There will certainly be many ecologists, linguists, biologists, and others who will take issue with this book and accuse Bakker of anthropomorphising animals and plants. Or perhaps for overstretching what we know, based on the studies she covers. And whilst that may be true at points, I think Bakker does an excellent job overall in explaining where our knowledge is tentative, impartial, and speculative, versus where we have quite a lot of evidence. As for anthropomorphising, she confronts this head on at several points, and also makes fair points about the flip side of this, anthropocentrism, which dominates many scientific fields and tends to assert that humans provide the standard against which all things relating to communication, intelligence, and consciousness should be measured. A lot of the research in here is at the edge of our current knowledge, so I have no doubt there will be a lot more work to emerge in years to come, some of which might shed new light on what she shares here. I found it a worthwhile and engaging read, and would recommend it for plant, animal, nature and music lovers alike. It's the most comprehensive book I have read on the topic to date.