Books Seeds of Story Saying “Hello” to Elephants and “Come Back Here” to Coral Reefs: Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life Bioacoustic technologies allow us to explore how the natural world communicates through sound — and it is fascinating. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on March 10, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. From budding corn to elephants, life takes greater advantage of sound—and has more to communicate—than we once imagined. New recording and analytic tools are helping us listen. What It’s About As we know from Ed Yong’s An Immense World, every species has its own unique sensorium. Culture—as Robin Wall Kimmerer points out—affects our ability to acknowledge and respect those different ways of engaging with the world. But even with that openness, our understanding remains limited. Karen Bakker explores the bioacoustic technologies that take us beyond our own sensory limits in the realm of sound. Human hearing, on average, lets us perceive frequencies between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz. Below that band is infrasound, the realm of earthquakes and elephants and thinking your house is haunted. In the other direction is ultrasound—used by medical scans but also by plants and insects. Ultrasound is also the tool of animals that (like the medical scan) use echolocation to pick out the shape of the world. Digital microphones can pick up these sounds and translate them for humans’ understanding and analysis. They can be made small enough to impress James Bond, but attached to bees rather than used for international espionage. They can be placed in deep forests or deep ocean. And they find communication where we expected only silence: unhatched turtles coordinating their births, mice exchanging signature whistles, coral larvae homing in on their mother reefs. They help us, in Kimmerer’s words, with “listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.” Bakker’s discussion begins with the study of whalesong. Long recognized by Indigenous arctic hunters, for a long-time awareness by Europeans (and their colonial populations) was limited to the occasional perceptive whaler. Jacques Cousteau titled his book about oceans The Silent World. But post-World War II research on submarine detection gathered clear evidence that humans weren’t the only thing making noise under the waves. The initial focus was on differentiating marine animal sounds from Soviet torpedoes—but casual descriptions of mysterious “Jezebel monster” and “A-train” sounds grew into direct study of the whales producing them Whale sounds can be divided into communication (orca pods have their own dialects, the babies babble), echolocation, and song. We still don’t entirely understand the purpose of this last: it may be produced only by males, and it may be related to mating. But it has affected humans in ways its creators couldn’t have intended. Publicly-released recordings led to the Save the Whales movement, which worked. And we are continuing to improve: recent work uses machine learning to tease out cetacean grammar. Bakker and others have also expressed optimism about full AI translation; I confess to some worry that this will result in hallucinating at humpbacks. Whale research informed work on elephants, who pick up each other’s infrasonic rumbles through their feet. Like the whales, their communications are optimized for long-distance connection, allowing herds to coordinate even when dispersed across difficult terrain. And like the whales, increased awareness of elephant social interactions bolstered conservation, in this case the international ivory trade ban of 1989. The same tools used to record elephants were then used to detect and fight poachers. Conflict between humans and disrupted elephant herds was mitigated with “bee fences”—regularly spaced hives whose sting elephants find particularly unpleasant—and this in turn led to the discovery that elephants use different “words” for different threats. New communication discoveries aren’t limited to potentially-sapient megafauna. Turtles make more noise than herpetologists once believed—the originally belief being “none”—not just the occasional distress call but a whole vocabulary of chirps, wails, howls, and pulses. These were long hidden not by their frequency, but by their low volume. Turtles are also slow conversationalists: minutes or hours may pass between vocalizations. Fish, too, make noises, allowing us to track the health of underwater ecosystems via changing soundscapes. Sound can also heal: recordings of healthy reefs attract life to artificial seed reefs, helping to regenerate ecosystems. Plants both make and respond to sounds. Young corn shoots produce clicks based on hydration level, and bend their roots toward specific frequency ranges. The roots of pea vines grow toward the sound of water, even if no other indications of moisture are present. And plants that have once been attacked by caterpillars make new defensive secretions in response to caterpillar recordings. Where might this relatively young research area go next? It isn’t new for humans to live in community with other species, but our dominant cultures discourage it. Could movements like Rights of Nature combine with new technologies to rebuild cross-species communication and collaboration? Groups like the Cetacean Translation Initiative use machine learning on what we suspect to be sperm whale language(s). Elephant researchers look for correlations between communicative sounds and external stimuli. The Interspecies Internet Project coordinates a wide range of such studies, looking for ways that we might someday achieve consistent, meaningful communication across species. Buy the Book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants Karen Bakker Buy Book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants Karen Bakker Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The idea of communicating with other species is irresistible, and stories where animals can’t speak are a more modern innovation than those where they can. I appreciate Bakker’s acknowledgment that bioacoustic research builds on longstanding Indigenous wisdom. You have probably noticed by now that I read a lot of books that quote Robin Wall Kimmerer. I don’t even do this on purpose; it’s just that good thinkers tend to make that connection for so many interesting topics. Along with Kimmerer’s Potawatomi paradigm, Bakker also pulls in relationships between African communities of humans and elephants, Aboriginal knowledge about the Great Barrier Reef, and Inuit understanding of whale migration patterns. Which raises the question: when are new research technologies genuinely the best way to learn, and when would we be better served by a change of attitude? It’s not a dichotomy, of course—we can do both. The risk is that we won’t. Bakker was a technological optimist, and her second book—which is on my TBR list—focuses on AI-based efforts to translate communication from other species. I’m more cautious about this potential. Machine learning is good at picking up patterns, even in areas that are tough for humans. Grammar is an obvious application. But the ability to learn new vocabulary, without clear observable correlates, is more limited. And as even Bakker admits, we’re prone to glossing over this challenge. You can buy sensors and apps that claim to translate your houseplant or your dog, but all they really do is paint a layer of English over soil acidity or anxious barking. You know what that tail wag means even without a translation collar, I assume. You know what your cat is on about. These gadgets are a high-tech way of saying “No one ever feeds me!” while getting out the can opener. It would be all too easy to paste ChatGPT on top of a miked-up humpback, and find out that whales want us to use more vibe coding. But still: irresistible. I love the idea of a world that no one could pretend was silent, where you could go outside and share gossip with the elm tree and the crows. But then, I gossip with the crows now, no translation app required. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Who Learns to Listen? The first researcher to detect elephant infrasound, Katy Payne, was also a classically-trained musician. That training in how to think about sound, and about recording, shaped her assumptions going into bioacoustics. This kind of interdisciplinary work is often a source of new scientific direction, but it’s something we rarely see in fiction. What other fields could help us connect with other species? And what other scientific areas would benefit from stronger artistic input? Payne also raises the possibility of interspecies music, something that Bakker brings up later—there’s a musician who teaches a bonobo piano. But surely other species have rhythms and musical methods to teach us as well. I would read that story. The Not-So-Universal Translator. We’re beginning to lay out cetacean grammars. The Hello in Elephant app offers very simple translations, starting with basic emojis. But assume that full translation becomes possible. What would we do next? Presumably different species have different things to say—would they be able to negotiate shared resources? Tell us what they need? Or what they want—does an oak tree want anything beyond what it needs? Maybe we’d finally find out what it’s like to be a bat. Depending on the depth of conversation, and the differences in cognition, this could affect our laws, our everyday interactions, or the core philosophical questions that have bugged us for millennia. How alien—and how much like us—are the aliens who share our world? New Growth: What Else to Read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” is a classic of animal communication SF. There are a bunch of dolphin communication books from the 70s that probably belong in one of my retro posts; David Brin’s Startide Rising has dolphins “uplifted” to join humans in the intergalactic community. I haven’t read it in years and am not per se recommending it, but the concept has been influential—for example, Adam Roberts’ Bête plays with the idea. Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon doesn’t involve humans learning to talk with or understand animals, but her aliens take the ability to do so as a given. Oceanic intelligences, particularly cephalopods, have been particularly popular lately, from Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea to Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. My housemates insist that I include Up, which does in fact include a device for translating Dog. Squirrel! Bakker’s (unfortunately final) companion book to The Sounds of Life is Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth. Amorina Kingdon’s Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater focuses in on aquatic bioacoustics. Tom Mustill’s How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals explores both the current state and the potential implications of improved human-animal communication. What does your dog think of this column? Tell us in the comments.[end-mark] The post Saying “Hello” to Elephants and “Come Back Here” to Coral Reefs: Karen Bakker’s <i>The Sounds of Life</i> appeared first on Reactor.