Grafting in the great order of noises.

"The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out.  Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand.  The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge.  They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.  And yet it is habitual to summer nights, and is of the great order of noises, like the noises of the sea and of the blood her precocious grandchild, which you realize you are hearing only when you catch yourself listening."

--James Agee, "Knoxville: Summer 1915", Prologue in (my favorite novel) A Death in the Family (1957)


In this passage I believe that by "locust" Agee was referring to the Scissor-Grinder Cicada (below).  Have a listen.

Well day law*, you exclaim, how ever did you become so knowledgable about "the great order of noises"?  WELL.  Today for my birthday Shannon gave me the PERFECT gift for most any Easterner or Midwesterner living in the Northwest.  While the drastic diminishment of bugs up here is one of my favorite things about Seattle, the mute summer nights find me feeling like I'm in a sonic vacuum/graveyard.  And although these silent NW nights speak their own mysteries, I find the absence of creature music alienating and lonely for my Southern soul.

But not no more (you heard me, grammarphiles).  Thanks to the extensive field work of critter song curators Lang Elliot and Wil Hershberger, I now have a darn good artificial Southern (/Midwestern/Northeastern) night on CD.  See below.

And thank you, Shannon, for listening to my longing.  xo.

*The phrase "day law" means something like "I'll be.." or "my goodness" and might be local to East TN, I don't know, or heck, maybe just my dad's side of the family.  I'd be curious to know its etymology.

#1--Insect Concertos by Lang Elliot and Wil Hershberger

See charming annotated playlist.

#2--The Songs of Insects by Lang Elliot and Wil Hershberger

This one is a large 228 page book filled with amazing full color photos of each individual insect, facts about it, a map of where it's found in the U.S., and a DIAGRAM of it's unique song.  This in addition to an audio CD of long sound bites of each insect's song.  Whuuuut?!?!?!  I just really appreciate these gentlemen's work.  By the way they also offer A Guide to Night Sounds: The Nighttime Sounds of 60 Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, and Insects (my next venture),  Frogs and Toads of North America, and The Songs of Wild Birds, among others.  Woo!  That's my mammal sound.  Now if I can just figure out how to mount my speakers outside my window this summer...