Earth. Air. Fire. Water. The fundamental, interconnected elements that make up all things. The four humors and temperaments, according to the ancients. And, the compass points at which nature sound recordists point their microphones, because where the four elements are found, life is found.
Earth: the forge of construction and destruction of all that we are. It nourishes life, and when life ends, it reclaims the precious parts to create more.
Air: the distributor of seeds and pollens. The creator of waves and surf. The birther of lightning and thunder. The facilitator of great aerial migrations. The vital stuff of respiration, transpiration, photosynthesis. The gentle force that lifts a butterfly or a spiderling on its strand of web, and with time, its partner in destruction, renders mountains to rubble, rubble to desert, prairie, grassland, seashore.
Fire: the key to life’s beginning. The dance partner of seeds that must burn before they can germinate. The restorer of forests and grasslands. The fundamental stuff of creation, found within the Mordor-like depths of Earth’s volcanoes and fumaroles and deep-sea vents. The molten cushions upon which the very continents float, tearing apart and crashing together in the slowest of violent tectonic motions.
And Water: the bringer of life. Earth’s xylophone and flute and crashing cymbals. The calming blanket that covers three quarters of the planet’s surface. In concert with Air, the reason we are the blue planet. The planet’s sculptor, carving great and beautiful things: the Grand Canyon. Yosemite. The sparkling tarns of Croatia’s Plitvice. The barbarian at the gate, pounding at the ramparts of the very continents themselves.
The elements collaborate. Earth and Air join to grind away the hardest surfaces, frosting the crystalline faces of quartz, dulling the granite facades of buildings, whittling away the sandstone cliffs of the Dakotas to create soaring, totemic hoodoos, torturing the planet’s inhabitants with mistrals, haboobs, derechos, Santa Anas, chinooks, sciroccos. Harmattans pick up sand in the Sahara by the atmosphere-load, 44 million pounds per year, and carry it 4,000 miles westward to fall in the Brazilian rainforest as a dry, phosphorus-rich rain of essential soil, three days later.
Meanwhile, Fire and Water hiss and scream in an intermittent steamy battle of birth, as lava flows across the Hawaiian Islands and into the sea, creating loopy Pahoehoe roadways and solid waterfalls where it strikes the ocean, expanding the island, bit by bit, year by year, eruption by fiery eruption.
Sound is life, and life is what we pursue.
And… life. The four elements are often arranged in a circle, as shown in Leibniz’s diagram below. Ignis (Fire) is at the top, Aqua (Water) at the bottom; Terra (Earth) is to the lef t, and Aer (Air) is to the right. It is a cycle, much like the cycle of life that the elements enable.
There is a richness of sound to record in each of the four elemental spheres, although no one, and I include myself in that, no one thinks about recording based on the whims of the four elements. And yet, we do. We record the whisper and rumble and crystalline hiss of traveling sand dunes, a song of Earth. The splattering wonder of bubbling mud pots and slurping lava and roaring fumaroles, a chorus of Fire. The susurrous voice of the ocean from a cliff high above, the explosive thunder of its crashing waves at beach level, the wind chime music of the stones on a cobbled beach, captured by a hydrophone buried deep beneath. A harmony of Water.
We record the eerily mechanical and rhythmic pumping of trees, as their circulatory systems move sap and water, leaf to root and back again. We sit in the darkness, entranced by the trill and charm of hundreds of spring peepers in a local pond, their combined voices shockingly loud and shrill and beautiful, singing with gusto, as biologist Archie Carr described, about sex. And in the hours before dawn, when everyone else is either soundly sleeping or feeling decidedly uncivil, the birds are awake, joyous, singing their hearts out to celebrate the sun as it bleaches the horizon. A celebration of the Air that carries the song.
And we, too, are there, dew-soaked to the withers, crouching in the tall grass, eyes closed, enjoying every second of the symphony as it passes from the headphones to our ears to that place deep in our hearts that makes us know, every time, why we do what we do. Sound is life, and life is what we pursue.
Earth. Air. Fire. Water. The creators of our beautiful blue planet. Ours to enjoy; ours to celebrate; ours to protect.
Featured photo by Vlad Kutepov on Unsplash
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