The First Known Earthly Voice

0:01Heads up, today's show does include a couple of curse words. so anyway here we go wait you're listening okay okay you're listening to Radiolab from WNYC okay well I'll play this and then I don't think you're gonna be able to hear it Lulu that's fine harness the karaoke You got the proverbial sweaty beer in your hand? Yes, I do. Yeah, I'm really feeling it. Hey, I am Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And we are warming up in the studio with an actor named Becca Blackwell. Oh, yeah. I used to do a sound. I'm so excited you're going to read this for us. I am too. I'm just going to. Who we brought in to voice a truly gorgeous essay about song in the animal world.

1:03from crickets to whales to humans in karaoke bars. We count to. It's written by the author Sabrina Imbler, who is a friend of the show. We've had them on before. They write about nature and feelings, basically, which is kind of my favorite genre. And this is a brand new essay of theirs just off the presses. And when I read it, it just screamed at me that it wanted to be freed from the page, that its words wanted to be filled with air and the spaces between them filled with music and natural sounds. And so we asked Becca, who we've worked with before, if they'd come in and read it. And we asked our sound designer, Dylan Keefe, if he would really bring it to life.

1:44And what they made is so beautiful. And so I am going to get out of the way and let you hear it. All right, here we go. Key Changes by Sabrina Embler.

2:24The first sound in the universe is joylessly underwhelming. White noise, boring through the taffy stretch of nascent space. The Big Bang is not a bang, but a droning robotic purr. Galaxies expanding from the hot throat of a cat.

2:48Things cool. Atoms whirl into being. Then light, scattering in the cosmic fog.

3:03Gas clumps to form the first stars, whose huddled masses in turn form the first galaxies. A storm of gas and dust collapses, perhaps t-boned by a nearby supernova skidding and spinning into a sun. Our sun.

3:30All of this cacophony, the universe ringing like a cosmic bell, would be brutal for anyone around to hear it.

3:42But there is no one. Not yet.

3:50Life remains entirely uninvented. And when it finally appears, likely around 700 million years later, ears remain entirely uninvented too. So no one hears the torrent of the first oceans, the slick of the first big freeze, the jostling of the continents. Life pleats, becomes multicellular. Sponges drink in the ocean, fungi unfurl, worms slither in the murk. Eventually, the first plants extrude from land and insects skitter. The seedlings swell skyward, thundering into forests. Insects sprout wings and join them. This living does not happen silently. Bodies scraping through brush, whirring of wings, exoskeletons crunched by jaws.

4:44But these noises are unintentional. They're not meant for anyone.

5:00This changes 270 million years ago when an insect akin to a cricket scrapes one ornamented wing over another. Veins stiffen like corduroy, creating a rasp. The rasp does not sound like a song or even a note. You might mistake it for one rock scruffing against another. But however tuneless, The rasp of Permostridulus progniardi became what biologist David George Haskell calls the first known earthly voice.

5:57There is no single agreed-upon definition of animal song. Some biologists reserve the label for the steepled melodies of birds and tapestries of whale song. Others apply it more generously to any creature that calls out again and again toward others of its kind. Promostridulus's coarse guttural call lacked the complex structure of modern cricket songs, but it used the same mechanism. So you might agree that the moment hundreds of millions of years ago when a rasp crackled out of two wings and bellowed out into the insect's presence for some unknown reason, escaping a predator, threatening a foe, finding a mate, marked Permostridulus as the planet's first singer.

6:59The fact that I have never been a skilled singer has never kept me from karaoke. In adolescence, I was a part-time theater kid, a past that left me with a simmering, unquenched desire for some kind of spotlight. I began singing in earnest after college, in matchbox rooms with friends, co-workers, and strangers, in bars where we all thrummed against one another. My voice is loud and clear, but also flat and often tone deaf. I could never command a room as well as a talented singer, a fact I was reminded of whenever I karaoke'd with certain friends. When they sang, the rooms fell silent. I envied this attention.

7:44How it felt alchemic, sublimating into self-worth. I, too, wanted to conjure delight and affection. In this way, I suppose I am no different from any other creature. The evolutionary basis of any animal song is a bid for a mate.

8:06Karaoke is famously an outlet for rage. The rare public place where screaming will be met with applause. But in my experience, the night always ends with love songs. A thinning, bleary crowd, some too many drinks deep, listening to a ballad of the unrequited.

8:31In my 20s, my favorite karaoke ballad was Hinder's Lips of an Angel, a grungy confession sung by a man to his ex-girlfriend over a whispered phone call. whispered because there's new girls in the next room. Lips is so wretchedly self-serious in its generic valorization of cheating that it is transmuted almost endearingly into camp.

9:08I listened to the song in middle school on some torrented copy of Now That's What I Call Music. I was not necessarily drawn to the lyrics. Can't cheat on your girlfriend if you don't have one. But rather it's naked emotional core. It's a song about yearning. which was then my favorite pastime. I yearned for everything. A crush, adulthood, a body, and self I could love more.

9:39My friends and I loved to karaoke to the pop divas we grew up blasting from our boomboxes. But the first time I heard one of them sing Lips of an Angel, a song I had not consciously listened to in nearly a decade, I felt a swell of my old adolescent kinship. I started my own surreptitious relationship with it, singing it in rooms and bars full of strangers until it felt as inextricable from my identity as my haircut. I grew to relish the way some people, often men, reacted to my performance, nodding along to the melancholic opening chords before surprise plastered their faces when they saw who held the mic.

10:19At the risk of being reductive, Lips of an Angel is a boy song, not a girl song. When I first began to sing, my face soft and eyebrows painted on, I felt a certain frisian, as if just for this moment I was stepping into another body. As an alto, close to a contralto, I had always felt more comfortable singing songs written for men. I wonder now if my singing voice was the first plane on which I would claim to have passed, even briefly, as something other than a woman. Each time I sang lips, I practiced embodying this man, this self-defeating, aspirational cheater, too afraid to leave a relationship that rendered him dispassionate.

11:06During the chorus, I gripped the sweaty neck of my beer and held it like a candle. But girl, you make it hard to be faithful During the guitar solo, I thrashed my head along I spat gravel from my throat and sang Not to the back of the room, but beyond it The morning after, I'd wake up without a voice We never learn if the singer gains the courage to go back to his ex But it seems unlikely that he moves beyond his comfortable stasis The song ends with the same line that opens it. Honey, why you calling me so late?

11:51As a middle schooler, I never questioned the idea that his ex's call came too late to act on. I was obsessed with the idea that my life had already foreclosed certain possibilities, such as becoming a figure skater or speaking Mandarin. Only when I got older would I learn that it is never really too late for anything. Humans, birds, and whales learn their songs over the course of their lives. They practice, learn through mistakes, and even compose new songs together. But crickets, who live only a few months and hatch long after their parents' generation has perished, cannot learn their songs from elders.

12:34Rather, each species is born with its own signature song. The composition is genetically encoded and manifests in the specific ridges of the male's wings. Even if a cricket is raised in total isolation, having never met another of its kind, he will know how to sing his own particular song, at least after a few raspy attempts. As soon as the cricket, known as the handsome trig, molts into an adult, He can rub one wing over another and emit his characteristic rattling trill. A cricket song is a beacon of connection to his kind. If it were ever lost, he may be doomed to wander alone in the reeds.

13:17Isn't that fucking cool? I know that he just totally is like, he just wakes up and he's like, I know my song. I know my song. I don't learn it. It's like this outlier where it's just like, did you just wake up with your song? I know. As you were. No, it's so true. Also, can I start calling people, like, you're a handsome trig. What a handsome trig. Okay, sorry, as you are. I know, they're going to be like, is that a mathematical equation? So wild. Okay, keep going, as you work. I think you... Many crickets look identical, at least to us. Dark almonds with short wings and elbowed legs. But in the 1950s, researchers trudging into fields with tape recorders discovered many more cricket species than they had identified by eye.

14:01Although the first songs of early crickets, like their perma-striderless, were little more than rasps, modern species have since developed a vast repertoire of songs that feature chirps, trills, rattles, and lisps. Carolina ground crickets make an impatient, sloping trill that suddenly catches, as if their wings needed to take a breath. A tinkling ground cricket emits a quick, hushed series of cheeps, like a bird wrapped inside a blanket. The confused ground cricket buzzes two short syllables again and again, raised like a question. Some songs, especially those of tree crickets, which often have wings translucent as a sugar crust, sound more beautiful than others.

14:48This beauty is human bias. The principles of cricket aesthetics remain a mystery to us, and is also the afterglow of evolution. After all, the first cricket song emerged as a mutation An insect born with an unusually craggy wing Rubbed it against the other to produce a sound so soft That it was only perceptible from nearby, perhaps to a mate Scientists suspect all the songs in a modern cricket's repertoire Arose from this ancient intimacy They needed to whisper before they could wail But when they wailed, it was the males who became the first beacons of sound. Given the animal kingdom's penchant for male flamboyance, perhaps this is unsurprising.

15:35Only males make themselves vulnerable with song, screeching out their presence both to potential lovers and potential predators. To protect themselves, males often hide while they sing, nestled within clumps of grass and under rocks and leaves. They have no choice but to sing. even if it means opening themselves up to doom.

16:00I didn't start taking testosterone because I wanted to become a man. Rather, I coveted certain manly flourishes. A wispy mustache. Flesh desperate to become muscle. A new mystery of a face. What I wanted most of all was a deeper voice. One that could drop into the abyss and skim the seafloor As testosterone tilts your larynx and thickens your vocal cords Your voice sinks, stretches, and breaks Mine skipped like a broken record It fell off cliffs in conversation only to reappear moments later It became a shadow I could not pin down Although I knew others found this pubescence embarrassing, I felt thrilled by the discomfort.

16:54I could hardly blame my body, transiting between one voice and another like a blinking satellite, destination unknown. Of course, there would be blips along the way, but eventually, I realized I had lost my urge to karaoke. If speaking had become a gamble, singing was an impossible hazard. I could no longer handle my old songs. Notes that my voice once wrapped around now dangled out of reach. When I did hit the right notes, a frog stuck in my throat. I riveted. I croaked. I tried switching octaves and often swung too deep. Still, I laughed it off. In the grand scheme of things, it was no big deal.

17:41It wasn't like I traded some perfect voice for an imperfect one. I mostly felt impatient, excited for the point where my new voice would feel worn in and familiar. I hardly thought about the notes I'd lost, instead fixating on the new, deeper ones yet to emerge. Just how low could I go? No, I never miss my old voice, but I miss the way I used to feel singing lips of an angel, punching each note with confidence, a beer swinging from my hand. I'd stopped singing it a few years into testosterone. It's true that the song had become more difficult. It's true that one night at a karaoke work party, I told my co-workers that I had left it behind.

18:27But I didn't admit to myself until now, as I write this, that I hadn't quit Lips of an Angel as much as I had quit karaoke. In my most honest understanding, karaoke became hardest not when I could no longer sing, but when I could no longer drink. I had a problem like many others have a problem. Not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough that it had run slipshod through my relationships, my health, and my ability to see myself surviving into old age. I had known this for years, but the only person I felt accountable to was myself. I shrugged off friends and lovers who had pulled me aside to share their fears.

19:08I desperately wanted to believe I was someone in control of their life, and quitting drinking felt like an admission that I was not. So I kept drinking, and drinking, and drinking. But this is the terrifying, miraculous thing about transitioning. Once you imagine a body that might bring you happiness instead of loathing, and once you imagine a version of yourself with less reason to hide, you might dare to imagine a more beautiful life. After I'd been on testosterone for a little more than a year, I found myself having more days in which I wished for nothing more than to be present in my body.

19:51I realized that quitting would be, in essence, to value my own life and wish myself into the future. So I stopped. But once I did, I felt far too exposed to strain for those old highs at karaoke. I had never been more aware of myself, my body, my newly raw voice. The dark rooms and bars had lost their sultry twinkle. They made me remember a past self that was freer to abandon themselves into gauzy oblivion. the loss of the cells with nothing to be mourned I was glad to have arrived on the other side but I was too freshly molted my shell soft and nerve ending still tingling so in the years following even as my change voice began to grow roots I stayed home

20:58When we come back, we'll see what happens when a song is lost. Not just for Sabrina, but for a whole species.

21:19This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller. Today, we are dedicating the whole episode to an essay I read and adored called Key Changes, all about song in the animal world and beyond. It's by Sabrina Imbler, and it is being read to us by the actor Becca Blackwell. Almost a year after I stopped drinking, I learned about a population of crickets in Kauai. They were Pacific field crickets, Telio grilis oceanicus, and their song was round, bright, and sweet. Four loud chirps culminating in a husky trill. several decades ago a biologist named Marlene Zook discovered that the males had suddenly stopped singing Zook started studying the crickets in the 1990s when the insects would bleat together but one year into the new millennium she heard only a single male call out in the entire field season an orchestra replaced by a soloist The silence might suggest that the crickets themselves had vanished, or at least absconded.

22:30But when Zook and her team returned to Kauai in 2003, they found crickets abounding in the fields. The males still went through all the motions, scraping mute wings together. But their wings had slickened, rid of the corrugations that once allowed them to sing. The culprit was a mustard-colored fly, Ormia or Catria. Only slightly larger than a pea, the fly cannot attack the cricket like a typical hunter. Instead, it is a parasitoid. The fly listens for the cricket's song with its highly specialized eardrums, which waggle like a teeter-totter to triangulate the insect's location. Then the fly unloads a heap of maggots atop the cricket's back, babies that burrow through the exoskeleton and curl up inside the cricket as if its body were a womb.

23:21The maggots develop inside this walking, singing incubator, and when they hatch, they erupt out of the body and eat their way out. In singing their old song, the male crickets had unknowingly condemned themselves to a gruesome death. The crickets had lost their song and might now survive into the future, for generations and mute flat wings hopped around the island, freed from the flies but scarcely able to find mates. But in 2018, biologist Robin Tingatella overheard a population of Pacific field crickets in Hawaii singing a new song. It sounded nothing like the species' signature chirping, but rather like a cat's low, throaty purr.

24:08To the careful ears of female crickets, these calls are crude imitations of the old one. The alchemy of the first, crafted by eons of evolution, remain lost. but these new songs, however coarse and tuneless, may be the cricket's ticket to the future. When I wrote about the Hawaiian crickets for my day job, I recognized what seemed like parallels between us. We were creatures who had traded some original ability to sing for something else, survival and a newfound masculinity. But I am not so obtuse as to conflate our situations. I had no life-threatening predators around to silence me, no flies dumping a litter of maggots on my back to remodel my body into a nightmarish womb.

24:56Thinking about our situation side by side only reminded me of my luck. I had simply fallen a little out of love with karaoke. What once had been an outlet for rage, love, and desire had now become a site of discomfort, even fear. It was no longer a place I could go to lose myself. In fact, I was running out of places to lose myself. Perhaps this was the point of stopping drinking, but it did not halt my yearning for times when I could step into a karaoke room, pick up a mic, and become someone else for a few minutes. Now I'm much more myself. This is sometimes a relief, sometimes a restriction.

25:42When I used to sing Lips of an Angel at karaoke, I often found myself reading the lyrics off a simple blue screen. But the fancier bars would play the actual music video. It opens with Austin John Winkler, the former lead singer of Hinder, a quasi-tatted white guy with the dark stringy hair, talking to his old girl on the phone as his new girl is in the next room. The video, like the song, is quite literal. When I duetted lips with the video, I mirrored Winkler's affect as I wailed, holding up my own quasi-tatted arms, nodding my own head of dark stringy hair. When I revisited the music video for this piece, I came across an interview with Winkler where he talked about reaching three years of sobriety after being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure.

26:33He talked about addiction, a string of stints in rehab, and saying goodbye to the person he was. He talked about coming back from the other side, going to therapy, picking up a microphone again, and feeling alive.