A web-famous lyre bird in the Adelaide Zoo learned to perfectly mimic the sounds of construction equipment. Mockingbirds in my old Austin neighborhood were uncanny in their reproduction of car alarms, the “new normal” of an auditory environment with thirty percent fewer birds and insects than there were in my childhood.

Humans aren’t the only ones confused by the proliferation of new stimuli. What’s lost in this reconfiguration of the networks of the biosphere? Shipping-traffic-interrupted whalesong and the baby turtles misdirected by hotel lights they mistake for the Moon. But music made by modern industry just abstracted the melodic soundscapes we inhabited, and their literal canaries dying in the mines of the technium that gave us the petroleum and metals we needed for electrified pop songs. The music industry is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to tracking new technology’s effect on culture. We’ve found a way to make ourselves heard.

Stand back far enough and it’s hard to ignore the curve: from the biofilms that dominated early Earth and made no more noise than gaseous bubbling, to the launch of rockets and atomic bombs. When I imagine forward into futures, all of them but the worst are noisy places: highly interactive, densely woven, layered, and syntactical – and as in any web of chatter, lots of lossy transfers, errors, and the patterns of intelligences too bizarre or fast or vast for anyone to notice are registered as noise.

Squeal jumble words