Sound Studies: The Invisible Power of Sounds
2026-03-17 Assistant Professor Maren Haffke conducts research on sounds. In her book “Umgebungsaufnahmen” (Environmental Recordings), she explores acoustic ecologies. In this interview, she explains how whale songs saved the giants of the seas; why highway noise can be art, and how climate change is making our world quieter.
Professor Haffke, can we hear climate change?
Maren Haffke: Yes, sound studies reveal changes that we often don’t notice in everyday life. You can hear drought, for example. In California, there were regions whose acoustic profile was strongly shaped by the sound of water. That sound is missing when the rivers dry up. We can also hear the loss of biodiversity. The American sound researcher Bernie Krause has been regularly recording the sounds of meadows since the 1970s: the years 1974, 2004, and 2024 sound completely different. Through sonograms, that is, the graphical representation of sounds, it becomes clear: Entire frequency ranges are missing, especially in the high bands, where, among other things, the sounds of insects are found. The dying of the insects, for which we lack photographic representations, becomes visually tangible through the acoustic recording. The images are frightening, astonishing, and moving.
Will we miss certain sounds?
In the 1970s, the album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” was released. This recording is said to have played a significant role in saving the whales. For a long time, the animals were treated primarily as resources: sources of fat and oil. Suddenly, people discovered these giants of the sea as singers and thus as subjects. This record made it clear to many: it would be terrible to lose the whales. Acoustic media can trigger strong emotions and open up worlds that are not immediately accessible to us. A microphone hears differently than a human ear.
Why do we find the sounds of nature more beautiful than the roar of a highway?
We don’t necessarily do that: Futurist music, for example, certainly appreciated the noise of the street. Or consider Musique concrète, which aestheticized the clatter of trains and the mechanical sounds of airplanes. The commitment to supposedly “natural” sound, in its distinction between city and countryside, draws, among other things, on the long tradition of Romanticism. Such categorizations can have a normative quality; they are also criticized as aesthetic moralism. The question of what is considered noise in a society, which sounds are included and which are excluded, is also a cultural and political question.
Why do we humans enjoy hearing birds chirp in the spring?
It is an aesthetic experience that many people associate with happiness. Art has reflected the sounds of nature for centuries. Compositions range from Haydn to Stravinsky to Messiaen. We perceive certain animal sounds in our immediate surroundings as a sign of a good, thriving life. In the 1960s, the book “Silent Spring” was published. In it, biologist Rachel Carson described the consequences of DDT use, including a spring without birdsong: as a sign that something in the world had gone alarmingly awry. Her work sparked a radical rethinking of pesticide use.
Silence can therefore seem threatening. What about noise?
Empirically, the health damage caused by noise pollution is clearly documented. Noise makes us sleep worse and impairs our concentration. There are considerations in research to plan cities fundamentally differently so that people are exposed to pleasant sounds more often. These plans tie in with the cultural negotiations just mentioned: what do balanced sound environments mean to us? What belongs there and what does not? Sounds play a major role in our well-being, but also in our social lives: through birdsong or whale songs, we experience ourselves as part of a world that extends beyond our own existence. A shared world, with contradictions and friction.
Thank you very much for the interview!
Maren Haffke studied musicology, media studies, and psychology at the University of Bonn. Starting in 2012, she was a doctoral fellow with the Mercator Research Group “Spaces of Anthropological Knowledge” at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB). Beginning in 2017, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the RUB Research Training Group “The Documentary -Excess and Withdrawal.” In 2019, her dissertation was published by Fink Verlag under the title *Archaeology of the Keyboard: Musical Media According to Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Scherer*. In 2025, she was appointed as an assistant professor of Sound Studies at Leuphana.