A Word In Edgewise: Preludes to Eternity

The old “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” is not really a conundrum, merely a difference between scientific fact and human ego. On Earth, swaddled in its ever-present atmosphere, and in the depths of the sea with its ever-rolling waves and tides, there is always movement. And where there is movement, resident creatures have evolved to perceive both the expected motion and the dangers to flee in disruption of the norm.

A tree’s demise, whether elderly and toppling, or felled in its prime by a lightning bolt, creates vibrations, physical “sound waves” by human definition. But our “sound” is perceived only by living beings whose biology is fitted to translate those waves into “noise.” Any human within range of the disturbance will hear a “sound” if their own audio equipment is functioning.

That intricate equipment, installed by birth inside our ears, includes the malleus, incus, stapes, tympanic membrane, a cochlear duct within which fluid waves stimulate hair cells that convert sound into neural signals to the brain’s auditory center, where finally, those signals are interpreted into the sound frequency, pitch and volume, that allows the auditor to differentiate between a lethal Douglas fir and Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”

Some forest mammals, to return to our fallen tree, also perceive the arboreal event in systems similar to our own. At the same time, non-warm-blooded creatures nearby will feel the vibrations in their own manner, digging deeper for safety or surfacing to dine on any remains delivered by the tree’s demise.

If truth be told, we create our own symphonies — not just in those embarrassing sounds emitted inadvertently, but through waves emitted ceaselessly, mere weeks after conception, continuing to the end. We aren’t aware of those, and they couldn’t be precisely determined until the perfection of medical instruments that now allow the performer to participate.

We can feel the beating of our heart, and physicians have been able to hear it thump since René Laennec invented the first monaural stethoscope in 1816. Earlier on, it was the practitioner’s naked ear to your naked chest. Feeling is one thing, viewing the motion and hearing the thump as an amplified noise is another.

It’s possible now through the echocardiogram to learn it’s not even “the” thump, but several. While de-oxygenated blood enters your right atrium through the vena cava, passing through the tricuspid valve to your right ventricle to be pumped on through the pulmonary valve to your lungs, oxygenated blood is returning to your left atrium, passing through the mitral valve to the left ventricle to be pumped through the aortic valve into the aorta to circulate through the body. All day, every day, from early in utero to your final breath.

Not only a lot of pathways and purposes, but a lot of noises, now transmitted to you, lying in the dark, shirtless, on a gurney. The vibrations are transmitted via a gel swabbed on your chest via a probe to the machine, which returns the waves as sounds, unsettlingly similar to those suffered through a neighboring wall in a cheap motel…

You may marvel that each of the auricles and ventricles make their own specific music. Luckily, we aren’t privy to that cacophony every waking minute. And watching, listening, one begins to ponder … and what if it stops? One day it will, you know.

“The music of the spheres” comes to mind as the procedure ends with a final shot of your entire heart, still ticking along as the machine’s screen goes black. You hear no more “sound,” but you have broadened horizons concerning falling trees and beating hearts — and a greater empathy with Hamlet’s cautionary, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”