Seashell Sound
Shell of the bright sea-waves!
What is it, that we hear in thy sad moan?Is this unceasing music all thine own?Lute of the ocean-caves!
Or does some spirit dwellIn the deep windings of thy chambers dim,
Breathing forever, in its mournful hymn,Of ocean’s anthem swell?
—Amelia Welby, “To a Sea-Shell,” 1845
What is it, that we hear in thy sad moan?Is this unceasing music all thine own?Lute of the ocean-caves!
Or does some spirit dwellIn the deep windings of thy chambers dim,
Breathing forever, in its mournful hymn,Of ocean’s anthem swell?
—Amelia Welby, “To a Sea-Shell,” 1845
What sounds reside in spiral seashells? For generations, people who live by the sea have held that, when pressed to the ear, seashells resound with something like the roar of the ocean—a sensation whose explanation has offered a puzzle pleasurable and provocative to scientists and lay listeners alike.
In his 1915 Book of Wonders, popular science writer Rudolph Bodmer suggested that the association followed from the symbolic power of shells: “The sounds we hear when we hold a sea shell to the ear are not really the sound of the sea waves. We have come to imagine that they are because they sound like the waves of the sea, and knowledge that the shell originally came from the sea helps us to this conclusion very easily.” But the likeness, he urged, had a technical explanation—though one in which similitude still figured. Both sea and seashell sounds were generated by waves: “The sounds we hear in the sea shell are really air waves”—waves, that is, of concentrated, resonant noise from the listener’s surroundings.
That explanation sought to supplant superstition with science, trading sublime enchantment for fascinating fact. The account in Bodmer’s book rested on a century of empirical and theoretical investigation in which sound had come to be understood as vibration, and not, as earlier, more numinously, on the model of music or voice, exampling what Jonathan Sterne names as a “shift from models of sound reproduction based on imitations of the mouth to models based on imitations of the ear.”3
Tune in a century later, however, and ear-centered explanations like Bodmer’s coil in on themselves; his explanation of seashell resonance (in agreement with scientific thinking then and now) loses out in most popular accounts to the erroneous claim that what we hear in seashells is the flow of our own blood. Jennifer Lawson’s 2001 Hands-on Science and Technology asserts, “Many students will tell you that they hear the ocean in the seashell. Actually, the dull roaring sound they hear is the echo of the blood moving inside their ear.” OMGFACTS.com—“the #1 fact source on Twitter,” and a contemporary analog, perhaps, to the Book of Wonders—offers, “When you put a seashell next to your ear, it’s the sound of your blood surging in your veins, not the ocean.” Oceanic other, sounded out, outs itself as inside noise.
Why this slide from the sound science of reverberating air to the sciency-sounding flow of blood? In 1889, Robert E. C. Stearns coined the term “ethno-conchology” to describe how shells have “been curiously interwoven with the affairs of men, both in civilized and barbarous communities.” I suggest that the changing ratios of ocean, air, and blood in seashell sound accountings track a European-Atlantic-American ethno-conchology, one that unrolls from Romantic enthrallment toward a double-edged modernity that uses the language of science to disenchant at one moment and then re-enchant at another. This essay puts an ear to popular science and poetry, following a history that has, first, shells singing, speaking, sighing, and echoing distant oceanic and communal pasts, and next, shells reflecting back the personal and present moment, and, then, as we approach today, delivering sounds imagined deep inside, rather than outside, human bodies. At stake are changing models of the relation between hearing, the world, and the self, with the avowedly mystical and communal gradually replaced by the secular, scientific, and individual—though, with the arrival of the blood-in-the-ears interpretation, infused anew with an element of the mythical.
SPEAKING SHELLS
Begin with shelly speech. Around 1800, William Wordsworth wrote of a dream in which he was given a book in the form of “a shell / Of a surpassing brightness.” Instructed to hold it to his ear, he “did so,”
And heard that instant in an unknown tongue,
Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,
A loud prophetic blast of harmony;
An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold
Destruction to the children of the earth
By deluge, now at hand.
Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,
A loud prophetic blast of harmony;
An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold
Destruction to the children of the earth
By deluge, now at hand.
