[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey. Jad here. So this spring, many of us—some of us are starting to emerge from a year of being stuck at home or apart from our friends and family. And we are not alone—we humans, that is, because there is something else emerging in the coming weeks from the ground to sing and dance and make babies and try not to get eaten. And that something is cicadas. There is another brood about to awaken after 17 years of slumber and about to swarm many places across the country. So in their honor, I thought we might replay this old piece of ours, which we made the last time there was a big cicada awakening around here. It was—this is from 2013. It's pretty fun. Very Robert Krulwich. I'll just say that. And here it is.

ROBERT KRULWICH: All right. Here we go.

JAD: Hey. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, the podcast. And today ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: What's so interesting about the cicada sounds is when you just hear it for the first time, you just hear white noise. You just hear "shh." It's just noise. But when you learn what's going on, you can hear the different parts of the orchestra.

ROBERT: That's David Rothenberg, composer and professor and writer. And what he's gonna do is he's gonna take that huge wall of insect sounds ...

JAD: Soon to be upon us.

ROBERT: Soon to be upon us, and get really into it, really start to dissect it.

JAD: Ooh.

ROBERT: But what he really loves to do—really!—is he likes to play music with animals. So he goes around and finds individual animals or groups of animals to duet with. And if you don't mind, Jad, I'd like to just introduce you to a few of his strange escapades.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: One of the first times he tried this was with a ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, that was a white-crested laughing thrush.

ROBERT: A white-crested laughing thrush.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Because, you know, before I met the white-crested laughing thrush ...

ROBERT: [laughs] I love the way you're able to bring that up. Because if you ask an ordinary person like myself to say white-crested laughing thrush, it's hard.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It should be much more well-known because the white-crested laughing thrush is one of the best ...

ROBERT: You mean the white-crested laughing ...?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Thrush. Yeah. Washington has them, Bronx Zoo has them. They thrive very well in zoos. But what they do is they sing duets, the males and females together.

ROBERT: So that's animals singing with animals. But here's what he did. He went to the national aviary, which is in Pittsburgh.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: First I stepped into the big tropical aviary where you wander and the birds run—are flying freely. It's a big warm, kinda moist space.

ROBERT: He got there ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Before the aviary opened. Like, 6:00 am.

ROBERT: And there were—when he walked into the cage, there were dozens of different kinds of birds flying around.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And I was walking with my clarinet.

ROBERT: Playing up to the trees.

JAD: Why is he doing this?

ROBERT: Well, he just wanted to see what would ...

[clarinet music]

ROBERT: That's him, by the way. And he wanted to see what would happen.

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: And as it turns out, nothing happened. The birds just more or less ignored him.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: By then, I was kind of—kind of lost interest. Like, nobody's paying attention to this. It's a bad idea. And then all of a sudden ...

JAD: Ooh, hello!

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The laughing thrush was interested.

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: That's the thrush. One little guy, brown feathers, dark beak.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Because at that moment ...

[clarinet and bird sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Anyone would say, "Hmm."

JAD: They're, like, doing call and response.

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "This is interesting. Something's happening here. This bird and this clarinet is doing something together."

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: So as you're—as you're playing, what's going on in your mind at this point?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I was just imagining I was sitting down with a musician who I maybe couldn't talk to, who spoke another language besides English. And I couldn't talk to this musician, but I could make music together with them.

[clarinet and bird sounds]

ROBERT: Okay, so that was his encounter with the thrush. Let me take you on another little adventure, just before we get to our big thing. This is a diff—can I just do this?

JAD: Are you asking me for permission?

ROBERT: I am.

JAD: Then no. No, you can't.

ROBERT: Well, all right. Well, I'm not gonna ask you then. I'm just doing it.

JAD: Good.

ROBERT: After a variety of bird duets in which I'm sure he frustrated many a thrush, he then did a duet with an entirely different animal.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

JAD: What the ...?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well humpback whales, the best thing about that story is nobody knew they sang until the 1960s, so you can ...

ROBERT: I—don't whales spend most of their time except for the tops of them underwater, so where would you be?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They do. Good point. I was broadcasting my clarinet through an underwater speaker.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Listening with headphones to what's coming out of the underwater microphone.

[clarinet and whale sounds]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And you hear this duet from down there, live clarinet and whale.

JAD: [laughs] This is so bizarre! What does the whale make of this?

ROBERT: I—we—I don't speak whale.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The thing about humpback whales is, unlike most animals, they change their songs from year to year. They're interested in new sounds, so all the humpback whales in any one ocean are singing one song, and then they change it altogether. No one knows why. Why do they want to change their song if they all want to sound the same?

[clarinet and whale sounds]

ROBERT: Well, when you sung your song with the whale, did the whale react like the thrush?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I think it's different, but I would say the whale seemed to change what he was doing.

ROBERT: Now, it can be a little hard to hear exactly what David's talking about. It took me a few listens to pick out the distinguishing moment, but here's what the whale was doing when David showed up.

[whale sounds]

ROBERT: It was doing this thing where it would go up and then down, and up and then down. Over and over. And here's what it started doing a few minutes after he'd been playing the clarinet.

[whale sounds]

ROBERT: The whale kind of extends the note.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Whales tend to go "eurgh," and clarinets tend to go "oooh." They play a steady tone, you know? And so the whale was trying to play a more steady note.

[whale sounds]

JAD: Maybe? I don't know.

ROBERT: You can't hear that? Just a little bit of an extended line. It's "ohhh." Instead of "eurgh" it's "ohhh."

JAD: I mean, it's awesome. I love listening to this, but I don't—I mean, I don't—it just sounds like the whale's still doing whale.

ROBERT: Well, David says that when he played the recording to some of the—to whale scientists ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They all are shocked.

ROBERT: All?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Every scientist I played that to was—did not believe that what I played them was actually a live recording. They thought I'd done something to it, which I didn't.

ROBERT: I mean, they—they never heard a whale make a sound like that, I'm assuming.

JAD: Which implies that the whale was reacting to his clarinet?

ROBERT: Well ...

JAD: Because maybe the whale was just saying, "Shut up! Shut up up there!"

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, however you want to resolve it, like, we—we should move on to the real purpose of our gathering here this afternoon, or whatever time you're listening to this.

JAD: 2:00 am.

ROBERT: Which is that he then turned to this sound right here.

[cicadas sound]

JAD: The plague.

JAD: Kidding, of course. It's just a bunch of cicadas. But when we come back from break, we will dig into that sound and find out that it is much more than at least I ever thought it could be.

[LISTENER: Hey, this is Becca, calling from Dallas, Texas to let you know that Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[JAD: Science reporting on Radiolab is supported by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.]

JAD: Jad. Radiolab. We are back. And Robert Krulwich is leading us through a dissection of the dreaded sound. The sound of millions of cicadas fresh awoken from their 17-year slumber.

ROBERT: And when you and I hear it, I mean, it just sounds like an enormous block of monotonal noise.

JAD: Yes, sir.

ROBERT: Just screech, you know? An elaborate screech.

JAD: Annoying.

ROBERT: But David says actually, if you know what's going on in here, if you learn to dissect it, well ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Pretty soon, you can pick out up to nine separate sounds made by the three related species of cicada that are there at the same time.

LYNN LEVY: Can you—can you walk us through the nine different sounds?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Well, at least some of them.

JAD: By the way, that was our producer Lynn Levy.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Okay we have three basic species that come out. Whenever there's an emergence, they're all there.

ROBERT: So now—I didn't, you know, realize that this was—when you're walking through the woods and you hear this enormous white noise, what you're actually hearing are three different kinds of cicadas, three different species singing three very different songs that are all mixed together so you can't tell them apart.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: And then each one of those songs—each of those three—has three parts, which is how you get to the number nine. In any case, here are the three species. This is number one ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada cassini makes the white noise sound "shh."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And they—they swell together, they synchronize, so they'll all go "shh."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And then they fly around a bit. Do that now: jump up from your seat, and you get back in and you do it again.

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: There you go.

ROBERT: Okay, so that's species number one. Now here is species number two.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada septendecula is making, like, "ch, ch, ch."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It's kind of irregular.

[cicada sound]

ROBERT: So that's the bebop guy.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Kind of, yeah. And there's fewer of those, and they're quieter so less is known about them.

ROBERT: Can I hear that one again?

[cicada sound]

ROBERT: So we got the white noise one, the bebop one, now here's number three.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Magicicada septendecim. The most popular known sound. And that's going ph—the pharaoh sound: "pha-roah."

[cicada sound]

JAD: Wow!

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And the thing is, when you actually hear millions of them, all you hear is "Eee."

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: If you take one and multiply it hundreds and then thousands of times, its tail disappears. You just hear this tone.

JAD: And I mean, this is what we hear, but what would the cicada hear in all of this?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Ah, well this is the whole story.

ROBERT: Well, see the thing about cicadas is that the cicadas who sing here are the males—just the guys—and they sing for—it's the mating song, really. You know, there are lots of songs you sing, but this is one of those kinds. And the idea being ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The females hear all this sound and they find the males. Like, the grand mess of music like a disco or it's called the lek by biologists, which pretty much means "disco" anyway. And then ...

ROBERT: If you were a guy looking for a date, you might not join with lots of other guys, but these animals join together for what purpose?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: So the females can find them.

ROBERT: But if you've got, like, a billion cicadas crowded into a disco, then how do you—how does a single male and a single female notice each other?

JAD: They don't have to. They just bump into each other and then it's on.

ROBERT: No.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: 17 years ago, John Cooley and David Marshall discovered things were more complicated than that. They discovered the females make a sound after the male finishes his sound.

ROBERT: So say you're one of these males ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Going "pha-raoh, pha-raoh." And the female has to make a wing flick, this tiny little flick exactly one third of a second after the male stops.

ROBERT: Really? So it's like, "pha-raoh," "dit."

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And then—nobody imagined such a thing was going on. They didn't imagine insects were doing anything this complicated.

ROBERT: Well, for one thing, it sounds like that would be a male-to-female bit of business. One-to-one. When you listen to all these animals you don't think they ever have one of them, they're like so many of them.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Millions of males are making the pharaoh sound, but when you're close to one, you know, the female hears "pha-raoh" if there's one close enough, she makes the wing flick, and the male knows to approach her a little bit and he goes on with his second sound, it's called, by John Coolie, "quart two." Quart-two is like ...

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Pha-raoh, pha-raoh, pha-raoh." And then she makes the wing flick again.

ROBERT: Same one?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: As far as we know.

ROBERT: Okay. And where does that tell mister—mister I love you guy?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: It's time to start mating and make the third sound.

[cicada sound]

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Which is more like "da, da, da, da, da, da, da..."

ROBERT: Let's do that again. So you—your hello is "pha-raoh."

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah.

ROBERT: I'm getting closer, is ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Pha-raoh, pha-raoh, pha-raoh..."

ROBERT: Now we're kissing et cetera et cetera is ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: "Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da..."

ROBERT: So now you know when the cicadas come, when you hear this massive roar, what you're really hearing is an orchestra of sex. Just think: all these little animals getting ready to do what they were born to do, what they've been waiting 17 long years in the ground to do. And all the while, it's the songs that matter.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They're, like, following these little rules, simple rules that together shows how very simple organisms can create things of great complexity and beauty. Each individual doesn't have to know that much about the whole, and still interesting things happen. Which—which gives you a different view of human life. You're one little part in this giant thing. You don't have to really know what's happening, but you're doing your little bit for the whole of creation or evolution or life or music, and you do your own little thing and you're not sure where it leads.

ROBERT: But for the individual cicada, for Tommy cicada or Betty cicada, it's all pretty simple: they have their sex, they lay eggs on twigs of trees, the eggs hatch, and then tiny little larvae cicadas will fall to the ground and then they'll burrow into the warm earth.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And attach themselves to roots of trees.

ROBERT: And then start sucking the fluid from tree roots. And they will do this for years and years and years.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: And they're slowly growing.

ROBERT: And then for some reason that nobody can quite fathom, at the exact same moment it's party time.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: There are different broods of them, so different years you can go somewhere in the country and maybe there's some coming out.

JAD: And why is it that the one that's about to come out here in the northeast, why does that happen only every 17 years? Why 17?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: The honest answer is we really don't know. We do have some evidence of how they keep track of the years, which is that the cicada monitors the temperature. We don't know how, but that's what they pay attention to.

ROBERT: So in the ground, they're not just eating tree juice, they're also—they've got a little thermometer.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Somehow they're pinging—they have a little counting thermometer. They count the number of years, then they know when to come out. A few years ago at my parents' house, I did see one in the wrong year. You know, every year a few of them wake up, "Where's the party?"

ROBERT: Oh, really? You have Rip Van Winkle ones?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah. Not—they don't always count correctly, you know? [laughs]

ROBERT: Oh, really? That must be a lonely experience.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah, the lonely cicada, looking for its kind, the wrong year, the wrong place.

ROBERT: Can they go back down, and go back to the ...

DAVID ROTHENBERG: I don't think so, no.

ROBERT: Or the jig is up?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: They change. They come from their larval stage and the wings had come out. They can't crawl back and lose the wings.

ROBERT: Oh.

LYNN: Did it sing? That lone cicada?

DAVID ROTHENBERG: Yeah, it was singing.

[cicada sound]

LYNN: To no one.

DAVID ROTHENBERG: To no one. To me.

ROBERT: And you can kind of imagine David picking up his clarinet ...

[clarinet and cicada]

ROBERT: ... and joining in.

[clarinet and cicada]

ROBERT: Thanks to John Cooley and to David Marshall. And now Jad wants to say something.

JAD: What do I want to say?

ROBERT: About Lynn Levy's favorite song?

JAD: Oh, and if you go to—yes, and if you go to Radiolab.org, you can download a song from David Rothenberg's album chosen by our producer Lynn Levy. It is her favorite song. You can download it for free. Also, David Rothenberg has a new book out called Bug Music.

ROBERT: And if you happen to be on the East Coast, we have a—well, you can do this from any coast you like, but we have a map where you can track where these little critters are popping up.

JAD: Which they're doing right now.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Just—just barely.

ROBERT: In Georgia and in the Carolinas.

JAD: Not in Brooklyn yet, but soon. I'll be frying 'em up, making some tempura.

ROBERT: No you won't. No you won't.

JAD: I'll be makin' tempura!

ROBERT: No, because the little guy will come up to you and go "ticka, ticka, ticka" on your leg.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: So you'll drop to the ground and burrow into the earth, and we won't see you for—I don't know. It'll be, like, either 13 or 17 years.

JAD: Thanks for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: See you in two weeks.

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.