You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu.
Have you ever noticed feeling calmer when you hear a bird song outside your window or while you're walking down the street?
Birds often sing only when they feel safe.
And, as it turns out, our connection to the sound and to acknowledging safety may very well come from our ancient evolutionary wiring.
In this talk and performance, London-born rapper and musical ecologist Louis VI argues that humans are hardwired to nature's many sonic languages, yet modern life has drowned them out.
While recording rainforests from the Amazon to the Caribbean, he discovered the overwhelming chorus of aliveness, as he puts it, that we've stopped hearing.
He shares why this crisis of inattention is at the heart of rising anxiety and the planet's climate breakdown, and why relearning to listen isn't a luxury but essential to our collective survival.
We humans... have stopped listening.
Wow, you all really listen to that.
But it's true, there's a language out there that we all know how to communicate really quite well, but we've tuned out of one we're innately fluent in, yet forgotten how to hear.
I truly believe the key to solving many of our crises as humans is relearning to listen to this language.
What I'm talking about is the sounds of nature.
I want to take you all somewhere real quick, if that's all right.
I want you to close your eyes a sec and make a mental note of how you feel right now.
You can be happy from the week stressed.
It is a Wednesday in the middle of the week, charmed already from my London accent or annoyed by it.
Just be honest.
Now close your eyes and open your ears.
How do you feel?
Different, right?
A bit better, maybe slightly more relaxed?
You were just transported to West Papua.
That beautiful melody was a hooded butcher bird, which, believe it or not, is carnivorous.
Didn't think predators could sing like that, right?
So what's happened?
Is it that you're all nature geeks like me?
Maybe.
Maybe. but it's probably because we're all evolutionarily hardwired to nature's sonic language.
See, we're so hardwired to it.
The choruses of birdsong, percussion of insects, the symphony of amphibians has all been shown scientifically to trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, aka make you feel relaxed.
You probably also noticed you were in a forest, and a tropical one at that.
Might seem obvious to mention, but that was just from you using your ears.
Look at you flexing your fluency already.
It's possible.
The birdsong makes us feel relaxed because it's been a generous signal from Mother Nature that there's no predators around.
But it can't be all relaxing.
Hearing this from an unseen lioness near you in the dark, trust me, triggers a cascade of fear, but one that's also practical and proportionate.
Eerie, unusual silence does the same thing.
It's no wonder that we're seeing a rise in anxiety in cities.
We may be unknowingly subjecting ourselves to an evolutionary stress.
See nature's sound does something to us.
That's often hard to put into words true, but our nervous system understands it like a remote control.
Blindfold on.
I bet I could put any one of you in a biodiverse environment and you'd be able to tell me if it was dawn, the middle of the day, dusk or nighttime.
That call right there was a putu, which is a crazy word worth looking up when you get home.
Each of these were recorded in the exact same place in the Amazon rainforest.
The more biodiverse, the easier it is.
There's an even deeper level.
There are still First Nations trackers alive today that can tell you there's an unseen predator moving through the forest in a northwest direction, just from the change in birdsong.
Our ancestors were polyglots of ecology.
To listen was to know.
Inattention was literally life-threatening.
Our ancestral grandmothers and grandfathers lived in an attentive relationship to the songs of other species, contributing to conversations that spanned back millions of years.
But that fluency is still in you.
Why?
For our entire evolution, listening has been a big part of our compass.
But now we turn that off.
It's no wonder that we lost our bearing.
So what's this got to do with solving crises, Louis?
I'm glad you asked.
Now, my path to standing before you here today is an unusual one.
I'm not exactly from a place abundant in natural chimes.
Born and raised in grimy old North London, more common to hear sirens and music good music, I might add than birdsong.
Growing up in Enns, my love of music led me down the path to becoming a musician, but I'm standing here today as a massive nature geek.
Nice to meet you.
Even though I grew up in the city, I've always been fascinated by nature, from day dot, yet it was something that me and my friends had the least access to.
Yet many of us had ancestry from nature-rich places.
For a long time, I felt that these two worlds had to keep separate.
How would you market a wrapper that can talk to you about the complexities of hymenoptera with a full-blown degree of zoology?
But during COVID my amazing mum and sister really persuaded me to combine the things, the damn things.
A couple more swear words I might add, but I won't say.
See, sound was the common denominator between my two loves.
Yet, if There's over 55% of us humans living in cities and rising.
We don't get to experience this.
If I want people to reconnect to nature, I need to bring these sounds back.
So I built these omnidirectional mics that I bring with me wherever I go.
When I'm not being mistaken for an alien with a probe, I record.
The first time I did this, something crazy happened.
I put my headphones on.
And I disappeared.
Not literally, of course.
But I wasn't an individual anymore.
I was plugged into an overwhelming, highly synchronous chorus of aliveness.
See, listening to these sounds didn't just tell me information.
It made me feel like something like a soup of life, a language that my DNA knew, that I fundamentally understood, not as Louis, but as a human.
Surely this could be a new tool for people, particularly people from the diaspora, to reconnect to the places that we're from that are still abundant in nature there.
See remember, for a long history of colonialism extractivism, the transatlantic slavery, us diaspora have been pulled not just from the lands we're from but from the nature there.
Sounds as common as the rising sun to our ancestors are now extinct in our experience.
But that's happening to all of us, wherever we're from.
Reconnecting to nature is fundamental if we're to have a future on this planet, because planetary health and our health go hand in hand.
See, nature sounds so important to us as a species.
We evolve not just to hear the information, but to have an emotional response to it.
That's probably why music is so powerful for us.
It transcends barriers.
Where words fail, it adds meaning.
It resonates.
Many scientists believe music predated language in humans, inspired by mimicking the songs of Earth.
But we're relatively new on the scene as musicians.
Try telling a nightingale or humpback whale that we invented music.
Mother Nature is the original artist.
Going back to that hooded butcher bird, I can imagine that mimicking moment.
What's crazy?
As I did nothing to this and I recognized this, I was like this is G Phrygian, which is C minor.
For those that ain't geeky in music like me,
But let's check with the harmonies.
Okay.
I can imagine people hearing this and being inspired back in the day to get musical with it.
But we've got to check the chords.
And obviously, what is a song without bass?
Ooh, yeah Ooh, yeah We'll be how we elevate.
We connect and things will change.
Let's take a breath, let's beg the name.
Who you are inside is so okay.
Just close your eyes, do this simple thing.
Nature loves when you're listening.
Happiness is the greatest rage.
Give time to Mother Nature.
Man needs is a simple thing.
Nature loves when you're listening.
Nature loves when you're listening.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
Listen to.
This world says, And that's my theory of ornithology.
Scientist geeks like that one.
So it's not very common for someone where I come from to get to go to a rainforest, let alone three, in the space of a year.
Trust me.
But I was lucky enough to be invited to West Papua, to Dominica, or Waitukubuli as it's more correctly known, where one half of my family are from, in the Caribbean, and a Sarayaku nation deep in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon, with the Moth Collective.
Each of these is an indigenously stewarded place, past and present, and a biodiversity hotspot because of it.
When we were in the Amazon, the Kichwa people taught us about calzac satchel.
It means living forest.
Now it doesn't just mean the toucans, the jaguars, the tapirs, the many frogs you can hear right now.
Now, it means the trees, the rivers, rocks, the soil, the fungi, the air, everything.
Just like the planet, the forest itself is a living organism, and we are like the organs, singing our functions to each other.
How good does nature sound without colonialism?
See, listening to these beautiful sounds of thousands of lives and universes they inhabit.
Of course it's calzac, et cetera.
But of course that's why it's so hard for us to connect in places devoid of these orchestras of life.
We're in a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis.
There's wars, there's genocides, there's depression, anxiety on the rise.
But at the heart of it all, We're in a crisis of inattention.
We're like apples that have forgotten the tree we come from is alive.
But not only is it alive, but it bears many other fruits.
8.7 million, to be exact.
8.7 million other species that we share this planet with.
This is a nightjar that sounds like a laser.
How many songs and cultures and stories are we missing?
We're not so neatly separable from nature, and listening to it doesn't just tell you that, it makes you feel it.
Being more attentive to nature's sonic language might help us better exist with it, because listening requires embodied respect.
But we've stopped listening so much, we've almost not noticed we're making it silent.
We run the risk of future generations thinking that silence is normal.
That's a bit embarrassing.
We've only just met, and I already owe you lot an apology.
Now, I've hopefully helped you listen.
I'm afraid you can't unhear.
You'll go outside and you'll notice the beautiful birdsong, but you'll also notice the drilling, the beeping, the scraping, the burning, the silence.
You can't unhear the symphony of nature, but you also can't unhear what we're doing to it.
But that's okay, because noticing is the point.
We don't just stand to be aware of what we do might lose what we stand to gain in a nature-filled future.
Awareness that nature ain't a luxury, it's a necessity.
Our membership in life's conversation is not one just to be observed, but one we're part of.
So go out there and change not how you see the world, but how you hear it.
And in changing how you hear it, hopefully you'll never see it the same again.
Thank you.
That was Louis VI at a TED Countdown event in New York in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund in 2025.
If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
