“A Murmur in the Trees”

Conceptualizing sound in nature has a long history both in philosophy and in literature. What guides these discussions is the distinction between the act of listening and the act of hearing. Listening, understood as an open-ended engagement with the world, can mark an ethical realm that welcomes the other. Often presented as an aural element that is processed in an embodied way, sound in this context does not necessarily need to be perceived by a human. In this article, I discuss the ineffable sounds in nature and soundscapes that do not engage the semiotics of the human. Instead, they mark a nonrepresentational arboreal agency that humans can affirm but not cognitively process. This article juxtaposes two opposing traditions of listening to and hearing the ineffable sound of nature. Writing in the wake of American transcendentalism, as exemplified in Emily Dickinson’s work, registers a specific type of human cohabitation within nonhuman environments that rejects human stewardship. The nonrepresentational sounds of nature radiate through earlier settler colonial imaginaries as well, as seen in my examples of representations of memorial nature in Lydia Maria Child’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing. In these examples, however, the ineffable sound is functionalized and serves to infix the Indigenous population in nature. These antagonistic traditions highlight the important ways in which the ineffable sounds have been shaping US American literature through centuries.