And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.”[1]
Since Homo sapiens’ creation and our rise to dominance, we have influenced the biosphere—the set of all of Earth’s ecosystems and the interactions between them—in extraordinary ways. From both natural history and Judeo-Christian theology in the book of Genesis, we have understood humans to be a dominant species with a choice to either answer the Lord’s call for stewardship or alternatively to cause great disturbance, loss, and peril. The ultimate peril, extinction, is a process that has ebbed and flowed over the course of our planet’s history. In total, there have been five mass extinctions in the ancient past and the argued “Sixth Extinction” during the current geologic epoch known alternatively as the Holocene or the Anthropocene.[2] As the overseers of creation, we are called to conserve nature. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College pursuing a dual degree in evolutionary biology and musical performance, my call to stewardship is a sonic one.
Our role in environmental preservation stems from God’s call to Adam in Genesis: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”[3] From biblical creation, man is set to be the overseer of the surrounding biosphere. In recent years, the Catholic Church has supported this interpretation. Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si’ that we cannot separate the beauty of nature from the existence of God, and thus we need a “new way of thinking about…our relationship with nature.”[4][5] Francis accordingly advocated for environmental protection and policies to ensure this protection. Most recently, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) celebrated ten years since Laudato Si’s publication. “Over the last decade, Laudato Si’ has inspired the Catholic Church and the World to draw closer to Almighty God, the Creator of all life,” writes USCCB president Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, reiterating the conference’s commitment “to advocacy that cares for the most vulnerable and creation.”[6] As such, the Catholic Church has internationally upheld the importance of stewardship in Church teaching. Pope Leo XIV has maintained Pope Francis’ stance on the need for stewardship.[7] In Christianity more broadly, stewardship’s value has long been discussed. In 1998, University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental science professor Calvin DeWitt outlined in his book Caring for Creation: Responsible Stewardship of God’s Handiwork, “a biblical concept for stewardship in three ways: (a) earthkeeping, (b) fruitfulness, and (c) the Sabbath.”[8] “Earthkeeping” is the most straightforward, with DeWitt interpreting the Hebrew words “abar” and “shamar” from the original text as, “to serve and keep nature in dynamic integrity.” From earthkeeping DeWitt explains the second pillar of preserving creation’s abundance: “fruitfulness.” In Genesis, God instructs the birds and the fish to “be fruitful and increase in number,” highlighting the importance of creation’s abundance in its preservation.[9] The final pillar ties the first two together. “Sabbath,” in DeWitt’s view, is the day of rest linked to the “rejuvenation and restoration of life” made possible through earthkeeping. The place of man within creation and the fullness of “restoration” through restoring our Earth places stewardship as a crucial pillar of the Christian faith. Even with the importance stressed by DeWitt and others, the relative value of stewardship has been debated. In 2004, the Protestant denomination Assemblies of God claimed that the impending end of times rendered all Earthly creation irrelevant. They wrote that “environmental stewardship takes a back seat to concerns directly related to human welfare.”[10] In addition, the predominantly Christian nations of the West are seen by many as key perpetrators in pollution, biodiversity loss, and environmental change. In the Yale Forum on Ecology and Religion, St. Paul University professor Heather Eaton wrote, “Christian bodies have done little to restrain deforestation, species extinction, water contamination, and so on.”[11] As such, there is pushback to the notion of stewardship as a central Christian value because of both its lesser importance compared to other concerns and a precedent of ignoring it. Theologians have still supported stewardship as a core church tenet. Most noteworthy is the paleontologist and priest Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote that it is through “collaboration which he solicits from us that Christ, starting from all creatures, is consummated and attains his plenitude,” highlighting the fullness of God in the ever-evolving natural world and our obvious place in the ecological system.[12] Teilhard de Chardin’s words echo DeWitt’s pillars, including the value of biodiversity, or fruitfulness, and living alongside creation in “collaboration,” which resembles the principle of earthkeeping.
In my own life as a Catholic attending Catholic school, I immediately grasped studying and preserving the natural world as a calling from God. My education and upbringing stressed science’s and curiosity’s existence parallel to faith. I recall our parish Monsignor stressing the Catholic Church’s impact on science, including a short lecture on Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître’s theory of expansion from the “primeval atom,” which is the basis for the Big Bang theory.[13] Outside of school, exposure to encyclopedias and BBC documentaries spurred my love of evolutionary science in concert with a Catholic upbringing. In elementary and middle school, I started the St. Francis Club, focused on spreading awareness of endangered species in my school largely through hands-on student projects on specific taxa and themed raffles to fundraise for the World Wildlife Federation. In middle school and entering high school, I worked at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums-certified Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo, which is focused on conservation outreach initiatives. As a Dartmouth undergraduate I have participated in wildlife veterinary shadowing at the Trevor Zoo again, mostly with rehabilitated raptors. Most recently as an undergraduate I was a field technician at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. At Hubbard Brook, I studied singing behavior in ovenbirds (Seiurus aurocapilla) and I collected data for annual “spot mapping” by marking all present species within the experimental plot for ongoing historical records. These projects in animal and ecosystem science have allowed me to understand more about the very systems and organisms I seek to conserve. Outside of my biological studies there is a second side to my interests: I am an avid songwriter, a classically trained singer with a knack for jazz, and a bass guitarist. As a musician, perhaps my most significant means of taking in the world around me is by “hearing it.” I found my love of music and sound in the pews of a church, and it is through this love for listening that I believe we can discover a new form of stewardship: bioacoustics.
Listening to at the sounds of nature is a new answer to the papal call to rethink our “relationship with nature.” Bioacoustics is the study of the quality of organism-produced sounds and relationships between those vocalizations within an ecosystem community. The interplay of organismal vocalizations within a community has been called the “biophony” by studio guitarist-turned-ecologist Bernie Krause. The biophony is the larger entropic system in which various organisms vocalize across a soundscape. In The Great Animal Orchestra, Krause explains that when a habitat is altered by human presence, such as when a forest is logged and then replanted, the recordings pre-impact and post-restoration sound completely different. “When habitat alteration occurs,” explains Krause, “vocal critters have to readjust.”[14] This readjustment is most notable in the “acoustic adaptation hypothesis” (AAH), in which vocalizing organisms alter aspects of their vocal bouts in order to be better heard by members of their respective species in chaotic environments. The AAH is most notable with songbirds, who may sing at a slower pace or cadence to be better distinguished from the surrounding environment.[15] The readjustment of native fauna can result in differences in biophony, thus showcasing the value of sonic analysis of an ecosystem as a metric of that community’s health. The biophony is based on an ecosystem’s biodiversity, and a direct measurement of “fruitfulness,” recalling DeWitt’s pillars of stewardship.
At Dartmouth, my sonic analysis has focused on New Hampshire’s songbirds. Under Biological Sciences professor and ecologist Matthew Ayres, I presented an ongoing project on a poster entitled, “What’s in a song?” at the 2025 International Bioacoustics Congress in Kerteminde, Denmark. As part of this project, I am studying the inter-vocalization intervals (IVI), or silent periods, between oscine, or “true songbirds,” and suboscine vocalization bouts. By comparing the time to next vocalization and the average number of subsequent bouts within a 100-second period, we have evaluated whether or not these species possess non-random rhythmicity and have a set number of vocalizations to produce verifiable signals. Non-random rhythmicity, a musical element of avian biology, is the link between studying sound and answering the call of stewardship. “Rhythmicity,” or a regular cadence determined by the average amount of time between vocalizations in a set period of time, has been observed in our recent studies, perhaps as the mechanism of songbirds within the broader AAH. Vocalizing with a “rhythm” could trigger central pattern recognition circuits in the brain of a listener, thus making a species’s specific “rhythm” important in the larger system of natural sound. If birds or other fauna vocalize rhythmically, this vocal structure could exemplify a musical aspect of the natural world around us. In that case, not only are bioacoustics, or the physiological or ecological basis of vocalization alone valuable for monitoring biodiversity; monitoring and preserving “fruitfulness” may be achieved through a far more artistic understanding: music.
Musical elements of the natural world highlight the potential value in understanding nature’s “order.” Music has a universal quality based in our humanity, our connection to God’s image, and in the larger biotic system. This belief is backed by recent scientific and anthropological theory. University of Reading Professor Steven Mithen describes music as an evolutionary precursor to language in his work The Singing Neanderthals. Mithen argues that our ancestors used holistic sounds to convey an entire message instead of multiple words strung into sentences. These holistic sounds with tonality may have resembled a basic form of music, given the ability to convey a message and change the emotion of the listener as music has been shown to do.[16] Music’s emotional impact has been explored extensively in Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia and in Stanford University neuroscientist Professor Daniel Levitin’s I’ve Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. Sacks goes into depth on music’s effects within the brain, including interactions between the auditory and motor cortex in our reception of music, as well as interactions with the frontal cortex in the creation of vivid images or memories.[17] Both Sacks and Levitin emphasize music’s power as a healing mechanism and a form of therapy, even for individuals suffering from dementia.[18] Music has also been found to be an effective tool for individuals with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD), allowing them to more accurately express their emotions verbally after experiencing music.[19] Levitin expands upon musical therapy by connecting music to our human quality of language. He compares syntax in musical scores to our creation of sentences, which once again highlights the parallel between music and language.[20] St. Augustine, author of De Musica, describes the parallel between musical properties and speech in Confessions, that “there is a rhythm written into the words and this is the aspect of music that is fundamentally musical,” and uses the example of “Deus Creator omnium – the line consists of eight syllables, in which short and long syllables alternate.”[21] These words are reflected in scientific findings, with genes Coenzyme Q8A and Neurexin I found to affect both rhythmicity in birdsong and the cadence of human speech.[22] In addition, Sacks stresses that as humans, “we are attracted to repetition, even as adults, we want the stimulus and the reward again and again,” highlighting the need for repeated sound in an orderly fashion to trigger reception in a listener, mirroring our own thinking in my “What’s in a song” project.[23] Rhythm is a binding component of both music and language. Augustine’s focus on rhythm stems from his emphasis on order. Rhythm suggests and showcases the evidence of a higher power who has strung a system of ordered creation into existence. The relationship between rhythm and order is key to using music and sound science as a form of environmental preservation.
Outside of individual species such as songbirds or humans, musical qualities like rhythm can be observed in interspecific systems at large. These larger systems are the biophonies described by Bernie Krause. Biophonies are made up of individual “voices” from different biota that form “collective sound signatures” within the community. Krause described this collective sound while on safari in the Masai Mara, Kenya in the 1980s, where he lay listening to the evening blend of vocalizations not simply as a chorus but as one “sonic event” between spotted hyenas, tree hyraxes, lions, and other taxa.[24] Krause’s recordings map onto spectrograms almost like sheet music, each sonic space and frequency occupied by different taxa. With reference to rhythm or conflict in timing, Krause writes that “the acoustic territorial disputes are sometimes solved by timing: first one bird, insect or frog might sing, and then others when that one quits.”[25] In my work regarding IVIs, a large part of analysis has been eliminating countersinging, or the “back and forth” between two different individual birds in order to only count birdsong intervals between songs by the same singing bird. The timing between different singing birds has also been used as a metric to evaluate whether both songs are from the same bird or each has its own singer. The timing and relationship between different intraspecific and interspecific vocalizations create some sense of “order” to the system, with the silent “offsets” being just as important as the “onset” bouts, thus suggesting some presence of rhythmic variation or rhythmic presence. Krause reflects on this point extensively, writing that “organisms evolve to acoustically structure their signals in special relationships to one another.”[26] The ability for different organisms to sing within intervals of one another has been called “niche hypothesis,” which suggests that “nonhuman animal voices must have evolved so that each can be heard unmasked and without interference,” thus mirroring and expanding the AAH in songbirds.[27] The broader art of vocalizing with purpose within your soundscape, and helping create the exact sound of your natural habitat, highlights a system of order. This “order” can be studied, and changes to this order can be documented in a way to understand environmental impacts.
On both a community scale and an individual species level, there is a suggested common musical presence or universal musicality. In his The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong, ornithologist Donald Kroodsma references a 2001 article in Science: “perhaps ‘there is a universal music awaiting discovery,’ universal because the music of birds and humans (and whales) has its roots in the brains of our common ancestors, the reptiles.”[28] Kroodsma saw a musical nature in songbird communities in the ecosystems he visited across the North American continent. He saw the musicality shared between birds and humans as having an evolutionary foundation. Emerson University professor emeritus Don Saliers reflects Kroodsma’s thinking his own theological writing in Music and Theology by emphasizing the systematic nature of biophonies, like pieces of sheet music:
“But every object in nature comes to sound something about itself . . . more obviously, birds, insects, and animals of every description all tell us something of themselves by ‘sounding’ . . . vibrations and sound waves take their character from features of the world of material and animate objects. Many composers and music-makers have explored the sounds of nature as part of their ‘language’ of sound- most especially birdsong . . . and more recently the sound of whales…even when these features of music are absent, we are hearing ordered sound.”[29]
Saliers describes universal music from a theological perspective, implying a higher order and connection to God. On a species level as Homo sapiens, he calls our relationship as pre-borns to our mothers’ voice and heartbeat as the “primordial, prelinguistic force,” suggesting that our entrance into life begins with a steady beat.[30] Perhaps rhythm is our first exposure to the gift of life. Salier’s weaving of the linguistic elements of music, specifically the presence of rhythmicity, parallels Mithen’s and St. Augustine’s, and his “ordered sound” reflects the onset and offsets in the biophony described by Krause. Writing for the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Salier proclaims that all of life must be “sung.” A foundation in Saliers’ writing could be his thinking of universal musicality, which has pervaded our natural world and inspired musicians for generations.
The order of musical and sonic elements in wildlands suggests the value of sonic stewardship as a way to grow closer to God by revealing a planned, devised system worthy of our protection. By listening to an entire soundscape and the arrangement of vocalizations, one can document both the biodiversity of this ecosystem as well as how that ecosystem has changed over time and in response to human impact. By evaluating the soundscape of an ecosystem, the listener is brought closer to God’s systematic creation and thus can become a more informed steward. When listening to nature’s acoustic components, we are drawn to order also through the components of these sounds which we have come to understand through music theory.
Biophonic order can be understood chiefly through rhythm and other musical qualities. Music, even without an application to evolutionary ecology, has been a staple of Christian philosophy. St. Augustine famously penned De Musica, where he describes music as “a way of discerning the mathematical proportions which pervade the universe . . . [music] engages with the proportions which characterize the whole of reality.”[31] St. Thomas Aquinas, while calling music “less noble” than language, asserts that music played “a crucial part of the Christian contemplative life,” especially with the intention of being sung for God rather than performed.[32] Perhaps Aquinas’ view of language as a more “noble” sound came from language being perceived as having a greater structure or clearer intention. In light of Mithen, Sachs, and Levitin we can now see music to have linguistic properties in both its containing syntax and having clear emotional reception in the brain. Regardless, both Aquinas and Augustine place the value of sound in its order and intention. The setup of a soundscape is essential to the sound’s relation to God’s presence, as an ordered sound showcases God’s work while an “intended sound” toward God’s praise carries value. Both thoughts parallel musical universality and the linguistic nature to music. Regarding system level musical “order” within a larger system, renowned author C.S. Lewis described his view of Heaven’s soundscape in his famous Screwtape Letters. The demons hated Heaven’s sounds, with a fictional demon, Screwtape, writing, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end . . . the melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end,” showcasing his disdain for non-random and orderly onset and offset of sound in a musical.[33] Organized sound, like music, is C.S. Lewis’s suggestion of Heaven’s soundscape and the workings of God. Through all of these theologians, music and its elements are compared to God’s ordered creation. By understanding acoustic and sonic order, we can better understand stewardship of God’s creation, made possible through conservation bioacoustics.
How can sonic stewardship be executed? Bioacoustics brings two main areas of value to conservation. First are the analyses described by Krause and Kroodsma on the universal elements of soundscapes. Monitoring the sounds of a natural environment provides crucial information on biodiversity, human impact, and trends within that environment. Both human-made recordings through parabolic microphones and passive acoustic recorders deployed within a forest have gathered extensive data in the New Hampshire and Vermont forests alone. This data gives researchers an idea of what species are vocalizing, how often, and any trends in these occurrences. As a bioacoustics researcher at Dartmouth, I have seen the value of my musical knowledge, including my ear for timbre and relative pitch, in differentiating and identifying vocalizations. Prominent musicians have noticed the music-biophony connection too, most notably Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne, who referenced Bernie Krause’s biophonies in the first chapter of his How Music Works.[34]
Besides assessing relative ecosystem health, the second area of value for conservation bioacoustics is the importance of sound to the survival of culture.
Sounds are essential to the survival of animal cultures. Animal cultures are “socially learned behaviors that are maintained within populations through information exchange and conformity.”[35] The clearest example is us humans, with the Harvard Data Science Initiative’s 2019 Natural History of Song finding music to be a constant part of 315 distinct world cultures.[36] Still, the sharing of sound communication systems between individuals to create a vocal “culture” has been observed in other non-human taxa. The most obvious examples are again songbirds, whose songs are often learned from their fathers and are subject to regional variation. For example, black-capped chickadees share the same “cheeseburger” song across North America, though certain acoustic qualities may differ based on region.[37] Avian vocal culture has been observed in bird populations at large and globally, and environmental changes have impacted how these cultures have developed or whether or not these cultures survive. For example, Albert’s lyrebirds have seen fewer tutors and song variation in smaller populations, and North Island saddlebacks “underwent cultural bottlenecks that led to fragmentation and simplification of song cultures.”[38] In both of these cases, declining or shifting bottlenecks has led to decreased sonic diversity in these species. Understanding bioacoustics creates a fundamental understanding that vocal culture is essential to species identity, as each organism requires its own voice to fit within a larger sonic niche. While a population may go extinct in the wild and have individuals in captivity to preserve the gene pool, those captive may not possess the ancestral songs of their wild counterparts or be exposed to aspects of their ecology that were forged through exposure to direct learning, in the case of songbirds and primates, or more broadly through generations that have adapted directly to a chosen habitat. Vocal learning and keeping these cultures alive helps maintain the identity and behavior of a species.
The preservation of vocal culture is a call in conservation needed now more than ever, as it provides a counterbalance to another novel conservation tool: synthetic biology. Recently, we’ve seen new ways through which genetic identity may be able to be conserved and expanded upon. Most notably in 2025, Colossal Biosciences showcased their dire wolf project. The project had two major parts. The most publicized part was modifying the sequence of extant gray wolves (Canis lupus) with the recovered sequence from 12,000-year-old dire wolf remains, resulting in three modern dire wolf pups.[39] The second part was a linked conservation project, as Colossal has paired each of its extinct animal resurrection projects with work on a living species of the same taxa. With the dire wolves, Colossal paired the modern critically endangered red wolf (Canis rufus). The company cloned four individuals successfully.[40] Synthetic biology through gene alteration has been voiced as a novel form of wildlife conservation since 2015, when Chief Colossal Scientist Beth Shapiro released How to Clone a Mammoth.[41] While exact clones of extinct species like mammoths or dire wolves are impossible, given the insufficient genetic material that has survived over 12,000 years of decay, modifying traits of extant species have been seen by Shapiro and others as an avenue to bring wild places, including western North America, back to their Pleistocene biodiversity glory. Synthetic biology aims to fill in the niches of lost taxa merely through genetic modification, with little thought to niche, environmental impact, or the preservation of the roadmap species’ behavior. How a species behaves is exemplified in how that species vocalizes. In the case of “vocal culture,” some groups vocalize in the context of other members of their species. Looking at passenger pigeons, dodos, or other extinct birds described by Shapiro; how can these organisms reclaim their habitats if they cannot truly fill their behavior, which includes a heavy component in vocal culture and teachers to learn from? By pairing conservation bioacoustics with synthetic biology, we place an emphasis not on sheer creation and manipulation but on preservation of systems in place. “Modification” on its own may be seen as “playing God.” “Maintaining” is the core of stewardship. Maintaining a soundscape through thoughtful acoustic analysis of species vocalizations not only avoids mocking God but instead assumes our full role as God’s chosen stewards on Earth. As de-extinction projects have entered the public consciousness, embracing bioacoustics reunites secular stewardship and innovation with its roots in Judeo-Christian teaching and our call to conserve God’s masterpiece.
While “sonic stewardship” may seem most applicable to conservation biology through bioacoustics, the call is simpler than documenting rich ecosystems or balancing out Ice Age resurrections. In fact, “sonic stewardship,” my own call, is a call that anyone can answer. For my college peers, this work for God begins by going outside. Listen to the world around you. At Dartmouth College, students can notice flocks of nighthawks over the evening Green, merlins out by Pine Park, or spring peeper frogs on a walk around Occom Pond. In these moments of raw exposure to the culmination of cycles of rise and fall of life, have gratitude in the moment you listen. We listen intently to nature; we are in sync with the time we live in, a time in which we have risen as a species whose curiosity seeks to uncover the cosmos and ultimately, the hand that willed it.
The biophony is a gift of God’s hand. Through understanding nature’s acoustic order, we can become more effective stewards of creation both through scholarship and conservation. Sound, celebrated through the art of music, is a core Christian tenet. By using musicality to understand aspects of species biodiversity, I seek to grow closer to the rich living system that God has made, the system that showcases his majesty and calls us in his image to rise above ourselves to conserve for our posterity what we have heard and known throughout our history: a natural world that is complex, rhythmic, and truly beautiful.
[1] Genesis 1:28 (ESV)
[2] Crutzen, Paul J, Eugene F Stoermer, Sverker Sörlin, Paul Warde, and Libby Robin. The ‘Anthropocene’’’ (2000). Yale University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300188479-041.
[3] Genesis 2:15 (ESV)
[4] Francis, Pope. “Laudato Si’: On Care For Our Common Home.” Our Sunday Visitor, 2015.
[5] Tulloch, Joseph. “Laudato Si’: Pope Francis on the Environment.” Vatican News, 21 Apr. 2025, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-04/laudato-si-pope-francis-death-environment-advocacy.html
[6] Noguchi, Chieko, and the Office of Public Affairs. “USCCB Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Laudato Si’.” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 20 Mar. 2025, https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/usccb-celebrates-10th-anniversary-laudato-si
[7] Giangrave, Claire. “Pope Leo XIV Calls on Catholics to See the Urgency of Protecting the Environment.” NPR, 10 Jul. 2025. Religion. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/10/nx-s1-5459932/pope-leo-xiv-calls-on-catholics-to-see-the-urgency-of-protecting-the-environment.
[8] Houtan, Kyle S. Van, and Stuart L. Pimm. “The Various Christian Ethics of Species Conservation.”
[9] Genesis 1:22 (NIV)
[10] Van Houtan, K. S., and S. L. Pimm. “The various Christian ethics of species conservation.” Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Prudence in a World in Flux. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2006, 116–47.
[11] Eaton, Heather. “Overview Essay.” Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, https://fore.yale.edu/World-Religions/Christianity/Overview-Essay. Accessed 21 June 2025.
[12] Campbell, Jim. “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ.” Ignatian Spirituality, https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-voices/20th-century-ignatian-voices/pierre-teilhard-de-chardin-sj/. Accessed 21 June 2025.
[13] DeGrass Tyson, Neil, et al. “Georges Lemaitre: Father of the Big Bang.” American Museum of Natural History. 2000. Retrieved September 16, 2025, from https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/georges-lemaitre-big-bang
[14] Krause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little, Brown, 2012.
[15] Sebastianelli, Matteo, et al. “A Genomic Basis of Vocal Rhythm in Birds.” Nature Communications, vol. 15, no. 1, Apr. 2024, p. 3095. www.nature.com, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47305-5.
[16] Mithen, Steven J. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. Harvard University Press, 2006.
[17] Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008.
[18] Levitin, Daniel J. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. W. W. Norton, 2024.
[19] Sharda, Megha, et al. “Music Improves Social Communication and Auditory–Motor Connectivity in Children with Autism.” Translational Psychiatry, vol. 8, no. 1, Oct. 2018, p. 231. www.nature.com, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-018-0287-3.
[20] Levitin
[21] Augustinus. De Musica. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2017.; Wiskus, Jessica. “On Music, Order, and Memory: Investigating Augustine’s Descriptive Method in the Confessions.” Open Theology, vol. 6, no. 1, 2020, pp. 156–67. https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0116
[22] Sebastianelli, Matteo, et al. “A Genomic Basis of Vocal Rhythm in Birds.” Nature Communications, vol. 15, no. 1, Apr. 2024, p. 3095. www.nature.com, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47305-5.
[23] Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008.
Saliers, Don E. Music and Theology. Abingdon Press, 2007.
[24] Krause, 84
[25] Krause, 99
[26] Krause, 97
[27] Krause, 99
[28] Kroodsma, Donald E. The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
[29] Saliers, Don E. Music and Theology. Abingdon Press, 2007.
[30] Saliers
[31] Leithart, Peter. “Music, Time, and Augustine.” Leithart, 30 Aug. 2007, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2007/08/music-time-and-augustine/
[32] McGann, Dominic. “Nobilior Modus Est: The Importance of Music in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas.” European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas, vol. 41, no. 1, Oct. 2023, pp. 62–79. https://doi.org/10.2478/ejsta-2023-0004
[33] Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. HarperCollins, 2001.
[34] Byrne, David. How Music Works. McSweeney’s, 2012.
[35] Crates, Ross, et al. “Conserving Avian Vocal Culture.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 380, no. 1925, May 2025, p. 20240139. royalsocietypublishing.org (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0139.
[36] Gottlieb, Jed. “New Harvard Study Says Music Is Universal Language.” Harvard Gazette, 21 Nov. 2019, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/new-harvard-study-establishes-music-is-universa
[37] Kroodsma
[38] Crates et al.
[39] Clark, Robert. “The Return of the Dire Wolf.” TIME, Apr. 2025, https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/.
[40] Clark
[41] Shapiro, Beth. How to Clone a Mammoth : The Science of De-Extinction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. doi:10.1515/9780691209562.