I CAN no longer hear the ultrasounds of bats or larks. However, we humans have limitations right from the start. No more eloquent expression has been given to them than by the great Scottish scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
He wrote in the early 20th century: “... our own perception of musical notes only reaches to 4000 vibrations per second, or thereby; a squeaking mouse or bat is heard by few, and to vibrations of 10,000 per second we are all of us stone-deaf.
“Structure apart, mere size is enough to give the lesser birds and beasts a music quite different to our own: the humming-bird for aught we know, may be singing all day long. A minute insect may utter and receive vibrations of prodigious rapidity; even its little wings may beat hundreds of times a second.
“Far more things happen to it in a second than to us; a thousandth part of a second is no longer negligible, and time itself seems to run a different course to ours.”
Limitations they may be, but we have ways of getting round them. We can record high frequencies and slow them down and can analyse lark song or, at the other end of the scale, the subsonic infrasound rumblings of elephants and whales can be recorded and speeded up.
How early on humans at least understood that there was a sound world beyond their own hearing is unlikely to find a definitive answer.
However, when recording, my colleague Simon O’Dwyer playing a Bronze Age horn in the great neolithic monument of New Grange in Ireland, we all felt rather than heard an acoustic response in the central chamber. When I say “we” I mean a tour guide who knew the monument and its properties well, a Radió Éireann sound engineer, myself and, of course, Simon.
This was a reasonable spread of experienced people and we all felt the same thing – a sense of vibration from the floor and in our abdomens which was not the note Simon was playing. It was closer to the effect the deepest organ notes can create in a church – scarcely audible but definitely felt.
We decided then that what we were experiencing was a standing wave. Standing waves occur when a wave gets reflected back onto itself at the same frequency as that of the resonating chamber, resulting in intensification of the sound.
It was an unlikely phenomenon in a very irregularly shaped chamber, and I wonder now if Simon’s playing had somehow brought to life the infrasound potential of the chamber – and were its builders aware of it?
I know for sure that at least on one occasion sound must have been an accepted, even determined aspect of a Neolithic recumbent stone circle. I wrote about this long ago in Rock Music in The National on January 23, 2023.
But that is the sound of a rock gong or ringing rock and well within human hearing. There was also acoustic enhancement inside the burial chambers of Maes Howe on Orkney, but nothing quite like what we heard, or rather felt in New Grange.
Even if we can clearly identify infrasound and ultrasound effects in ancient structures, that doesn’t prove the builders or the people who used the buildings, felt their presence. Any answers out there?
Nowadays, ultrasound scanning is a common diagnostic tool no longer associated primarily with obstetrics, but equally with most parts of the body. I’ve had my heart scanned a few times and can watch it staggering its way through existence with great fortitude. But my first medical encounter with ultrasound was long ago – the spring of 1967. Early days.
It arose from the fact that Professor Ian Donald (1910-87) was a neighbour. Ian and his colleagues, notably Tom Brown of Glasgow’s Kelvin & Hughes scientific instrument manufacturers, should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine.
Early prototypes were built in part from Meccano – my favourite childhood toy. It was Ian and Tom who, by common international consent, pioneered the medical use of ultrasound. Ian came from a family of Scottish physicians and he lived down the lane from us.
When my wife was diagnosed by our family doctor as suffering from a hysterical pregnancy, we did not wish to pester a distinguished neighbour for an alternative opinion and went to a specialist in town who was unable to give a definitive answer.
However, word got round to Ian of our dilemma, if that is what it was, and, characteristically, he rang up of his own accord and offered to examine my wife Wilma, using the new equipment installed in the Queen Mother’s maternity hospital.
The hospital was in many respects of his own designing, the first to have a dedicated ultrasound scanning room and one of the first to encourage men’s presence at the birth of their child. That included an unmarried father – which was quite a shock to the moral pretensions of those days.
Ian was proud of the fact that he worked for the NHS and had never practised privately in Scotland. He once declared that he would treat “every mother like a duchess”.
Wilma duly went to the hospital and Ian asked her, as she lay prostrate awaiting the application of gel to her stomach, if he might presume to raise her gown and examine her. One look and he declared that he didn’t need all this expensive machinery – she was pregnant.
But he scanned her just the same, and so it is that our son Seán has an image of himself some six months before he was born which, in those days, was a bit of a rarity.
Despite all the preceding, Ian’s convictions held him to a moral system that has almost totally evaporated. He was in many respects very old-fashioned, for instance being against contraception for the unmarried. Nowadays some of his opinions would be regarded as outrageous – but he was ready enough to use the same word of other people’s views.
The following, culled from an online article by Malcolm Nicolson for the Royal Society of Physicians of Edinburgh, is typical: “I began my lecture in a fury at not even having been invited to lunch just before it, the sort of inhospitality for which Edinburgh is famous. I retaliated by eating a picnic lunch in their car park and not walking through the doors of the college until exactly two minutes before I was due to start, by which time the old hags were in a proper tiz about whether I was even going to show up.
“I will also bill them for five hours’ subsistence ‘in view of the absence of an invitation to lunch’. This sort of meanness could not happen in Glasgow or Dublin.”
Ian and his bright and lovely wife Alix had four daughters, their births spread evenly over 12 years. Ian concluded, jokingly, that he and Alix were only mutually fertile every four years. The girls inherited his red hair.
All joking on such matters ceased when David Steel’s Abortion Act was presented to Parliament. Most of our neighbours were in favour, as were we, but Ian was adamantly against, and one had to respect his position.
He had been looking at human life, hearing its heartbeat and seeing it wriggling its fingers and toes in the womb from an early stage. He maintained that it was an attempt “to eliminate an evil by substituting another evil”.
The history behind the concern for prenatal life is as ancient as you like, and in some societies in the past, the age of a person was determined not by the date of their birth, but the presumed date of their conception. This was considered astrologically important.
In any event, the law was passed, is with us still, and is regarded by most as a welcome piece of legislation which has prevented far worse harm than if it had not existed.
Meanwhile, Ian made heroic efforts to develop a safe method of contraception agreeable to the Roman Catholic Church, by using changes in temperature at the time of ovulation. It was a high point of Ian’s life when the Pope met him, apparently having read Ian’s papers on the subject.
His efforts never succeeded. How could they? For a start, many a woman was not attracted to the idea of pushing a thermometer up her vagina. For a second, even if the test were properly carried out, it required abstinence from sex to make it effective, and the urge for sex, for many, is not so easily suppressed.
But Ian should not be thought of as a repressive man, far from it. He was immensely energetic, outgoing and boyishly inclined to show off, whether in his paintings or his pianistic skills, to which he often drew attention. He was also an accomplished sailor and had to come to the rescue of a young medical protege who took some of us out sailing on Loch Fyne and refused to spill wind from the mainsail when the wind got up, resulting in the capsize and swamping of the boat in mid loch.
If Ian had not been keeping an eye out from the shore we would have been in serious trouble.
Besides diagnosing the existence of my son, Ian also answered a query of mine about a medical condition recorded by Martin Martin in the late 17th century.
Here is what Martin recounted: “Anna, Daughter to George, in the Village of Melbost, in the Parish of Ey, having been with Child, and the ordinary time of her Delivery being expir’d, the Child made its Passage by the Fundament for some Years, coming away Bone after Bone.
“She liv’d several Years after this, but never had any more children. Some of the Natives, both of the Island of Lewis and Harries, who convers’d with her at the time when this extraordinary thing happen’d, gave me this Account.”
Martin Martin may be accused on occasion of excessive credulity but we must be cautious. I showed this account to Ian who confirmed it as a rare but accurately reported case of a particular form of lithopaedia, to which he added:
“We don’t let that happen these days. She must have been a remarkably strong woman.”
Latterly, Ian decided to build his own sailing boat in the huge garage that gave on to Ruskin Lane in Glasgow’s west end. All his life he was bedevilled by heart trouble. He sported a huge Y-shaped scar to prove it and monitored his own condition with diagnostic impartiality. In those last years I occasionally helped him out, sweeping up shavings or shifting heavy things.
One day, as a gesture of thanks, he gave me his beautiful Zeiss microscope. I never deserved it and have at last passed it on to a young vet, impressing upon her its history – a fond memory of a controversial but truly remarkable man.
