Her name was Mary Shane, and in 1977, she became the first woman to get a real job as a major-league announcer. What Shane went through is a telling reminder of how much has changed—and how much hasn’t—in the last half-century. Her complicated legacy is worth remembering, and so are the victories she fought for in the years after baseball cast her aside.
It’s called “passive acoustic monitoring”, and it’s been booming over the last decade, as the cost of high-quality recording equipment has plummeted while data storage capacity has rapidly increased. The process of decoding that data is accelerating quickly too, with help from artificial intelligence. As a result, scientists have been collecting more sounds from more places than ever before, and everywhere they listen, they discover there’s more to hear.
But at the same time, a counter-revolution is also underway. Humans have become very loud. After millennia of careful attunement to the life around us, many of us now move through our days, or even our entire lives, hearing almost nothing but the sounds of just one species: our own. If life on Earth were a dinner party, we would be the obnoxious guest who talks over everyone.
It’s at this moment that a handsome, older gentleman makes his way toward you. He wears a tuxedo and approaches you directly, intently. You quickly run the numbers on the oldest aged person you’d sleep with—then raise it by ten.
“Good evening, madam,” the man says. “Would you kindly follow me?”
The Skin of Dreams is Raymond Queneau’s book about daydreaming multiple lives into existence. It is Queneau’s dance across that diaphanous membrane separating the waking real and imagined fantastical.