TED Talks Daily - The language you're fluent in — but forgot how to hear | Louis VI

Episode Date: January 31, 2026

What if the calm you feel when you hear birdsong isn't a coincidence, but ancient evolutionary wiring ... a signal that once meant safety? Musical ecologist and rapper Louis VI says humans are hardwired to nature's sonic language, but modern life has drowned it out. He explores how we can tap back into the "overwhelming chorus of aliveness" we’ve stopped hearing — and performs an original song incorporating rainforest recordings from the Amazon and the Caribbean.Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hugh. 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 this 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 V.I. 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, when we're innately fluent and yet forgotten how to hear. I truly believe the key to solving many of our crises as humans is re-learning 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. 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 notice you 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 bird song 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 unknownly subjecting ourselves to an evolutionary stress. See, nature sounds does something to us. It'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'll be able to tell me if it was dawn, the middle of the day, dusk or nighttime. That call right there was a put-to, which is a crazy word worth looking up when you get home. Each of these were recorded 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 the northwest direction just from the change in birdsong. Our ancestors were polyglots of ecology. To listen was to know. Intention was literally life-threatening. Our ancestral grandmothers and grandfathers lived in an attentive relationship to the songs of other species,

contributing to conversations that span 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, and natural chimes, born and raised in great. Grimy old North London, more common to his sirens, and music, good music, I might add, than birdsong. Growing up and ends, 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 rapper that can talk to you about the complexities of Hyman Octa 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 and our 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 are so important to us as a species.

We evolved not just to hear the information, but to have an emotional responsibility. That's probably why music is so powerful for us. It transcends barriers, where words fail, 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 knight and girl or hump back well

that we invented music. 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 was recognized this, I was like, this is G Phrygian,

which is C minor, for those that ain't geeky and 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 but listening to the world that made we'll be how we elevate I know things that shade of grey but the future green if we make it let's take a breath

let's make the name when you're listening the nature may nature loves when you're listening Nature loves when it leads to mine. And that's my theory of ornithology. Scientists geeks like that one. So it's not very common for some where I come from

to get to go to a rainforest, let alone free in the space of a year. Trust me. But I was lucky enough to be invited to West Papua, to Dominica or Wai to Kubuli, as it's more correctly known, where one half of my family are from in the Caribbean. And a sariacriac 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 Kitsawe people taught us about Kalsak Satchat. It means living forest. Now, it doesn't just mean the toucans, the jaguars, the tapirs, 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, the thousands of lives and universes that inhabit, of course it's Caldac, etc. 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. that 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. tell you that, 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 a lot an apology.

Now I've hopefully helped you live. I've hopefully helped you listen. I'm afraid you can't unhear. You'll go outside and you'll notice the beautiful bird song, 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 might lose but what we stand to gain in the 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 changing how you hear it, Hopefully, we'll never see it the same again. Thank you. That was Louis V.I. 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, Lucy Little and Tonica Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balareso.

I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.