People learn to know their world through the sounds of the place they live, and this listening becomes a shared, locally learned way of understanding. The soundscape of a place does not just surround a culture; it helps form how its people think and feel. The book calls this acoustic way of knowing 'acoustemology.'
In a dense forest, where much is heard but little is seen, people tell sound patterns apart by their texture rather than by their source. One kind of sound is described as being 'around' and 'in the air', marked by a buzzing quality.
In a rain forest society, bird sounds matter more than any other natural sound because they play several cultural roles at once. Birds are heard not simply as animals but as voices in the forest, so their calls become part of how people understand feeling and loss.
Weeping, poetry and song form a chain in which one person's grief, expressed in sound, moves others to sing or to cry. Studying how sound carries emotion between people helped open the study of the senses and of feeling as fields in their own right.