Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World, Revised Edition

what we hear in wild places is not only fascinating and immeasurably rich in detail, but absolutely vital to our lives and our survival.

Recording natural soundscapes is a type of abstraction, because you get only what the mics pick up, which is different from what your ears hear.

Bill McKibben’s ideal definition works best for me. He tells us that a wild place is one where you can walk for a week in any direction and not encounter a road or a fence.

Part of the discovery of wild soundscapes is discovering what specific types of habitats resonate with you.

World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. More recently, the International Society of Ecoacoustics, which convened for the first time in June 2014 in Paris, changed the focus of that inquiry to the narrower concept of soundscape ecology.

Printed out, these might take the shape of an envelope the size of a CD (five inches square) with a graphic and an audio CD of a favorite location you have recorded.

God asks nothing of the highest soul but attention. —Henry David Thoreau

My soul turns into a tree, And an animal, and a cloud bank. Then changed and odd it comes home And asks me questions. What should I reply? —Hermann Hesse, “Sometimes”

In a paper in 1977 on birdsong, Peter Marler and Kenneth Marten suggested the possibility that creatures vocalize in some (yet to be understood) relationship to one another.