The Last Quiet Places: The Sounds of Nature’s Silence Are Essential to Our Own Contemplative Lives
by Krista Tippett, host
Sunrise on the outskirts of the Hoh. (photo by Joshua Bousel/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
This week and next week, we’re bringing people to the air who feel like discoveries. Their chosen vocations surprise and enrich the world in graceful ways. Sarah Kay, next week’s guest, is a young spoken word poet and teacher. Gordon Hempton is an acoustic ecologist, an explorer and collector of natural sound. At heart, they are both about listening as an essential, if somewhat lost, art. In very different spheres, they are leading a renaissance.
Gordon Hempton tells of a turning point when he was in his mid-20s, just a little older than Sarah Kay is now. He took a break alongside the highway on a cross-country drive, and lay down to listen to an approaching thunderstorm. He felt like he had never really listened to life before, and pledged to give himself over to it. Our producer Chris, who mixes the sound of these shows, has created an immersive experience, guided by Gordon Hempton’s ears, which will also make me a more passionate listener to “ordinary” sounds ever after.
Gordon Hempton went on to become one of the world’s first acoustic ecologists. He has gathered sounds from the Kalahari Desert, the edge of Hawaiian volcanoes, inside Sitka spruce driftwood logs of the same wood as violins. His work appears in movies, soundtracks, and video games. Along the way, he’s also invented another, related vocation — that of “silence activism.”
Sitka spruce driftwood washes ashore at Rialto Beach in Olympic National Park (photo by Bryan Matthew + Jessica Lee/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
Silence, as Gordon Hempton experiences and seeks to preserve it, is not a vacuum defined by emptiness. It’s not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. True quiet has presence, he says, and is a “think tank of the soul.” It is quiet that is quieting.
This is one of those insights that is in the realm of re-learning as much as novelty. We live in a picture-drenched culture. Gordon Hempton suspects this is, in part, because the noise level of the 21st century is so high that we would be overwhelmed if we really focused and took it in. He helps us remember that most of the world’s creatures move through life by way of sound more than sight. The history of humanity is no different. Hearing was always a primary source of never-ending information and of staying safe, of survival. Our eyes close and stop working for us at night, but our ears work for us all the time.
Gordon Hempton also shares a fascinating piece of truth that human ears are most attuned at their peak sensitivity not to other human sounds — but to birdsong. In our not-so-distant past, the sound of birds signaled a habitat that would be compatible for human flourishing. We’ve intuitively nurtured quiet in spiritually and aesthetically nourishing spaces in our common life, like places of worship, libraries, theaters, and music halls. Gordon Hempton also tells of research that links the noise level of environments and our capacity to be actively caring toward other people.
Amazon rain forest (photo by Oscar Federico Bodini/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)
As I was preparing to interview Gordon Hempton, I came across an essay by Pico Iyer called “The Joy of Quiet.” Iyer, a globe-trotting journalist and a non-religious person, shared how he periodically goes on retreat at a monastery. He described the other unlikely modern people he encounters there — like an MTV executive who comes to the monastery regularly with his young children, and has been transformed by the delight they can take together in a quieting, technology-free place. “The child of tomorrow,” Pico Iyer reflected, “may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.”
Gordon Hempton, I think, has been ahead of a lot of us on this particular frontier. He helps us understand ourselves better as listening, contemplative creatures — not for what’s new, but what’s essential, and why.
New England Phonographer’s Union: MIC’D (by SilenceOpensDoors)
The sounds of sewage
This is a lovely find: SOUNDSCAPE EXPLORATIONS :: Dedicated to Internet videos related to the field of acoustic ecology.
The WSP group at SFU, 1973; left to right: R. M. Schafer, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax, Howard Broomfield (via WORLD SOUNDSCAPE PROJECT)
Environments is a series of LPs, cassettes, 8-Track cartridges and CDs created by producer and sound recordist Irving Solomon Teibel (1938-2010[1]) for Syntonic Research Inc. between 1970 and 1979. The series consists of recordings of natural sounds such as a seashore with crashing waves or a thunderstorm with falling rain, without musical accompaniment. The series ignited a worldwide interest in field recordings which resulted in literally thousands of imitations being released throughout the 1970s,[2] 1980s and 1990s both with, and without, music (i.e.: Moods, Solitudes, Echoes of Nature, Nature Recordings, Magic Moods, etc.).
The Environments albums were considered definitive enough to have excerpts included on the Voyager Gold Record.[3] The Environments series also presented some of the longest album-sides ever released.[4]
Download the compilation online for free here: Sound Localities Compilation 2011
Click through for the full lowdown on this 7-city project.
Longer-form work in progress, rough mix:
Walking through my new hometown, late summer: cicadas, daily life in Nara-machi, lantern festival.
This looks promising: FiRe - Field Recorder for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
Sounds from the Berliner Dom - Friday July 8th
This is the last of my Sounds of My City: Berlin edition recordings (but maybe you have some to contribute?). But you better believe there will be more once I relocate in September! Here you can hear the bells chiming at the Berliner Dom last Friday afternoon while I was walking around Museum Island. It was certainly a treat for my eyes and ears! I love bells and old, beautiful cathedrals that have them.
Do you like bells too? Are you living in Canada? Do you also happen to like R. Murray Schafer and feel like doing something to commemorate his birthday?! You DO?! Amazing.
It’s his birthday on Monday, and so to celebrate the father of the acoustic ecology movement (Schafer), the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology (CASE) is participating in World Listening Day by encouraging “acoustic ecologists, artists, researchers, and ardent listeners” across Canada to record sounds of the 8 remaining hand-rung church bells in the country!
I will be participating by recording the bells at St. James Cathedral at King & Church St in Toronto. Are you also interested in recording these bells? Join me! I’ll be there recording on Sunday between 10-11 am!
Do you maybe live in Victoria, Vancouver, Mission, Calgary, Ottawa or Quebec City? You can participate in the CASE project, too! Visit the CASE event page for more information!
Don’t live in Canada and still want to participate? Visit the World Listening Project website for more information about the project and the events, and see how you can be a part of World Listening Day!
If you DO choose to participate in World Listening Day and happen to record any sounds, please share them with me! I’d love to hear them!
matt rösner & seaworthy (aka cameron webb) are two Australian artists who explore the fragility of environmental sound in the composition of ambient soundscapes.
Hatsumode
3m:53sec
January, 2011
Field recordings by yours truly, made in Nara, Osaka, and Ise, Japan.
All sound sourced from short videos made on a Sony Cybershot DSC-W320 camera.
Audio tracks were separated using Switch, and then put together in Audacity.
(Source: aseriesofdecisions)
LowLightMixes “Thru the Field”
An ambient mix by Dave Michuda
« I recently was given a box of old sound effects records like the one in the picture. These albums brought back a lot of memories. As a kid I would go to the public library down the street and borrow their sound effects records. I guess that was an early sign that I’d end up with music tastes that were a bit different. This new mix is perfect for my new vinyl sound effects collection, unfortunately I finished the mix before I got the records. So I’ll have to save them for the next instalment in the field mixes.
For this mix, the 3rd in the field music mixes, I tried to use more natural sound and less music. There are definitely musical elements here, thanks to Spheruleus, Nigel Samways and others. I tried to pick field sounds that weren’t too obtrusive. There are many sounds that are interesting to listen to, but don’t work as ambient “music”. After a nice quiet section of wind blowing through bamboo, hearing fireworks exploding wouldn’t work for me.
I’d like to bring attention to to releases used in this mix. They both come from a new netlabel, Audio Gourmet. “Rust” by Spheruleus & “Momentary” by Darren Harper are the first two releases. They are excellent recordings & they are free so check them out. Each one has a cut in the new field mix. The tracklist is a bit vague, as the times are even more nebulous than normal. I hope you enjoy this latest field mix. — Low Light Mixes »
Runtime 0h 60m
00:00 Chihei Hatakeyama - Distant Sound of a Bustle · 04:00 Loren Nerell - Wind Through Bamboo Forest · 06:00 The Black Dog - M1 · 08:30 Jason Kahn - Transit · 10:00 Framework podcast 11-5-09 excerpt · 13:30 Seattle Phonographers Union - Hollow Earth Radio(excerpt) · 15:30 Nigel Samways - City of Gas Street Lamps · 19:00 Spheruleus - it sits on a shelf inside my skull · 25:00 Mister Vapor - Rain 1 · 31:00 Chihei Hatakeyama - Dance of the Sea · 33:00 Chris Watson - Vatnajokull · 35:00 Quiet American - Khulna Station · 37:00 Thomas Koner - 45_26n, 12_20e (hour three) · 40:00 Steve Bradley - SO2 Emissions · 41:30 Cecile Le Prado - Passages · 43:30 Spheruleus - Rusting · 47:30 Richard Chartier - Fields for Recording (excerpt) · 52:00 Chris Watson - Bucaneve · 53:00 Spheruleus - A Hindered View · 55:30 Darren Harper - Field & Glass · 60:00 End
Enjoy an hour of excellent field recording mixes; headphones recommended.
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