Sound ecology & silence activism

There is an ecology of sound, and an activism of silence, that we neglect on pain of becoming desensitized to other lives.

Gordon Hempton tells of a turning point when he was in his mid-20s... 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. He 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.”

On Being Blog • The Last Quiet Places: The Sounds of Nature’s...