The article writer joins a scientist in Alaska’s Denali National Park in search of silence and natural sound, with commentary on the status of silence and natural sound as components of wilderness and animal life. Remarks the scientist: “If you’re on foot and you choose to focus on the natural quality of the landscape, you’re completely immersed in nature; nothing else exists. Then a jet will go over, and it kind of breaks that flow of consciousness, that ecstatic moment.” Part of that natural quality and flow of consciousness is silence.
For more than 40 years, scientists have used radio telescopes to probe starry regions trillions of miles away for sounds of alien life. But only in the past five years or so have they been able to reliably record months-long stretches of audio in the wildernesses of Earth. … Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread.
Article includes representative natural sounds of Denali National Park.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/is-silence-going-extinct.html