Scientists are recording the sound of the whole planet

Scientists are recording the sound of the whole planet | The Verge
▻http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/28/6071399/scientists-are-recording-the-sound-of-the-whole-planet

In a few weeks, sensors in Indiana will go online that will record, in the words of Bryan Pijanowski, every sound the Earth makes. The array of microphones, geophones, and barometric gauges will run for a year, taping everything from the songs of birds arriving in the spring to the vibrations of the continent as ocean waves pound the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. They will measure earthquakes on the other side of the world and the stomping of cattle nearby, the ultrasonic whistles of bats and the barometric drop of cold fronts. “I joke to my physicist friends that if I had a microphone small enough, I could record the Higgs boson,” Pijanowski says.

Pijanowski is a soundscape ecologist, a term he coined three years ago to describe a new approach to studying sound. Rather than look at how, for example, a single species of frog calls for a mate, soundscape ecologists study how all the sounds in a space interact, from frog calls to car traffic to thunder. “There are what I call rhythms of nature, there are periodicities like the dawn chorus and certain crescendos during the seasons,” Pijanowski says, referring to the way birds burst into song at sunrise. He believes listening to these patterns can tell us important things about the state of the natural world.

Earlier this year, Pijanowski launched the Global Soundscape Project, which is building a map of the world’s sounds using an app that turns phones into recorders. Occasionally he has an IMAX crew in tow, part of a soundscape education program he’s filming. And every few months he convenes soundscape researchers for workshops, part of a grant from the National Science Foundation. He invites people from outside the sciences to participate. “When you look at arrangements of sound, working with musicians helps you to think about the orchestration of an ecosystem,” he explains.

Lincoln Meadow 1988, Bernie Krause
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps9-VhZ9gQM

Lincoln Meadow 1989, Bernie Krause
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g9ncp2VJ-g

▻https://www.globalsoundscapes.org/index.php
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