Transcript
Speaker: Hi, I'm Ty, and you're listening to Stories Worth Telling Forever.
Speaker: This episode will change the way you hear the world.
Speaker: We investigate what has happened to our once quiet planet and why it's so difficult to find places that are truly quiet.
Speaker: We talk with Matt Mickelson who along with Quiet Parks International has made it his goal to preserve the last quiet places on Earth.
Speaker: You'll learn what natural quiet sounds like, why learning to listen can take a lifetime,
Speaker: And you'll even find out what it sounds like to be struck by lightning.
Speaker: Please enjoy the following conversation and the incredible stories that accompany it.
Speaker: All permanently stored for a minimum of 200 years on our weave.
Speaker: We don't often think about it, but noise is all around us.
Speaker: We accept it.
Speaker: The distant roar of an airplane flying overhead.
Speaker: Road noise punctuated by horns and sirens and the constant hum of any number of electronic devices in our immediate area.
Speaker: These sounds are so pervasive that they wrap us in a kind of sonic blanket as we go about our daily lives.
Speaker: It's been like this for a long time.
Speaker: In fact, it's been decades that our world has no longer been dominated by natural sounds.
Speaker: and most of us have never known anything different.
Speaker: Still, it's worth asking, have things gone too far?
Speaker: Have we gotten ourselves into a bad situation?
Speaker: It seems like the volume dial that controls the noise in our environment only goes one way.
Speaker: At what point do we stop and reevaluate the importance of quiet and think about turning down the noise?
Speaker: there's this famous quote from Mozart where he stated, the music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
Speaker: Looking at that quote from the context of our episode, his words reveal a simple truth, that silence or quiet is needed to appreciate sound.
Speaker: But why then is quiet so hard to find?
Speaker: And if we do find quiet,
Speaker: Do we know what it sounds like?
Speaker: Is it something we should be doing more to protect?
Speaker: To help me answer these questions, I had a conversation with Matt Mickelson, the director of Wilderness Quiet Parks for Quiet Parks International.
Speaker: He's a documentary filmmaker, a sound engineer, but he spends much of his time recording and capturing
Speaker: the soundscapes of natural environments with a focus on preserving the last remaining places on the planet where you can find true natural quiet here's my conversation with matt mickelson how important do you think it is for people to sort of
Speaker: make a concerted effort to get out and experience this kind of natural quiet that we're talking about.
Speaker: I think quiet is so important for us as humans and we get like none of it, you know?
Speaker: And I'm not just talking about quiet, like walking into a recording studio and it's quiet in there.
Speaker: Quiet is not only like a, a situation to find yourself in, whether it's, you know, in the woods or in your home or something, but it's also a state of mind.
Speaker: And when we put ourselves in quiet places, becoming quiet ourselves becomes a lot easier.
Speaker: And we're just always like going from point A to point B. We're always worried about work.
Speaker: Our phones are like always telling us about news or emails or, you know, family things, whatever.
Speaker: So rarely do we have a chance to just sit and do nothing other than be.
Speaker: And I think that's what quiet has given me is a chance to just exist in a way that connects me to the world around me.
Speaker: So how did you start as a nature sound recordist?
Speaker: And what led to you co-founding Quiet Parks International?
Speaker: I was trying to figure out a way to kind of merge love of music and sound production and sound technology with nature and being in nature.
Speaker: And that's how I came across Gordon Hempton and his work to kind of protect and record these last quiet places in
Speaker: And so I sent Gordon an email when I was 18.
Speaker: I sent him an email and I said like, hey, what you do is sounds really cool.
Speaker: I'd like love to hear more about it.
Speaker: And that was like 10 years ago.
Speaker: Now, that email like sent this crazy spiral into motion where I him and I really connected and I ended up going out to Washington State to visit him and learn from him that summer.
Speaker: We just really, really connected throughout these 10 years.
Speaker: Our professional relationship has grown, but we've also together started Quiet Parks International.
Speaker: One of the things that you're doing is sound recording, or sometimes people call it field recording.
Speaker: In the sense of doing this in quiet places, could you describe what is that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a lot of terminology to explain to folks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And when I tell people what I do, they're like, huh, that's interesting.
Speaker: Or like, I've never thought of that before.
Speaker: So it warrants a little bit of explaining.
Speaker: Essentially, yeah, I record sound.
Speaker: My specialty is recording the sound of nature.
Speaker: The problem with recording the sounds of nature is that noise pollution is everywhere all the time.
Speaker: Even in the middle of our biggest wilderness areas, out in the far reaches of our maps, noise pollution is everywhere.
Speaker: Just like pull up a live air traffic map of North America, you will be shocked at how much air traffic there is.
Speaker: So it's difficult to record nature sounds.
Speaker: The more important part of my work is recognizing that...
Speaker: our ecosystems shouldn't have this much noise pollution in them.
Speaker: And we need to have places that are free from noise or at least more free from noise, not only so the animals and the birds and all these other things can exist in their original environment, but also as humans, it's like really important that we as humans can have quiet.
Speaker: Quiet is shown to do amazing things for our mind, for our body, and noise is shown to do horrible things for our minds and our bodies.
Speaker: The kind of more scientific part of my work is I take decibel level readings, which is like the overall sound pressure level.
Speaker: I do like frequency analysis to see, okay, like how much of our current sound is noise pollution versus natural sound, and then measuring something we call the noise-free interval.
Speaker: That's the time in between noise pollution events.
Speaker: For wilderness quiet parks, the bar to become a wilderness quiet park is a dependable 15-minute noise-free interval, which seems like nothing.
Speaker: Everyone's probably like, what do you mean?
Speaker: That's 15 minutes.
Speaker: That's not that long.
Speaker: I would guess that there's fewer than 20 places in most of North America that actually would qualify for that 15-minute noise-free interval.
Speaker: So it's a lot harder to find than it seems like it should be.
Speaker: And why?
Speaker: Why is it so hard to find?
Speaker: I mean, since the industrial revolution, since like the invention of the combustion engine, a lot of things have changed for the better too.
Speaker: You know, like this is not to say that all combustion engine noise is bad, but our interstate systems have expanded.
Speaker: Most land in North America is like less than two miles from a paved road.
Speaker: The other thing is air traffic.
Speaker: Like air traffic has tripled since 1980 and it's expected to double again before 2030.
Speaker: So it's like an incredible amount of growth in the use of combustion engines for transportation noise.
Speaker: And airplanes like don't fly around national parks or wilderness areas.
Speaker: You know, they go from between their navigation points.
Speaker: Whatever is in between there doesn't really matter.
Speaker: I like always encourage people to like look up a live flight map of near where you live just to see how many thousands of aircraft are in the air at any given time.
Speaker: And the sound from an airplane, if you're looking at it directly overhead of you, think about how far that sound is spreading across land.
Speaker: So it's really difficult to find these places where the flight paths don't fly over you and the road traffic isn't nearby and there's no resource extraction, like mines or power plants.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So would you say people who are involved in conservation, like you're obviously dealing with parks and people in this field,
Speaker: And I know that they're thinking about litter on the trails.
Speaker: They're thinking about having too many people in these areas.
Speaker: Do you think they're concerned or are they aware of the importance of quiet?
Speaker: I think most the general population doesn't actively think about it.
Speaker: But when you kind of query them on it, a lot of people like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: Or, oh my God, I've thought about that before.
Speaker: Or if they haven't, they realize what a big part of their quote unquote wilderness experience is based on sound.
Speaker: Like I meet a lot of people who haven't thought about sound before.
Speaker: And the reason that is, is because like we live in, for the most part in our shared, you know, culture, we live in pretty noisy and unpleasant to listen to places.
Speaker: You know, even if you live in a small, like I live in a small town, there's a lot of noise here.
Speaker: Our brains do a really good job of ignoring that stuff and masking it.
Speaker: As soon as you start to tune into that, you realize just how much noise is around you all the time.
Speaker: So to start to key into that stuff in some ways is like, it can be a little bit maddening to kind of realize like, oh my God, I'm just constantly being exposed to noise.
Speaker: And not all noise is, you know, is bad.
Speaker: And of course, like there's lots of nuance in this conversation, but
Speaker: But I think once people start to clue into it, it becomes a really powerful tool for awareness to kind of ground yourself in place.
Speaker: So as soon as you start listening, it's really hard to stop and you end up doing more and more of it and it becomes more and more meaningful to you.
Speaker: And I've had the privilege of bringing a lot of people to quiet.
Speaker: It's like you can watch their body language change when all of a sudden they're in a quiet place.
Speaker: And it's so impactful for them.
Speaker: I think that like you can bring...
Speaker: you know, all your biggest problems in life to quiet.
Speaker: And what I, what we like to say is like the quiet will answer you, you know, and that sounds a little woo woo.
Speaker: And I'm not super woo woo as a human, believe it or not for a nature sound recordist, but it really does kind of set everything in place and like allows you to just kind of exist in this really beautiful way that I think is
Speaker: I think we need it now more than ever, you know, with like all the problems that we face and all the things going on in the world.
Speaker: Time and quiet is so beautiful and so impactful and allows you to like return to kind of the normal noisy world with a renewed sense of like joy and inspiration and ability to kind of push forward.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, thinking about it like you're describing the world and the way it is right now, it's so hard to sort of break free from the everyday, you know, all of the stimulation that we receive to just sort of slow down and listen.
Speaker: And I know that's one thing that I've heard you talk about before is the importance of becoming a better listener.
Speaker: What would you say happens when you make the effort to go to this natural place and you stop and you
Speaker: listen to what's going on around you.
Speaker: What happens?
Speaker: Is there like a series of things that happen when you start to do that?
Speaker: I think you can be a listener anywhere and you can find quiet pretty much anywhere.
Speaker: I think it's important.
Speaker: Sorry, there was just a, some sort of plow or something.
Speaker: Um, so yeah, you can be a listener anywhere.
Speaker: You don't need to go to a wilderness area to experience quiet.
Speaker: in kind of the root sense of the word, sirens.
Speaker: This is perfect.
Speaker: We couldn't apply on this better.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Noise is everywhere, man.
Speaker: Noise is everywhere.
Speaker: They're going to save someone's life.
Speaker: It's very acceptable.
Speaker: Listening, I like to think, isn't just something you do with your ears.
Speaker: You know, like we think about it as a sense.
Speaker: You're like hearing with your ears, right?
Speaker: And that's a super, super powerful thing to do.
Speaker: When you start to clue into all the information you're getting from your ears, you realize it's a vastly powerful and underrated sense that you have.
Speaker: Like, we just had to pause recording because I could hear sirens passing on a road that I can't see.
Speaker: Things like sounds, you're always processing, your brain's always working on whether or not your eyes are closed, whether or not you're conscious or not.
Speaker: Like when you're sleeping and you had to wake up this morning, how did you wake up?
Speaker: Most people have an alarm clock, it emits a sound, that triggers your brain to say, oh, it's time to wake up.
Speaker: Um, same thing.
Speaker: Like if you were standing in this room behind me and I had my eyes closed and I couldn't see you and you talked at me or even made a little sound, I could pinpoint where you are in the room just based on the way that sound wraps around my head and enters my ears.
Speaker: Um, so I think it's like incredible to start thinking about all the information you're getting from your ears and
Speaker: On this road, like I just heard a truck pass by.
Speaker: I didn't see the truck.
Speaker: I didn't, I had no visual cue that it was a truck other than I could hear, oh, that's a truck.
Speaker: That's not a car.
Speaker: That's not a motorcycle.
Speaker: It's not a bicycle.
Speaker: That's a truck.
Speaker: There's a car.
Speaker: Oh, is there an airplane above me?
Speaker: There's like all this stuff happening all the time that we just tend to not focus on it too much.
Speaker: But when you apply that level of listening to being outside and to listening, let's say in a national park or a wilderness area, you start to absorb so much information.
Speaker: And what's less important is like, oh, I'm hearing a bird.
Speaker: It's a black cap chickadee.
Speaker: What's more important is, oh, I'm hearing a bird, it sounds beautiful.
Speaker: Or it sounds like it's struggling.
Speaker: Or I hear a distant creek, it sounds nice.
Speaker: Things like sounds are all around us all the time and we can derive a lot of information and a lot of joy from those things.
Speaker: So I kind of, one of the things I tell people they can do, because I get asked all the time, like, how do I, how do I be a better listener?
Speaker: And it's a lifelong pursuit.
Speaker: And I wouldn't say that I'm a good listener, but I work on it really hard.
Speaker: Go to any, any place.
Speaker: It could even be in your living room, but if you have a local park near you, or you are lucky enough to have a piece of nature near you, go to that place, find a safe place to sit, a place where you feel comfortable and just close your eyes.
Speaker: And just start cluing into what's happening, what your ears are telling you.
Speaker: And you don't have to try and pick out specific things, but just let all the sound just kind of be your primary focus.
Speaker: And you start to realize really quickly how much we've been, how much our brains have ignored for a super long time.
Speaker: And it's hard to go back from that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that's really insightful.
Speaker: And I think those are some good tips for anybody listening to this, that, you know, how to improve as a listener.
Speaker: And it's amazing what we're doing when we're hearing.
Speaker: Like, you know, it's not just...
Speaker: noticing the sound.
Speaker: But like you mentioned, it's, we know the distance.
Speaker: We know maybe what it is, even though we can't see it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like this relationship that we're kind of creating with the world through this sense that we, we kind of take for granted a little bit.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And I mean, it's,
Speaker: The number of examples that I could share of like things that I heard that blew me away in terms of just like how powerful of a sense it is.
Speaker: Like I've heard sounds that were 15 miles away from where I was.
Speaker: Like I've been able to hear on the other side of valleys and like over mountaintops and things.
Speaker: It's not because I'm so good at hearing.
Speaker: Like I have average hearing.
Speaker: I don't have hearing loss, but it's because like you start to clue into that stuff and you start to pick up a lot more.
Speaker: I also think that listening, while I just talked about it as a physical thing that you do with your senses, it's again also kind of like a mindfulness practice that you can bring with you through your life.
Speaker: And I think like trying to be a better listener has taught me to be
Speaker: I hope, like a better friend.
Speaker: I think it's taught me to be a better like community member, a better partner.
Speaker: These are things that like listening helps you with.
Speaker: We do a lot of talking in our world and in our culture and being able to sit and listen, I think is really an undervalued skill.
Speaker: Yeah, just hearing you describe that, it makes me think like, why don't we have like a listening class in school beyond just appreciating our natural surroundings and which is a rich experience in itself, but just the improvement that being a better listener would offer to our listeners.
Speaker: you know, our personal relationships.
Speaker: That's another aspect of this, for sure.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think it's, we're such a visual culture in North America and South America too, in certain parts in North America, we are very visually dominant.
Speaker: The visual takes precedence over everything else.
Speaker: But like next time you're at like a beautiful vista or like something like that, after you're done appreciating it with your eyes, which is so worth doing, you know, I'm a photographer.
Speaker: I like, I love going and looking at things.
Speaker: Who doesn't take a minute, close your eyes.
Speaker: What are you hearing?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what I often find is these beautiful natural vistas that we get to go to, like Lake Louise or looking at the Rocky Mountains or something like that.
Speaker: You close your eyes at these vistas and what you hear is the sound of humanity you hear.
Speaker: cars and people and drones and all these other things that are happening.
Speaker: They don't always match up.
Speaker: So sometimes the places where I find the best sound don't look that crazy, but you listen to them and they're acoustically really rich in a way that some of these other places are not.
Speaker: So it's a tool to appreciate your surroundings, just like
Speaker: Sight, smell, touch, you know, listening is a way to enrich your experience as a human.
Speaker: And we like we only have a few senses, you know, use all of them.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I listened to one of a podcast you're on.
Speaker: I can't remember exactly which one it was.
Speaker: It got me so interested in this idea of sound recording and field recording.
Speaker: that I decided, you know, next hike I go on.
Speaker: I don't, I don't have any professional equipment for it, but like I have this ginormous USB mic here and I had my iPad.
Speaker: So I threw it in my backpack and did this like two or three hour hike up in Kananaskis to this place called Rosson Lake.
Speaker: set up my iPad and my microphone.
Speaker: And just the act of doing that, I just sat there for a lot longer and I really appreciated a lot more what I was listening to.
Speaker: And I'd never noticed up there the sound of airplanes flying over.
Speaker: I thought it was a totally quiet place.
Speaker: That's why I went there.
Speaker: And although I did get kind of a cool recording at that time, I had like the Stellar J kind of like fly by my microphone and like squawk like right beside it.
Speaker: But the crazy thing is, is that after hiking down and I got back home, I looked at my backpack and my iPad wasn't there.
Speaker: I actually left it up on the mountain.
Speaker: So a buddy of mine that was down visiting, he's like, let's go back tonight.
Speaker: Like it's dark, but I'm like, no way that we can't do that.
Speaker: So we opted for like first light, kind of be the first guys up there.
Speaker: And we recovered the iPad.
Speaker: but you got it back.
Speaker: I did get it back.
Speaker: And I think I will always cherish that little sound recording and the sound of that stellar J like anyway, since then I've kind of gotten more into it.
Speaker: I actually picked up a field recorder here and stuff like that.
Speaker: So I, I haven't had much time to play with it yet, but, um, you definitely inspired me to, to start doing a little bit more of this kind of stuff.
Speaker: Oh, I love that.
Speaker: I think it's like, you know, uh,
Speaker: Field recording, photography, any of these things, it's a way for you to start to engage with your senses in a more meaningful way.
Speaker: And yeah, even with just an iPhone, I've had some of my favorite recordings I've just recorded with my phone because it's what I had with me.
Speaker: And yeah, I have like a $40,000 microphone that I prefer to record with, but some of my favorite sounds are just something that's happening in the moment.
Speaker: And I think similar to what people say about smell is that smell is a really great memory trigger.
Speaker: Sound is also a great memory trigger.
Speaker: So like I could play you a hundred sounds of a Stellar J and you'd be able to pick up your recording of a Stellar J. You know that recording.
Speaker: When people, I've done this with friends is I've had them, you know, I've,
Speaker: Turn my back and I said, okay, click on a random file in my entire archive, which is terabytes and terabytes.
Speaker: Like I have a 50 terabyte hard drive on my desk full of sound.
Speaker: I'm like, choose any file and I can probably tell you where, when, and what.
Speaker: this was, I'd say eight out of 10 times, they play the file.
Speaker: And within less than 10 seconds, I can actually visualize myself exactly where I was at that time, what was happening, even like what I ate that day, like things like that, that happened years ago, just come back to you when you have a recording to reference, or at least that's what I find.
Speaker: And I've done that experiment with other field recordists too.
Speaker: And they, same thing, they know exactly what it is.
Speaker: I'll have the same experience.
Speaker: I'll be like listening to a movie or like, sorry, watching a movie or something.
Speaker: And I'll be like, oh, that's my Don Chorus Coyote recording from American Prairie Reserve in 2018.
Speaker: Like, that's definitely my recording.
Speaker: And people are like, no, it's not.
Speaker: Like, it seriously is.
Speaker: I know it.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And that's great.
Speaker: I mean, I love...
Speaker: Yeah, I love hearing my stuff in people's work, but it's really, it's amazing what a memory trigger sound recording can be.
Speaker: Also with like, you know, forget nature sound or field recording, but like I...
Speaker: made a habit about five or 10 years ago, my grandmother was getting older and she's like this very powerful, stoic woman who was just like an amazing role model for all of us.
Speaker: I started recording some of our conversations.
Speaker: So I'd like plant a microphone in like the centerpiece of the table and just like record whatever we were talking about as a family at the time.
Speaker: And she passed away not that long ago, a year and change ago.
Speaker: And I have these recordings where like I can just listen to her talking and like hearing her voice and hearing some of her stories.
Speaker: It's so powerful.
Speaker: Like I can almost, it's almost like she's there.
Speaker: So I encourage people like to use sound and these really high quality sound recorders that we all carry in our pockets now on the smartphones, use it, start recording stuff.
Speaker: Like folks take pictures all the time.
Speaker: Next time you hear a cool sound, I don't know.
Speaker: record it, see what it does for you.
Speaker: It's a fun memory.
Speaker: It's a fun way to capture memories for sure.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That's actually kind of like one of the things with the project called Forever Stories.
Speaker: The idea is to sort of encourage people to do those kinds of things, to create this artifact, this cultural artifact that you can have and that you can pass down.
Speaker: And it's just something that if we don't think about it, if you didn't plunk down the recorder on the table to record your grandmother speak, when it's gone, it's gone, right?
Speaker: But we have this opportunity.
Speaker: So just being cognizant of taking advantage of these opportunities, I think is so important.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, it's amazing.
Speaker: Like I can then show my children what my grandmother sounded like and a little bit about her.
Speaker: When we take that concept and apply it to the work I do in ecology, like I have all these recordings from Gordon
Speaker: that he started taking in the 80s of these places.
Speaker: And I go to the same exact place and take the same recordings and we can compare them.
Speaker: How much more noise pollution is there?
Speaker: What's the biodiversity like?
Speaker: Is there more or less the same biodiversity?
Speaker: And we've done that in so many places.
Speaker: And what we're seeing is that a lot of these places that he found that are quiet are no longer quiet.
Speaker: So part of what I find valuable about my work is like, it's an archive.
Speaker: You know, it's a,
Speaker: It's like a historical recording of what a place sounds like in a given time.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: I think what you touched on there is so important.
Speaker: If I was to listen to a sound recording, like maybe you mentioned one of Gordon's from the 80s, if I've never been there before, in my mind, it could be a recording from 2010.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But when you compare the same place from 1980 to 2020,
Speaker: and you hear the difference in the quiet or the lack of quiet, that makes an impact.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And I think if more people heard that, I don't know how you'd turn a blind eye to that.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: Yeah, we say a lot that people who ask why we need to protect quiet haven't necessarily experienced it.
Speaker: Once you experience quiet, the need to protect it is self-evident.
Speaker: it really becomes such a no-brainer when you're in a place and it's quiet and then all of a sudden you hear noise enter or you have a beautiful experience like this Stellar's J where an experience like that can open your whole world up to a new way of awareness and perception and using your hearing.
Speaker: Once you have an experience like that, which is an experience you put yourself in to have that experience, it changes the way you move.
Speaker: I think that people who are really, who like recreating outside do pay attention to noise and to sound.
Speaker: But a lot of them don't know that there's like kind of an active effort to protect places that are quiet.
Speaker: And a lot of people think that they know quiet
Speaker: And that's really great.
Speaker: I never want to tell someone like, oh, you have this quiet place near you.
Speaker: I show up with all my equipment and I measure it.
Speaker: And hey, there's a bunch of noise pollution here.
Speaker: I don't want that place to lose meaning for people.
Speaker: But I'd say nine times out of 10, I'll get a tip on a place to go.
Speaker: And I follow these tips like all over the country, all over the world, places to go that are quiet.
Speaker: Nine times out of 10, I show up.
Speaker: It's not quiet.
Speaker: That person perceives it as quiet, which is great.
Speaker: I hope it brings them joy and it accomplishes that for them.
Speaker: But scientifically speaking, based on our standards as an organization, doesn't count as quiet, which just shows me more and more that like our relationship with quiet as humans is varied and vast and beautiful.
Speaker: And there's also this, it's very interesting to have like a bar for like, okay, this is what I consider quiet.
Speaker: 15 minute dependable noise-free interval.
Speaker: How many places in the world have this?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm trying to find out, but not very many.
Speaker: What would you say is the quietest place you've been to?
Speaker: In terms of...
Speaker: Like silence, in the terms of silence.
Speaker: When I talk about quiet, I'm talking about a lack of noise pollution.
Speaker: When I talk about silence, I'm talking about overall sound level.
Speaker: So I've been to the Amazon jungle and it's been quiet.
Speaker: There's been no noise pollution, but it's certainly not silent.
Speaker: It's like full of just a cacophonous orchestra of sound.
Speaker: So those are like, that's a distinction that I think is important for people to grasp is quiet and silence in this context when I'm talking about it are different things.
Speaker: So the most silent place I've ever been, natural place or man-made place, because I've been to one of the quietest rooms in the world, an anechoic chamber before, which was a crazy experience.
Speaker: But if you want to hear about natural place.
Speaker: I want to hear about both.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, so I, while I was in school, I had the opportunity to visit an anechoic chamber, which for folks who don't know, it's like a, it's a room that's built usually underground.
Speaker: It's like isolated from the foundation of whatever building it's in.
Speaker: It's like kind of like usually a floating room.
Speaker: And inside of it is all this padding and foam, acoustic foam, and there's no floor or any hard surfaces in the room.
Speaker: And what it does is it prevents any sort of sound reproduction in the room.
Speaker: So usually when we're like, even right now, I'm talking into this microphone, but the sound waves that are coming out of my mouth are bouncing off the computer, the walls, they're propagating in the room.
Speaker: In an anechoic chamber, no sound can propagate whatsoever.
Speaker: So you talk and there's no reflections.
Speaker: which is a really disorienting experience.
Speaker: Even if you're not a sound nerd like me, when you're in this room and you hear someone speak at you and there's no reflections from around it, it's like, it's amazing how much reflections will inform our sense of place.
Speaker: But anyway, so if you're in this room and you're totally quiet, no sound is getting in.
Speaker: It's like usually zero decibels SPL or below the human perception of what quiet is.
Speaker: So what you start to hear is just like the ringing in your ears.
Speaker: You start to hear the blood pumping in your circulatory system.
Speaker: I had the chance to be in there alone for a bit and I had crouched on the floor because I felt like it was easier for me to stabilize myself because every single sound I made, like my clothes rustling, the hair on my head, like moving with my breath was super loud.
Speaker: It was so, so crazy.
Speaker: And when I was crouching, I could hear like fluid and like the tendons in my knees squeaking.
Speaker: And what ends up happening is that when your body's not receiving any sort of acoustic signal, after a little bit, your brain starts like making stuff up.
Speaker: It starts hallucinating sound.
Speaker: So I don't think I quite got to that part of hallucinating, but I just became super clued into these crazy sounds that were like not anything I've ever heard.
Speaker: So that was super nuts.
Speaker: And after about five minutes, I had to leave the room because it was like maddening.
Speaker: That is incredible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What does the sound of blood circulating through your system sound like?
Speaker: So have you ever like done a really like a cardio workout or you climb a big hill or a trail or something like that and you're like breathing and you can hear that like shakshun, shakshun, shakshun.
Speaker: You can like hear your heart beating.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Similar to that, like that sound is happening all the time but usually when we work out, we do cardio, it becomes louder and more audible.
Speaker: But it's happening all the time.
Speaker: And when you're in a quiet enough place, you can hear that happening.
Speaker: One thing you can do too to hear that is like if you lay down in your bed and like put a pillow over both your ears super tight, even when you're just laying there, usually you can start to pick up on your blood flowing through your body, which is weird.
Speaker: Everyone go lay down.
Speaker: You've earned it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, in terms of natural place, the quietest natural place I've been is probably either this desert in Arizona or up in northeastern Montana.
Speaker: I'll talk first about the desert in Arizona.
Speaker: It's a really interesting place.
Speaker: It's called Organ Pipe Desert National Monument.
Speaker: The organ pipe is a type of cactus, sorry, organ pipe cactus national monument.
Speaker: Organ pipe's a type of cactus.
Speaker: It only exists in this very specific region of Southern Arizona.
Speaker: It's right on the US-Mexico border and it's a military operating area.
Speaker: So while it's a national monument, there's a big air base nearby and they have blocked all the airspace in and around the park to do military training exercises.
Speaker: So during the week, you'll be like hiking on a trail and all of a sudden fighter jets like fly over your head right off the desert floor.
Speaker: But on the weekends when they're not flying, there's no commercial air traffic allowed, no private aircraft allowed.
Speaker: It was this incredible juxtaposition of these places that is so quiet and off limits to flights for the most part.
Speaker: I heard like, you know, just ringing in my ears, you know, things like the circulatory system, like so quiet that even my most sensitive microphones like weren't sensitive enough to produce a good recording of how quiet it was.
Speaker: It just sounded like ssss, just like electric hiss.
Speaker: So that's a really interesting place.
Speaker: And then American Prairie Reserve in Montana, which is lucky enough to like not experience a lot of commercial air traffic.
Speaker: You can go, like I've recorded hours long noise-free intervals there, very dependably.
Speaker: It's out in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker: Like you drive like 120 miles down a dirt road before you get to these places.
Speaker: So you have to be like, you can't just casually like go for a Sunday drive and go experience really quiet places.
Speaker: Requires like a lot of work.
Speaker: That's a beautiful, beautiful place that I like.
Speaker: Some of my favorite recordings are from American Prairie Reserve in Montana and Grasslands National Park in Canada, in Southern Saskatchewan there.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I've never been there.
Speaker: That's a very quiet place.
Speaker: Grasslands National Park for all your Canadian based folks.
Speaker: Grasslands is super quiet.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Thinking about these quiet places, quiet experiences, now that we are coming through the pandemic, I wonder if you could speak to what that experience was like as a sound recordist.
Speaker: One of the really cool experiences, one of the coolest experiences I think I've had is in the first few weeks of lockdowns or whatever you want to call it in March, when COVID started really, you know, spreading in North America and everything shut down, or I guess all over the world, you know, we all, that was a super scary time.
Speaker: We were all like really unsure of what was going to happen.
Speaker: Probably late, I guess it was late March, early April,
Speaker: Like no airplanes were flying anywhere.
Speaker: People weren't driving anywhere.
Speaker: Factories like weren't staffed in the same way.
Speaker: So I had this idea that like, okay, I want to collect, I want to hear from my other sound recording friends.
Speaker: Like put your microphone out your window.
Speaker: What are you hearing?
Speaker: How is it different from what you normally hear?
Speaker: And I had people, I like curated this kind of batch of sounds and I wrote an article for Atlas Obscura about it, but like the sound of like LAX airport with like birds and no planes or I had sounds come in from like
Speaker: huge metropolitan areas in India where like all you hear are like birds and like faint voices of people, no cars, no motorcycles, nothing.
Speaker: The way that our soundscape changed in such a crazy way in those few weeks
Speaker: was amazing.
Speaker: And I read articles that like seismometers that measure earthquakes actually quiet, like earth quieted its vibration during that time because we had less trains moving.
Speaker: We had less planes.
Speaker: We had all like the sound is vibrating the earth.
Speaker: It stopped or it lessened.
Speaker: like talk about like an archive of sound you know like when do you ever expect to hear a big airport like even even like calgary or lax or jfk with no planes in it what does that place sound like when there's no planes it was a horrifying time like i don't wish to repeat that i'm not suggesting that that would be a better way to live at all however
Speaker: in that time, it was really interesting to see what the implications were of our sound.
Speaker: But when everything kind of has roared back to life, I think that's something that I've heard from a lot of people that they miss is that quiet.
Speaker: I'm always kind of asking myself,
Speaker: How do we bring some of that quiet with us as we move forward into like, what is kind of a new world?
Speaker: What lessons did we learn?
Speaker: What's important to take with us?
Speaker: And I think one of the things that a lot of people have felt is like, it's important to take quiet with us.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: You know, hearing that now, it makes me super curious to find out what other unique recordings you've been able to archive over the years.
Speaker: Like I have a sound recording of myself getting struck by lightning.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have like sound recordings that were like, you know, two weeks in the making of tracking packs of coyotes and then a coyote like saying like right to the microphone.
Speaker: So were you okay when you got struck by lightning?
Speaker: I was okay.
Speaker: I was in Colorado there to record thunderstorms.
Speaker: And I was kind of like up on this foothill on the other side of a valley from a mountain range.
Speaker: The storm was coming in over the mountain range, but it was still like 15 miles away.
Speaker: So I was feeling like real super safe.
Speaker: And I always, I'm like, I do a risky thing for my line of work.
Speaker: Like it's inherently risky to spend that much time outside or going to the places I go, but I was feeling real safe, real good.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: It's kind of like in this little aspen grove.
Speaker: I had my microphone set up, was getting this nice, really distant thunder.
Speaker: Super, super distant.
Speaker: And I was standing underneath this pine tree for shade and...
Speaker: out of nowhere, the tree, I was like leaning on the tree and the tree gets struck.
Speaker: And I immediately like lost all my hearing.
Speaker: Like, you know, I just got ringing in my ears.
Speaker: I couldn't see anything.
Speaker: It was like so bright that I was like blinded by the light literally.
Speaker: And I was on the ground.
Speaker: And so like when I kind of like,
Speaker: I didn't think I lost consciousness, but when I became aware of my surroundings, I was like, okay, that was lightning, I need to get the heck out of here.
Speaker: So I ran and grabbed my microphone, threw it into my truck, and got in the truck and just blasted off this hill, because I thought all of a sudden it was just going to start happening all around me, and I had all this adrenaline.
Speaker: But I was okay.
Speaker: Again, it wasn't a direct hit, but it was just, it was super, super scary.
Speaker: And I then got to like a safer place kind of near a town and I played back the sound recording and I was like, okay, if I lost consciousness at all, like depending on how long between the lightning strike and the me fetching the microphone, if that's at all a length of time where I can't recount, I'm going to go to the hospital.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the lightning strikes and immediately I'm like running towards the microphone.
Speaker: So I like hit the deck and immediately stood up and ran, which was good.
Speaker: It took a few days for my hearing to come back.
Speaker: I still have like lightning related trauma for sure.
Speaker: But in the sound recording, it's like...
Speaker: It's very explicit.
Speaker: I ran to the microphone.
Speaker: I was like, holy beep.
Speaker: What the beep?
Speaker: I was like just screaming.
Speaker: I was like, oh my God.
Speaker: It's like kind of funny when you listen to it back because I'm okay.
Speaker: And then I like, yeah, I throw the microphone in the van and I didn't stop recording because I just, I didn't even care.
Speaker: I was just like, I need to get out of here.
Speaker: And you can hear me like breathing super, super heavy and super scared.
Speaker: And I left that place.
Speaker: I didn't go back.
Speaker: I was like pretty traumatized.
Speaker: I kind of called it quits on that trip a day or two later because it was just, it was, yeah, really messed up.
Speaker: And just this past spring or this past summer, my really good friend of mine, Laura, who's a sound recordist as well, she was in Colorado recording thunderstorms.
Speaker: And she was like, hey, I think I'm near where you got hit.
Speaker: Do you think you can find it on a map and I'll go see if the tree is still there?
Speaker: Because I didn't, like I totally blacked out.
Speaker: I don't remember if the tree blew up or like caught fire or anything.
Speaker: So I found on the map where I was.
Speaker: I was like, I think this is where I'm at.
Speaker: She went to the tree.
Speaker: And she took a picture of it and the tree has this like incredible lightning scar down the whole thing.
Speaker: And it's just like black, like blackened all around the scar.
Speaker: So that was the closest to death I've ever been, probably ever in my life for sure.
Speaker: And not many people have a sound recording of their near death experience.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I kind of want to hear it, but I kind of don't.
Speaker: I don't even know how I feel about it.
Speaker: Is there a way to attach files in here?
Speaker: If you, if you feel up to sharing it, I'm curious.
Speaker: I love sharing it with people.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: It's super crazy.
Speaker: Make sure when you're listening to it to monitor the waveform, because it's like nice, beautiful, like insects and distant thunder.
Speaker: And then all of a sudden it,
Speaker: It really kicks in.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So make sure you're like looking at the waveforms.
Speaker: You don't blast your ears off.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And you like, were you, you must've been worried about your hearing.
Speaker: Like, Oh yeah.
Speaker: I was, I actually thought it was like career ending for like the first day or so.
Speaker: I was like, that's it.
Speaker: That's my days of critical listening are over.
Speaker: A lot of people in this line of work have hearing loss, but usually it's sustained over many years of time.
Speaker: I'm super careful about my hearing.
Speaker: I'm here, you can't see, but I have a studio here and I have a dosimeter that tells me when I need to take a break.
Speaker: Anytime I go
Speaker: Even on like long drives, I like wear hearing protection, but it's also my like livelihood, you know, like if I don't have accurate hearing, I have, I have a problem.
Speaker: But yeah, people are exposed to unsafe levels of sound just like all the time.
Speaker: Now, Matt was kind enough to share with us some of his sound recordings, including that epic lightning strike.
Speaker: If you'd like to hear the full version of that recording, you can go to our site at foreverstories.xyz and click on the Stories tab.
Speaker: And there you will see listener submitted stories and find Matt Mickelson's lightning strike.
Speaker: And one of the sound recordings that Matt shared with me was from Boundary Waters in northeastern Minnesota.
Speaker: Let's take a minute and enjoy how beautiful nature can sound in true natural quiet.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: Oh, my God!
Speaker: This conversation with Matt has revealed many things about sound, quiet, and noise, making it abundantly clear why he spends these countless hours in seemingly desolate and sometimes dangerous places documenting and preserving these last vestiges of natural quiet.
Speaker: Like the bolt of lightning that almost struck Matt and gave him newfound appreciation for his hearing, we've also been reminded how quiet is an incredibly valuable resource while also being extremely fragile.
Speaker: Thanks to the efforts made by Matt and other natural sound recordists, we are able to get a taste of natural quiet from locations around the world that otherwise we may never have had a chance to visit.
Speaker: As Gordon Hempton, famously known as the Soundtracker once said, quiet is the antidote to noise pollution.
Speaker: When we understand the value of quiet, Gordon's statement takes on a deeper meaning.
Speaker: To call quiet an antidote also implies that we've been poisoned by noise.
Speaker: Is that really the case?
Speaker: It's an important question to ask because the amount of noise around us is something that we often have very little control over.
Speaker: After all, we can't close our ears like we can close our eyes.
Speaker: Even when we're sleeping, noise is filtering in through our ears and into our minds.
Speaker: It's 24-7.
Speaker: Sound, like the invisible air that we breathe, affects our health and quality of life.
Speaker: And just like breathing in bad air, exposure to some kinds of noise can have serious health implications, not just for us, but for all creatures that call planet Earth their home.
Speaker: In our next episode, we'll dive deeper into how sound and noise impacts the natural world, while taking a look at some fascinating projects that are documenting those impacts in order to help bring about positive changes.
Speaker: This story about sound and quiet doesn't end here.
Speaker: All of us can have a share in documenting and preserving natural sounds.
Speaker: We need you to help us build an archive of sounds and stories on our weave.
Speaker: Visit the foreverstories.xyz website and upload your sounds and audio stories for free onto the permaweb.
Speaker: How do we make this possible?
Speaker: Through our on-site integration with the Accord API.
Speaker: We are able to store each episode of Stories Worth Telling Forever, the accompanying digital vault, and the listener-generated content permanently onto our weave.
Speaker: We would like to thank Accord for making it easier than ever to preserve and share these stories worth telling forever.
Speaker: please enjoy one last epic natural soundscape, courtesy of our friend Matt Mickelson.
Speaker: This is from one of the quietest places on the planet, the American Prairie Reserve, located in central Montana.
