The Sounds of Nature Look Like This

We humans head for wide open natural spaces as much to listen as we do to see; we value serenity as much as beauty. This, then, is what serenity looks like.

That's a newly released spectrogram—a visual representation of 24 hours of sounds recorded in a given natural area—from the National Park Service's vast archives. Specifically, you're looking at all of recorded sounds in part of the Grand Canyon National Park. The map reveals that a "coyote chorus" took place at 2:30 am and a "chorus of birds" lasted from 5 to 8 am. Some of those spikes are airplanes, far overhead.

Actually, the serenity we hear is probably closer to this—the spectral image adjusted to account only for what the human ear can detect.

There are hundreds of thousands more where these came from. The NPS has been doing acoustical monitoring for over twenty years, and the Western Soundscape Archive has made available some 10,000 spectral images culled from 200,000 hours of the effort.

"The images allow rapid visual assessment of daily acoustic patterns and show the prevalence of many kinds of sound sources, such as aircraft, bird songs, insect choruses, rain, wind, river flows and the environment in general," the WSA explains. "Such sound signatures can offer clues about an area's biodiversity and ecological health, and are also a window into the increasing impacts of human-caused noise on the environment."

The maps document invading human sounds like airplane flyovers or vehicle drive-bys. It's an aural explanation of how humans are encroaching on, and sort of ruining, that serenity we're so inclined to seek out. But it's also, in the simplest terms, a nice alternative visual conception of what the sounds of nature look like.