Quiet, Please

Gordon Hempton On The Search For Silence In A Noisy World

Gordon Hempton believes there may be fewer than a dozen places left in the United States — and none at all in Europe — where you can sit for twenty minutes during the day without hearing a plane fly over or some other noise from human activity. An acoustic ecologist, Hempton has traveled the globe for more than twenty-five years recording the vanishing sounds of nature — from the songbird chorus that greets the dawn to the crash of waves on a rocky shore; from the bugle call of elk in a mountain meadow to the drip of rain on a forest floor. He reports that the average daytime noise-free interval in our wilderness areas and national parks has shrunk to less than five minutes.

Hempton makes his home in Joyce, Washington, near Olympic National Park, a place he calls “the listener’s Yosemite.” It offers not only relatively long periods of undisturbed quiet but also a great diversity of natural “soundscapes.” Covering more than 1,400 square miles of the Olympic Peninsula, the park encompasses the longest wilderness coastline in the lower forty-eight states, the largest temperate rain forest in the Western Hemisphere, and a rugged interior of alpine valleys ringed by glacier-capped mountains. Olympic is home to more than three hundred species of birds, including northern spotted owls and bald eagles, as well as cougar, bear, salmon, Roosevelt elk, and at least eighteen species of animals found nowhere else in the world.

Hempton has designated a location within the park as the focal point of his “One Square Inch of Silence” campaign for the creation of a place totally free of human noise. The spot is marked with a small red stone given to Hempton by an elder of the Native American Quileute tribe. (On a trip through Olympic National Park with my sons I camped in the Hoh Rain Forest and hiked to within a mile or so of the spot. Though I didn’t know about Hempton’s campaign at the time, my sons and I did note that we and the other hikers were by far the noisiest presence in those ancient woods.)

Hempton won an Emmy for his documentary Vanishing Dawn Chorus, which aired on pbs. He is also the subject of the documentary Soundtracker, directed by Nicholas J. Sherman, which had its U.S. debut at the Sedona Film Festival in Arizona last February. Hempton is the coauthor, with John Grossmann, of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), a chronicle of his ongoing attempt to convince legislators and regulators, particularly the Federal Aviation Administration (faa), of the importance of protecting silence in our national parks.

I scheduled a telephone interview with Hempton to begin our conversation. At an hour past the time he’d said he would call, I still hadn’t heard from him. (“He’s into silence,” my husband said. “Maybe this is how he does interviews.”) When Hempton finally phoned, he explained that it was a stunningly beautiful day in Washington, and he’d wandered outdoors and simply lost track of the time.

Goodman: How did you become interested in acoustic ecology?

Hempton: I was twenty-seven years old and on my way to graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin. At the end of a day of driving I pulled to the side of a road in Iowa and lay down between two rows of stubby cornstalks to sleep, to save myself the cost of a motel room. I listened to the crickets. Then I heard a thunderstorm booming from miles away. I continued to lie there and listen as the thunder got louder, and I let the storm roll right over me. I let myself get soaked. I simply took in the experience. There was no more driving I wanted to do, no more thinking, no more moving. I just let it happen.

When it was all over, I was left with one question: How could I be twenty-seven years old and never have fully listened to a thunderstorm before? I felt that I was missing out. There was something much greater that this life could afford. I ended up dropping out of graduate school, because nothing there seemed to measure up to the authenticity of that experience. I didn’t know what was ahead of me, but I knew what was behind me: a lot of student debt and a life that was no longer adequate. I wanted to become a better listener.

I found that the microphone was a valuable tool for improving my listening skills. The microphone hears everything, and when I would play back a recording, I’d discover how much I had missed in person. I jumped freight trains and recorded interviews with hobos. I interviewed punk rockers in downtown Seattle. I worked as a bike messenger in Seattle to pay my bills, and I started recording everything I could. Rather quickly I became immersed in natural places. They are so symphonic, so musical, so informative — and so hard to find. I realized that the recordings I was creating were valuable because the places themselves are disappearing rapidly, and one day people won’t be able to hear those sounds anymore.

I spent nine years recording in as many natural places as I could find. I tried to get a bank loan to document more exotic places before they vanished, and the bank officers laughed at me. So I’d earn as much as I could as a messenger and then take time off to make recordings. After ten years or so I got a grant from the Lindbergh Foundation, then another from the National Endowment for the Arts. When I won an Emmy, my career started snowballing, and I finally got control of my time. I was one of the few people in the world who’d recognized the value of natural “soundscapes,” and the only one who was recording them unedited. (I took the attitude that nature did not need improvement.) Meanwhile the world of soundscape studies gained recognition at Simon Fraser University, and the Acoustic Ecology Institute was formed, along with the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology. Some people had started paying attention to changes in our acoustic environment.

Goodman: There’s a line in the prologue to your book: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” What do you mean by that?

Hempton: When you’re in a place of natural silence, you’re not alone, and you can feel it. Whether it’s birdcalls from miles away or the proximity of a giant tree whose warm tones you can feel, there’s a presence. It’s a quieting experience.

Goodman: Are the sounds of people included in that “everything”?

Hempton: They can be. The problem is that humans are often oblivious to the natural balance of sounds that has been established since the beginning of time. Imagine we’re gathered to hear a symphony, and a handful of people are running vacuum cleaners or perhaps playing their own instruments without any regard to the orchestra. That’s how human sounds often come across in a wilderness environment. I think of Campbell Lake in Pipestone Canyon near Winthrop, Washington, for example, which is a natural amphitheater. The lake and the surrounding hills amplify sound like a stereo speaker. I’ve listened many times to the sounds of the frogs there, and the killdeer and the blackbirds, and the drumming of the grouse, and the rustling of the aspen groves. That is the “silence” that is the presence of everything. But there is also a road that goes by Campbell Lake, and motorcycles roar past and echo through the canyon. They’re taking that route because of its scenic splendor, but there is so much more that they’re oblivious to because the noise of their engines overpowers it. Too often the sounds people make are just waste products of their activity, discarded like trash with no regard for the environment.

Goodman: Can you be a little more specific about how you define silence? After all, nature can be very loud.

Hempton: Yes, there are natural sounds that can be deafening — thundering surf or waterfalls. But most natural places on earth are quieter than even the quietest human place. The mechanized noise of modernity is excluded from “natural silence” for the same reason the janitor is forbidden to run the vacuum during the symphony: it’s out of place. We take great care to build symphony halls with fabulous acoustics. If we took the same care with natural symphonies, perhaps we’d appreciate them more.

Goodman: Are there human sounds that are natural or otherwise not intrusive?

Hempton: There are sounds of human origin that are harmonious with the sounds of nature. I think of indigenous music — Tibetan chanting, Hawaiian slack-key guitar — whose pace is that of an easygoing life lived mostly out-of-doors. I think of an infant’s coo when the breast appears or the sound of a child’s voice. Footsteps, by and large, are a natural sound. But most of us make too much noise. In Sri Lanka I witnessed a monk leading a group of about seventy-five schoolchildren on a nature walk. That I saw this large group of children before I heard them was remarkable. The children were not chatting; they were not bringing another place with them. They were being in that place. Compare that to a group of mountain bikers carrying on a conversation about what happened last night at a bar while they’re supposedly “experiencing nature.” They’re unconscious of their place. They’re shouting because they’re riding single file. Their chains are clanging. They’re not part of the natural world they’re traveling through. When you travel in natural harmony, you attune yourself with your environment.

Sound is a wave that passes through air, water, and even solid objects. Natural sounds generate a sinusoidal wave, with rounded peaks, which is easy on the ears. Many mechanized sounds are square or sawtooth shaped or have jagged edges. If you see them on an oscilloscope, you’ll know why they’re unpleasant to listen to.

Goodman: Why should the average person consider natural silence important?

Hempton: When people wonder whether they should take the time to pursue finding a silent place in nature, I often ask whether they’ve seen the Milky Way. Many have, but some haven’t. When I look up at the Milky Way, it never fails to impress me. What a difference there is between talking about the universe and looking up and actually witnessing the galaxy of which we’re a part — an ocean of stars so immense that, by comparison, the items on my ever-present to-do list shrink in significance, and I feel renewed awe and reverence.

Experiencing silence can be like that. In a naturally quiet place you can hear for miles. People who live in cities can often hear only a few hundred yards. In nature your sense of place is huge.

Goodman: What importance does silence have for species other than humans?

Hempton: For wildlife it’s critical. Though some vertebrates are blind, all have the ability to hear. They’re as busy communicating as we are, and if they have trouble sending or receiving signals, it can have fatal consequences. The little research that’s been done on the impact of noise on wildlife shows that it definitely decreases some species’ survival rates.

There are always several conversations occurring simultaneously in nature. Since the many species have evolved together over thousands of years, they’ve developed different frequencies on which to communicate, so that they can all send and hear messages at once. But when a loud, broad-spectrum roar enters the soundscape — traffic, for example, which is the number-one source of noise pollution in the world — all wildlife conversations become difficult. Unless the noise abates, they will have to evolve new voices, or new hearing, in order to communicate. And that is what is happening. Studies in Europe have found that entire populations of songbirds are changing their songs to a higher frequency as a result of highway noise. In one study, when traffic was stopped for two years due to road repairs, one species returned to its original, lower-frequency song. (Lower frequencies carry farther.) In Canada the noise of gas lines has reduced the pairing success rate of ovenbirds by 30 percent. A study of the sage grouse has found that noise from oil-drilling exploration near the leks — the grounds on which they perform their mating rituals — has reduced their numbers by up to 50 percent.

In the oceans and waterways the consequences of noise pollution are even greater. The only aquatic-mammal extinction in the last fifty years — that of the Yangtze River dolphin — has been attributed in part to noise pollution from shipping traffic. I was recently in Hawaii to record the humpback whales off the Kona Coast of the Big Island. The whales had previously been driven off by U.S. Navy sonar, but the Big Island community had complained to the navy, and the navy had ceased its sonar operations in the area. Since then the humpbacks have come back in record numbers. My fiancée, Rebecca, and I paddled a couple of miles offshore in a two-person kayak, dropped a hydrophone, and had a listen. Wow. The humpbacks were so expressive, I can’t even begin to describe their repertoire. Some sounds were definitely playful, even mischievous. Others sounded like a primate house gone mad. The whale songs I had heard on albums were flowing and musical, and I heard those too, of course, but there was much more variety than I’d expected.

The kayak enabled us to get quite close to the whales without disturbing them, but whenever a whale-watching boat approached — even when it was still miles away — the underwater noise caused the whales to change their songs and behavior. My interpretation is that they were anxious at the approach of the motor. After a while the whales resumed their normal vocalizing, but I must say that whale watchers on a so-called eco tour should understand that their boat’s motor is possibly annoying or upsetting to whales.

Goodman: You’ve said that native sounds are an essential part of the identity of a place.

Hempton: Yes, as noise has increased and natural silence has diminished, places all over the world — particularly urban places — have lost their local identities. Every place in the world has begun to sound the same: like traffic. It’s become harder to hear birds and other wildlife native to the area.

Although modern popular songs are typically about love for a person, folk songs are often about love for a place. Natural quiet allows us to fall in love with a place and appreciate how unique it is. Noise detaches us — not only from our surroundings but also from each other. Research shows that in noisy areas people are much less likely to help each other. That’s one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from being in natural silence: that we can begin to feel love for a place and, through it, for everything. This is crucial for the health of our planet because, when you love something, caring for it becomes effortless. Just as we care for the people we love without asking, “What will I get out of it?” so does love enable us to care for our world without running a cost-benefit analysis to see whether it’s “worth it.”

Goodman: You’ve written that, before entering nature, you go through a process to clear your mind and make it more receptive to silence. You might spend a night in the forest so that, by morning, your ears will be “relaxed” enough and your mind clear enough to hear the river valley “singing.” Are most of us oblivious to the sounds of nature because we’re constantly bombarded with our own mental chatter?

Hempton: Our mental condition reflects our external environment. Most of us live in cities, which are noisy, chaotic places. As a result we tend to have a lot of mental chatter, not all of it coherent. When you go to a naturally quiet place, you’ll notice first how physically loud you are — voice, footsteps, food wrappers, Velcro, zippers — but then you’ll notice internal noise as well. After a day or a week you’ll experience an internal shift: your to-do list will fall away, your body will find its rhythm, your ears will attune themselves to your new surroundings, and your mental chatter will quiet. You will recognize unnecessary thoughts as just that — unnecessary — and become acquainted with the place you’re in rather than staying inside your head.

Goodman: You blame “mental chatter” on modern life, but people have been trying to escape their thoughts for centuries.

Hempton: Some people, yes. It’s related to the pace of life, which has not always been as fast as it is now. Go to a quiet place in nature, and after a few hours you will notice that your thoughts have slowed; you are no longer thinking in words but in feelings. The mind is capable of taking in enormous amounts of information when we let go of our mental filtering system and open ourselves to pure perception.

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