back, however, and the acoustic edginess suddenly became blunted. It was akin to walking in tap-dancing shoes across a ballroom floor and then abruptly switching into sneakers to enter a small closet. Along these reaches, the air around me felt close and dense. In the dampened silence, the trickle of water from a spring under a rocky overhang or the tumbling of a pebble that became dislodged from the canyon wall could be heard in startling detail. Most captivating, though, were the sections of trail along the creekbeds. The streams would twist this way and that through narrow canyons or across broader stretches of braided channels. Sometimes the water sounded over my left shoulder; at other times, it whispered downstream to my right. Most memorable of all, though, were the intervals in which the sounds of flowing water bounced off the rocky walls all around me, creating a kind of ecstatic sloshing, as if I were swimming in reverberations.
For millennia, humans have walked the Bright Angel Trail, one of the few traversable paths between the the canyon bottom and the rim world of the Colorado Plateau. Surely like me they experienced their trek as a series of sonic compartments, maybe using these acoustic intervals as trail markers or as prompts for the telling of myths and stories, much like the songlines of aboriginal people in Australia. One balmy evening last spring my ASU colleague Prasad Boradkar and I packed a picnic supper and headed into the Sonoran Desert with Garth to talk about the field of acoustic ecology and to practice some listening ourselves. Below is a link to some excerpts from our conversation. I hope they will help you to listen with new ears to the sounds in your own habitat. ⊗
Soundcloud link
Cicada, Gray Hawk Ranch Photo: William Herron, 2013 | Flickr cc
Zygote Quarterly: zq17 | Volume 3, 2016 | ISSN 1927-8314 | Pg 51 of 96