He Hears Music in the Quietest Place on Earth—Can You? | Short Film Showcase

I like to say that silence is the think tank of the soul. Listening is something different. Listening means taking all sounds in with equal value. So instead of listening for a sound, I simply listen to the place. Today it's the echo of the whole river brushed off the mountain ridge top. It is a sound of the valley, and not only the sound of the valley, but where I am in the valley. It's all information. Yes, I record sound, and I record nature, but that's just what I need to do in order to become a better listener. Nature is as busy communicating as we are.

I find places that are completely free of noise pollution in places that we can listen to nature at her most natural. There is an epidemic of extinction of quiet places on the planet. There is not one natural place on planet Earth set aside off-limits to noise pollution. Here, the auditory horizon can be as great as 20 miles. Now, if you do the math and you calculate the area of a circle with a 20-mile radius, that's over a thousand square miles.

I come here to be reminded what an opportunity it is to be alive today. Nature is music, and I'm not asking you to get all theoretical here; I'm saying just listen. I've recorded well over 700 different logs, which I now call nature's largest violin. I question whether anything in nature is really as random as I once assumed it to be. That somehow, at some high level and sometimes small level, it's all math and harmony and wave and sound. Sound has told me to be like the wave: accommodate all things.

We think of ourselves living in this information age. Well, the auditory horizon in the city, if we're lucky, is only two blocks. And you're lucky if you can even hear the footsteps of the people around you. The information is often the same—the repetitive of just a few species. I find that when I'm in the city, I become very self-aware. Every place I look—in the advertisements, and the people, and the fashion, and the conversations—all about people, all about us. I find myself thinking about me.

So in the city, even when we're outside, we live in small worlds. We cannot think truly originally and be ourselves without quiet, and that is the gift of quiet: that it allows the faint meanings of sound to gain its original importance. This is the time to be alive. This is when we will make the big decision: will we or will we not fall back in love with planet Earth?