Hempton has spent nearly four decades capturing what he calls the planet’s “jukebox” of natural sounds. My craving led me to Gordon Hempton, a self-described acoustic ecologist.
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It was all such a marked contrast from the usual noises that engulfed my life at home: traffic, trucks, lawn mowers, airplanes, construction sounds, portable music beats, my phone buzzing. I wanted to capture the choir of croaking frogs, the rare applause of rain on rock, the hum of tarantula hawks, the echo of lambs bleating, the wind carrying a change in weather. On one assignment, involving a 750-mile trek through the entire length of the Grand Canyon, I’d set out to create a visual inventory of the wilderness, but after some 500 thirsty, thorny miles, I starting craving not more lenses but a better microphone.
This article is a selection from the October issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Power that give Icelanders a deep reverence for nature. The Markarfljot River is fed by the Myrdalsjokull and Eyjafjallajokull glaciers, and flows 60 miles to the Atlantic. The rushing, gurgling sounds of glacial rivers provide an especially valued tonic. It was that blanket of calm-layered with the notes of wind, wings and scampering claws-that remained with me long after my pixels were processed.Īlthough Iceland draws more than two million visitors a year, the population is a mere 357,000, and some 80 percent of the country is uninhabited.
Having spent my career working as a photographer in remote, hard-to-reach areas, it took me nearly two decades to fully realize that the least appreciated and often the hardest gems to document are not the vistas I chase with still cameras, but the auditory elements that surround them. All I could do was listen to these sightless fliers feeding above me in the stillness. In the moonless, inky hours before the sunlight creeps back in from the east, there is very little to see. I lay among the rocks and realized, not for the first time, that my camera was wildly insufficient. The murmur of bat wings fluttered above me, somewhere within earshot.