Kristy E. Primeau, University at Albany, State University of New York and David E. Witt, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn't how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
A red fox listening for prey under the snow in Yellowstone National Park. Noise can affect foxes and other animals that rely on their hearing when they hunt.
Neal Herbert/NPS
A recent study finds that noise from human activities is intruding into many parks and other protected areas. Creating quiet zones and noise corridors can help reduce impacts from noise pollution.
Unlike vision or touch, sound is much more difficult to control or avoid; music in particular spills across thresholds and intrudes into situations where it is unwelcome.
The oceans are filled with sounds produced by animals. However, a recent study shows that ocean sounds are diminishing due to nutrient pollution and ocean acidification.
It’s possible to create sound in a part of a room that only you can hear, but others elsewhere cannot.
Shutterstock/Syda Productions
Your own choice of music in a restaurant, your preferred language in a cinema, and a personal tour in a museum. All are possible if you can control the sound in almost any place.
A guard of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan outside Fatih mosque.
REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Unexpected calls to prayer from mosques in Turkey caught many off guard on the night of the attempted coup. An ethnomusicologist explains the political and social power of sound.
We will soon get to hear the winds on Mars.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
After travelling through the bush, returning to the cacophonies of the sonic city can be exhilarating. The body is immediately swamped with an energy that speaks of action, progress, and possibility.
What does Cézanne’s Bathers sound like?
Wikimedia Commons
The intensity and the consistent presence of sonic textures such as machine noise, distorted high-frequency sounds, midrange drones, sub-sonic hums and the like have significantly shaped the contexts of our hearing.
Magnets have mysterious powers – now shown to influence heat and sound.
Magnet image via www.shutterstock.com.
Sound waves are made of particles called phonons. New research shows they're affected by magnetic fields, with researchers able to steer heat magnetically.
The Sound Tube in Melbourne, Australia is designed to reduce road noise.
Wikimedia
We live in an increasingly noisy world. Since even low-level noise can affect quality of life, new tools to deal with noise are welcome. “Auralisation”, the audio equivalent of visualisation, is now helping…
A sleeping seal recorded, Antarctica summer, 2010.
Lawrence English
In 1889, an eight-year old boy made a recording of a Common Sharma using his father’s wax cylinder recorder. This boy, Ludwig Koch, would go on to become one of the great natural history broadcasters of…
Musicians often have curious minds, and the pianist and composer Horace Silver was no exception. An often overlooked musician in the public eye, Silver wrote some of the most performed jazz standards of…
It has been almost a truism of television, in the discussions of professionals and the analyses of academics, that television broadcasting is a sound medium with added pictures, while cinema is a visual…
