Adam, this is the middle of the night.

What time is it?

Oh, five minutes of two.

As you know, I live in a yurt and the yurt is a membrane, a lot like the human ear.

And so I can not only listen to the world that is outside my home, but the yurt being circular also amplifies many of the sounds.

And that is why I have to get up in the middle of the night.

If I'm going to do this voiceover...

That's a logging truck.

The road is a half mile away.

And yet you can begin to hear it from several miles away.

This is the quietest time of day. The air is absolutely still, and that's why sound propagates so well and travels so far. It gets louder and fainter and louder and fainter as it makes these turns.

Even here, somebody's workday starts 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning.

And the noise from that logging truck is even louder than the rush of the creek. The logging truck is miles away and the creek maybe 50 feet

okay logging truck please, so I can disappear.

Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of

the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County. Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry,

and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Equipped with his binaural microphone system, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has spent the last

40 years traveling the world, documenting the sounds of the earth and its many inhabitants.

Recording the noise pollution that permeates nearly all places on the planet, Gordon also listens for silence, for the sounds that emerge in the absence of human-generated noise.

...