Practicing Terraphilia

Soundscapes: Listening to the Landscape

Sandhill cranes wing overhead at dusk, calling.

Hello, Friends,

My gift, I said recently in a talk, is “listening to landscapes.”

What does it mean to listen to a landscape, to know a place through its natural sounds over the cycle of the year? Do you recognize the characteristic sounds of nature in your nearby spaces?

Knowing the natural “soundscape” of your place is one way to reconnect to nature, and to honor our terraphilia, humans' in-born affection for and connection to this planet and the living community that animates Earth.

What is a Soundscape?

Soundscape in the ecological sense, says the Oxford Languages online dictionary means “the sounds heard in a particular location, considered as a whole.”

Soundscape in ecology: “the sounds heard in a particular location, considered as a whole.”

I grew up in a family immersed in science and nature study. In my small family unit—two parents, two kids—I was the lone plant-geek. Everyone else—my dad, mom and brother—gravitated to birds. I learned to listen from my mom.

While my dad and brother watched birds, moving their binoculars to focus on motion and color, my mom—born severely near-sighted and with no color vision at all—birded by ear. She “looked” for birds by turning her head to listen for their songs and calls. As a trained musician, she could identify hundreds of birds solely by the pattern and cadence of their melodic (or in some cases, not-so melodic!) communication.

An old photo of Tweits (and two Cabes) birdwatching: Mom, second from the right, listening, my brother, Bill, middle, with binoculars up, my dad on the right about to raise his too.

Mom’s example taught me to practice “seeing” (in the sense of “understanding”) birds and the rest of the natural world with my ears and my other senses, not just my eyes.

Hearing is Not Our Dominant Sense

Humans are predominantly visual. Fully half of our cortex, the surface of our brain, is devoted to processing visual information, and as much as 60 percent of the whole of our brain is involved in visual processing. The portions of our brain devoted to processing auditory data, tactile information and smell and taste are much, much smaller.

Our vocabulary reflects this bias toward vision: we have many more words for sight and color, and we use vision as an analogy far more than we do our other senses. The pursuit of birding, for instance, is called “birdwatching,” not “bird-listening.” We say things are “clear” when we understand them, or “opaque” when we don’t. We “see” what someone means; we don’t taste what they mean.

Soundscapes and Terraphilia

While Mom’s example taught me to use my ears as well as my eyes in understanding nature, I didn’t think systematically about the ecosystem of sound until about 15 years ago, when my late husband, Richard Cabe, and I were invited to apply for 33 Ideas, an art exhibit at Denver International Airport organized in collaboration with Colorado Art Ranch. The show encompassed the 33 display cases along Concourse A of the airport; each case demonstrated an idea central to the artists’ work.

Richard Cabe and me by our terraphlia case in the 33 Ideas show. His brain cancer was already advanced then, but his left brain was still nimble.

Our idea was terraphilia, and to go with our case displaying some of Richard’s stone and steel, earth-based abstract sculptures and my books, we proposed a looping recording of a prairie soundscape replacing the “Musak” on the public sound system to illustrate the natural sounds that would have been audible on the site before the airport was built.

Thanks to the Natural Park Service’s natural soundscape recording program, travelers through the concourse for the half-year that the 33 Ideas Show was on display heard a meadowlark’s fluting song, a lark sparrow bubbling, wind rushing through prairie grasses, crickets chirping and toads bleating. How many of them noticed the prairie in the airport I don’t know, but I did hear some surprised and delighted comments.

Listening for the Change of Seasons

One way to practice terraphilia through listening is to notice how the soundscape of nature nearby changes over the seasons. Bird sounds may be predominant, but behind and around them are other seasonal sounds. Listening for the various players in nature’s “orchestra” can be fascinating.

The shooshing of fresh new spring leaves, for instance, sounds very different than the rattle of falling autumn leaves. Frogs and toads chirp and bellow in spring and early summer, and then go quiet in fall and winter. Summer is hummingbirds zipping past on trilling wings, crickets stridulating, and grasshoppers startling us as they fly off with snapping wing cases, as Mary Oliver writes in “The Summer’s Day:”

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

When I walked out my front gate this morning before sunrise, headed for the greenbelt and my daily walking meditation, I heard a distant sound that my brain interpreted as a sandhill crane’s throbbing “Khrrrr! Khrrrr!” call. Even though I know intellectually that late August is far to early to hear cranes migrating south in these parts, instinct had me scanning the sky, looking for long-winged forms, long necks outstretched, long legs trailing.

(Sandhill cranes calling as they fly overhead in the central Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico.)

Of course I saw none, but just thinking I heard that beloved sound, the call that always stirs my heart and gladdens my spirit, I felt a whisper of anticipatory joy: I will hear cranes in a few months, and their arrival will be accompanied by cool days and the rustle of cottonwood leaves turned old gold, the rich purple of the last elegant aster flowers, and evenings quieter without crickets’ scratchy stridulations.

Listening to the Landscape

How can we remember to “listen” as we exercise and strengthen our terraphilia in nature nearby?

One way is to make a game of it: Set the timer on your phone or digital watch for two minutes, and listen. How many natural sounds can you identify? How many sounds do you hear that you can’t identify?

Note them all, and then try again, for three minutes this time: How many different natural sounds do you notice now that you didn’t hear before? Write them down or record a voice memo listing them.

In a few days or a week, do the exercise again, and see if you notice more sounds than the first two times. Also note if any you heard the first time are missing the second time.

Sandhill cranes and golden cottonwood leaves—autumn heaven for me!

Make time for a brief listening and noting session every week, and look for patterns: What sounds do you always notice? What new sounds do you hear? What sounds do you not hear? Can you explain the changes?

By the way, if you want to learn bird songs, Merlin, the free bird ID app from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology allows you to record a bird song or call, and the app will identify it. (It’s kind of like Spotify for bird songs.)

Strengthening our connection to nature fills our hearts, minds and spirits with delight. It also brings the satisfaction of belonging to a community larger than humanity and as old as life on this planet.

Have fun listening to your nearby landscapes and practicing your terraphilia!

Blessings, Susan