Sounds of Nature’s Scarce Quiet Are Music to His Ears : Environment: Gordon Hempton spends his life taping an invisible world far from civilization and bringing it back alive for home stereo listeners.

Listen.

No, no, says Gordon Hempton, be still and really listen closely.

Don’t hear much? A weak croak from a distant frog? A far-off shoosh of a river? An occasional bird chirp? Later, maybe squirrel chatter and a ker-plunk from a falling spruce cone hitting moist soil? In between, not much but unbroken stillness?

Exactly.

That is quite literally music to Hempton’s acutely refined ears.

At the end of the 20th Century, quiet is one of nature’s scarcest and most easily forgotten expressions.

Hempton and a small band of fellow nature recorders are out to preserve what is left of it.

An audiophile, a “listener,” a recording artist, Hempton’s aim is to tape the sounds of quiet and produce programs for home stereo listeners. He hopes to build a constituency that values these hushed, subtle symphonies of nature, such as today’s breaking of dawn here deep in the Hoh Rain Forest of Washington’s Olympic National Park. And the sounds of dawn next in California’s Carmel Valley, then those in a bird refuge in Hawaii, and the Australian Outback and the Sri Lanka jungle. And so on.

For purposes of understanding a nature recordist’s point of view, don’t think of sounds simply as a matter of volume, either loud or soft. Rather, consider those sounds produced by nature as quiet, and sounds resulting from modern civilization as noise.

After 10 years of study, Hempton has some startling observations about the receding frontiers of quiet:

--There is no place on planet Earth where there is quiet all day long. The best you can hope for are intervals of quiet only minutes in duration, and only in remote areas away from air corridors.

--In the southeast United States there is no place that is noise-free for longer than intervals of 10 to 20 seconds. Anyone who thinks they have experienced more, he says, has either enjoyed an exceptional occurrence or has a hearing problem.

--Likewise for the grasslands of the Midwest.

--Although he has not traveled extensively there himself, he is told there are no noise-free areas in all of Europe. He takes that as a challenge and would like to mount an expedition to find “that one last remaining noise-free area on the continent.”

--The quietest place in the United States is also sometimes one of the noisiest. That would be at Fish Springs, Utah, where you can get 65 miles from the nearest thoroughfare. There in the salt-desert are springs. And the springs are so quiet that you can hear tiny fish spit water to try to bring down passing insects. Then again, you can be all but knocked flat by the afterburners of low-flying military jets on maneuvers.

The two sides of the coin, noise and quiet, have long-held fascination.

The Romans decried noisy chariots on cobblestone streets. And urban dwellers have kept up the complaints ever since. Everybody from Groucho Marx to the Environmental Protection Agency has had something to say on the subject.

Chief Sealth, the Indian leader after whom Seattle was named, complained eloquently about how noisy he found white settlers. He wrote to the President in 1855: “There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the leaves of spring or the rustle of insect wings. But perhaps I am a savage and do not understand--the clatter only seems to insult the ears.”

In 1968, the surgeon general declared that “noise must be considered a hazard to the health of the people everywhere.”

Exploring effects of noise on humans, Health magazine this year reported there is even profit potential in returning to quiet. The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Milwaukee began silencing its telephones one day a week in the underwriting section. The result: Underwriters were 20% more productive.

People who have searched for quiet seem to agree that self-discovery is a common byproduct. Meditation, of course, is founded on the principle of quiet. Even commuting in a car--as noisy as that is--offers urban dwellers some time away from the pressures of conversation, a form of adapted city “quiet.” And this may explain why car-pools are not more popular.

For the remainder of the year, Hempton, 37, is out to circle the globe, on a journey to capture the quiet sounds of the dawn chorus from around the world.

As epic, long-distance expeditions go, Hempton’s is a rather, well, quiet affair. Just him, a supersensitive stereo microphone apparatus built into a soft rubber manikin’s head, which he calls “Fritz,” and Seattle PBS television producer Rob Reed, who is along to make a documentary of the three-month odyssey.

But in a manner as subtle as the sounds he records, Hempton thinks he can alter people’s sensory values about the outdoors and offer them the chance to appreciate something uncommonly satisfying in this rock ‘n’ roll, boom-box, full-throttle, booster-rocket era.

After all, there is nothing quite like the reawakening of some long-ago mothballed and forgotten sensory experience.

“This is an invisible world; mine is the quiet art of listening,” says Hempton, who lives, to his dismay, just north of Seattle within earshot of a thundering roadway. The life of a sound recordist, you see, is not necessarily lucrative, and only now with a series of recordings on the market is Hempton beginning to break into notoriety.

So how can someone like Hempton listen to the quiet, no matter how carefully recorded, when home is a noisy city?

Earphones are the easiest answer.

The sounds of nature are recorded digitally these days--the consumer market demands it. The results are noticeably crisper notes, whether rain drops or crickets or a mournful wolf howl, and that can help the urban listener discern and appreciate even hushed sounds.

“I call it middle music,” Hempton explains. “It’s not background music; it’s not foreground music. . . . You should drift in and out, listening to sounds and then thinking about whatever is on your mind. Often people listen because they want to relax. And that’s why I say that one of the highest compliments someone can pay to my work is to fall asleep.”

To enter the ancient rain forest with Hempton in pursuit of true quiet is a mix of torture and discovery.

One must awaken at 3 a.m., chilled and damp, and march through a marsh into a hidden grove of old hemlocks to be in position to capture the dawn chorus. That is the easy part.

Harder is sitting utterly motionless for 40 minutes, while “Fritz” the microphone patiently records the smallest flutters of noise. Biting insects merrily bear down on all exposed flesh, testing one’s innermost resolve to remain still.

For many minutes, there is no sound save that coming from your imagination. As the poet Keats put it, “A little noiseless noise among the leaves.”

But then a squirrel sounds the dawn alarm at 6:28 a.m.: B-dh-dh-dh-dh-dh.

Silence.

“Oops, he jumped the gun,” Hempton later says with a laugh. “Nobody else was ready for dawn.”

Two minutes later, other creatures join in recognizing the dawn of a new day. A winter wren sounds off. Then other squirrels. They are harvesting spruce cones for winter. And the cones begin dropping a hundred feet or more. Off in the distance, a whistle-like sound of a bull elk beginning the mating rut. A frog gives off a half-hearted croak.

All in all, the volume is only 28 to 30 decibels. That is much softer than the 55 to 60 decibel range of conversation. But sitting motionless on the spongy moss of the forest floor, the sounds of quiet seem profound. All those cones falling, and you can’t turn your neck. Could it be a herd of elk about to thunder into your small glade?

If your hearing is normal and you allow your ears the several hours’ time needed to “recover” from sounds of cars and engines, Hempton says it is not uncommon in the wilderness to hear water running underground, or to catch the crunch of insects eating plants, or sometimes even to hear plants grow.

That’s the purpose of traveling the world to make his recordings. “It’s a way to convey to the listener that these are sounds worth preserving. I want everyone to know these are sounds within their reach.”

Times researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.