To Those Fans of Natural Sounds, the Hills Are Very Much Alive : Archives: Wind, waves and insects are among the quarry of those who record outdoor noises. They know nature has a lot to say for itself, but that it’s an aurally polluted world out there.

While you drive by crooning along with your car radio or fly over munching stale peanuts, Nature Sounds Society members are recording what you’re missing in the great outdoors.

Remember rain on leaves?

How about waves washing over rocks at the beach?

Or--stop me if you’ve heard this one--hordes of tiny flies revving their wings in the heat of the rising sun?

“It’s the grand concert called life,” said Nature Sounds Society member Gordon Hempton, who circled the world recording that last sound--the daily dawn chorus of birds and bugs.

“At dawn, when the sun creates this great dome of life . . . you can hear that great crescendo of insect wings . . . warming their engines,” Hempton said. “How can you describe what it is like to hear just countless minstrels like that over miles?

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“That’s what this is all about,” the Port Angeles, Wash., artist said. “Preserving those opportunities for people to hear something.”

Founded in 1983 by curator Paul Matzner of the California Library of Natural Sounds at the Oakland Museum, the one-of-a-kind Nature Sounds Society brings together people interested in hearing what nature has to say for itself.

Nature recorders stick microphones down anthills and aim parabolic reflectors at mating elephant seals.

The variety of sounds they have catalogued is endless; the Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell, the world’s largest, has more than 100,000.

Nature Sounds Society members’ work can wind up providing sound effects in sci-fi movies, or rounding out an inventory of the calls of all the birds in Shakespeare.

Many of the sound collectors primarily are artists, like Hempton, who won an Emmy in 1993 for his dawn chorus recordings.

Others are scientists, gathering data that can mean life or death for a species.

Under the gun of development, for example, it’s quicker to assess a habitat’s population by logging animals’ calls than by counting noses, said Greg Budney, curator of Cornell’s sound library.

Increasingly, the nature recorders are historians, their work amounting to taped reproaches from the past.

One such tape sits on Budney’s shelves--the only known recording of the dusky seaside sparrow. The last dusky died in a cage at Disney World in 1987.

“It’ll never be heard again. That’s so tragic,” Budney said.

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“In the Nature Sounds Society, there’s a group of people who think about those things,” said Budney, a non-member. “They may not all know birds the way professionals do, but they’re thinking about these things the right way.”

Whatever the individual recorder’s interest, the society provides a forum for trading tips on recording--typically done early in the morning, far from people and their noise--and on gear.

When Fred Trumbull, a society member in Sea Ranch, Calif., started recording in 1949, sound-collecting meant portaging a 33-pound wire recorder into the wilderness.

Recorders can be measured in ounces now--not counting the parabolic receptors that make nature recorders look like they should be standing in front of mobile homes picking up 55 television channels.

However, technology is not the key change since Trumbull, who is now 85, first punched the record button.

“We used to be able to go a half-hour, three-quarters of an hour, without hearing the sounds made by man or his animals,” said Trumbull, who with his wife, Ginny, is collecting recordings for a wilderness guide for the sight-impaired.

“Now, we’re lucky if we can get three or four minutes,” he added.

Quiet has become the hardest sound of all to record, the collectors agree.

“The first time you put a pair of headphones on someone’s ears and connect them to a microphone with a little amplification, they realize how noisy the world is,” Budney said.

“And if it’s someone who’s been doing it for a while, they realize how noisy the world has become.

“It’s just impossible to escape it,” he said.

Jets are nature recorders’ most invasive enemies, with a range that ensures no place on Earth is free from man-made noise. So Hempton and other members of the society are now campaigning for a ban on flyovers of national parks.

That’s as a start, and as an alternative to more radical methods contemplated when a jet engine’s rumble ruins a recording.

As Budney wryly confided: “Surface-to-air missiles from time to time come up on our wish list.”