Tuning In to Nature’s Symphony

At 4:48 a.m., Paul Matzner sped north on California 89 toward the still-dark Sierra Valley. Racing to beat the sun, early traffic and, most of all, those annoyingly noisy bird watchers.

Matzner had driven five hours from his home in Oakland and risen before dawn in search of elusive prey: a few moments of stillness. He was looking for a pocket of time and space unmarred by the sounds of planes, trains, automobiles or his fellow Homo sapiens and filled instead with the surprisingly robust tweets, whirs, buzzes and clicks of frogs, birds and insects.

Matzner is a founder of the Nature Sounds Society, a loosely organized California-based group whose goal--some might say obsession--is hearing and recording nature in all its burbling, chirping and thundering glory. The group’s growing numbers, now at 150, show the odd pursuit is becoming increasingly popular as an antidote to the daily babel of helicopters, cell phones and boom boxes.

“The world’s getting increasingly noisy,” said Matzner, 54, the group’s quirky and ponytailed leader. “I truly believe nature sounds are important for holistic health.”

Some members will go to great lengths to capture specific sounds, hunching for hours on Antarctic ice to catch a penguin call, diving to record the gurgling of seals and ignoring the puzzled looks of suburbanites as they record the arias of white-crowned sparrows. For them, sound is not background, not ambient, but front and center.

But capturing pristine sound is not easy. On a recent “nature sounds weekend,” Matzner led a dozen sleepy initiates from cold tents in the Yuba Pass at the impossible hour of 3:30 a.m. They scarfed down coffee, popped on headphones, strapped recorders to their chests and followed Matzner to a wildlife-laden pocket of the Sierra Valley. There, they tiptoed through meadows and along the edges of frog ponds, holding an array of shotgun and parabolic microphones out toward the world.

There is no whispering in the presence of this intense group, or taking errant steps. Their sensitive microphones pick up even the slightest noise. They wear soft cotton or fleece; rip-stop nylon is too noisy. Conscientious recorders tape down zippers so they won’t clink.

At first glance, the high Sierran meadow they chose looked empty and seemed relatively quiet. After they slipped on the headphones, though, and flicked on an amplifying microphone, it became a different--and very noisy--world.

There were layers and layers of sound: the outlandish, rapid-fire twittering of the tiny marsh wren, the gurgling trills of feisty red-winged blackbirds, the one-note squawks of the common snipe. Underneath it all, the hollow rattle of sandhill cranes, the grunks and twocks of bullfrogs, the rhythmic throbbing of cicadas.

Ann Kroeber, a Berkeley-based film sound producer, stood at the edge of a dirt road and leaned back, microphone out, her blond hair glowing in the rising sun. Headphones on, eyes closed, she looked as if she were inhaling pure sound.

“You’re all ears. You’re nothing else. You are the sound,” she said later. “It’s Zen like.”

To walk with the Nature Sounds Society, to really listen to the world, is a revelation. Most people, Matzner says, don’t know how to listen anymore. Noise has become a dirty word, something to tune out: Sirens. Ringing cell phones. Car alarms. The roar of traffic. The thudding bass of a stereo through a neighbor’s apartment wall.

‘We Live in a Much, Much Noisier World’

The spate of Walkman headphones is a visible symptom, Matzner thinks, of the pervasiveness of city noise. “The Walkman movement is all about the stress of city living. You don’t go to farms and find people with Walkmen in their ears,” he said.

“The urban soundscape is too much with us,” agreed Alan La Pointe, 56, a Bay Area video designer who joined the weekend trek to work on sound recording skills and was avidly trying to capture a bullfrog’s croak. “It’s only when you come to a place like this that you finally get the buzz of the city out of your ears.”

Experts on hearing agree.

“There’s no question about it. We live in a much, much noisier world than we were ever intended to,” said Dr. Alan H. Lockwood, a professor at the University of Buffalo and neurologist at the VA Western NY Healthcare System.

“Speaking from an evolutionary point of view, it’s only been the past few hundred years we’ve had helicopters, car alarms and airplanes,” he said. “Before that it was the occasional saber-toothed tiger and that was about it.”

Such noise takes a toll on our hearing. Roughly 90% of adults older than 65 suffer from some noise-induced hearing loss, Lockwood said. Matzner thinks city noise also takes a spiritual and emotional toll. Although those connections are less well studied, Lockwood’s work on brain imaging shows close connections between hearing and the limbic system, which helps control emotion.

But we are so used to unnatural noise, suggests Matzner, that we no longer question it. To illustrate his point, he jumped up during an interview in his (relatively) quiet office in the Oakland Museum of California.

He switched off a clattering fan, a buzzing fluorescent light and a humming computer.

Suddenly, it was much, much more quiet. It was easier to hear, to absorb, to not be distracted by the din. “There’s a complete change in perspective,” said Matzner. “And you probably would have said we were having this interview in a quiet room.”

Matzner, a Long Island native, followed a circuitous route to his current calling. A former naturalist, science teacher and ice cream man, he helped co-found the Nature Sounds Society in 1983, just two years after becoming curator of the museum’s sound library, a collection of sounds that enriches the museum’s exhibits on California natural history.

Though he no longer runs the group, he now helps teach new members and spreads the gospel of quiet.

He urges anyone and everyone to go to nature and simply listen. There’s no need for the high-tech equipment many nature sounds aficionados use. You also don’t necessarily have to go far--even in Los Angeles, where the dawn chorus often comprises, not bird song, but traffic helicopters.

Pursuit Is Lonely for Many Seekers

“There’s a lot of good, natural sounds in L.A. People just have to know where to go,” said Mona-Lia Ventress, a Hollywood-based sound designer who traveled six hours north for the sound weekend but usually favors recording with her bright green, 2-foot-wide parabolic microphone at Leo Carrillo State Beach and Malibu Canyon.

The pursuit of nature sounds is generally a lonely one. Many members of the group toiled alone for years. Nancy Reiser, 50, a medical researcher in Oakland, discovered the group through a random flier and joined. “I just found all these weird kindred souls,” she said.

Some connections have been deep. Jason Reinier, a San Franciscan who composes and designs nature-filled soundtracks, spent a first date with his future wife on the beach--to record ocean waves.

For many in the group, motivations are artistic or commercial. Many of the recordists at the weekend session were looking for sounds to feed video games, interactive Web sites, films, museum exhibits and the burgeoning interest in New Age relaxation CDs. Even children’s toys are part of the trend.

Rudy Trubitt, 39, an audio producer in Oakland, spends much of his time traveling the country to record blaring train sounds for Tyco trains. He came to the recording weekend seeking a change. “I’m really looking forward to getting some nice, quiet, gentle sounds.” He succeeded. One trophy: the delicate fluttering of a hovering hummingbird.

Such soothing nature sounds, theorizes Matzner, are a chief lure of the outdoors--though people may not realize it. “One of the main memories of being in the wilderness is waking up in the morning and hearing all the birds sing. . . .” he said. “Your whole body relaxes.”

But many quiet places are being overwhelmed by artificial noise, he fears. The Sierra Valley meadow has gotten almost too loud to be of use.

“Two years ago it was great and pristine. I recorded 2 1/2-minute stretches with nary a car,” Kroeber said as a plane roared overhead. “Now it’s Grand Central Station.”

Intrusive noise has become an important issue at national parks; some are beginning to manage sound just as they manage other resources. Biscayne Bay National Park near Miami is leading the charge with a “soundscape management plan” to assess and limit noise from aircraft and other sources.

Scientists are now assessing the effects of sound on wildlife, from investigating whether sonar tests have caused whales to beach themselves to studying how seals will fare amid retrofitting of bridges in San Francisco Bay.

“The world’s getting noisier, especially in the ocean,” said Amy Bohorquez, a biologist working on a Caltrans/San Francisco State University project to study the seals. “The more we’re learning, the more we’re seeing how damaging the noise is.”

Underneath their headphones, on the acoustical front lines, longtime members of the Nature Sounds Society were among the first to become aware of the noise now bouncing across once-quiet landscapes. Said Reiser, who now helps lead the group: “We’re like canaries in the coal mine.”

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Nature and bird sounds can be sampled on the Internet at https://www.museumca.org/naturalsounds/index.html, or https://birds.cornell.edu/sow/