Microphones on the seafloor recorded life under the Antarctic ice for two years – inadvertently catching seal trills and chirps that are above the range of human hearing. Could they be for navigation?
Belugas swimming near Utqiagvik, Alaska, in July 2017.
(Lisa Barry/NOAA Fisheries)
Belugas use sound to communicate, navigate the dark marine environment and find food. But climate change is opening up Arctic waters to more sound, and could affect the health and survival of belugas.
It’s going to get loud.
Alexey Laputin/Shutterstock.com
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
The village bell was once a powerful symbol of sonic identity. Living in the noise of today’s global cities, what sounds exist that express our communal identity?
Eric Fidler/flickr
Sound, as a still relatively unexplored medium of urban design, provides an obvious starting point in the search for new relationships and identities in the contemporary city.
Noise transformation and community-led design projects are reclaiming unwanted spaces that lay adjacent to motorways.
rogiro/flickr
Communities have an increasing desire to be informed and included in local art, design and infrastructure projects. This has inspired new ways of dealing with noise-afflicted areas.
When they hear the music, some people want to dance. Other shoppers want to flee.
Justin/flickr
Unlike vision or touch, sound is much more difficult to control or avoid; music in particular spills across thresholds and intrudes into situations where it is unwelcome.
Unexpected calls to prayer from mosques in Turkey caught many off guard on the night of the attempted coup. An ethnomusicologist explains the political and social power of sound.
After travelling through the bush, returning to the cacophonies of the sonic city can be exhilarating.
drp
After travelling through the bush, returning to the cacophonies of the sonic city can be exhilarating. The body is immediately swamped with an energy that speaks of action, progress, and possibility.