In this week’s episode of Sound Escapes, experience dawn in the Kalahari Desert as the sun rises over the sandy savannah of southern Africa. It’s nearly level at this part of the Kalahari Desert. The trees are widely spaced. There’s almost no available water. You cannot see very far — the…

“Water makes every sound imaginable and occupies every frequency audible to the human ear and certainly spans the dynamic range from the faintest sound to near distortion,” says Gordon Hempton, the Sound Tracker. The writings of John Muir can guide our ears, as we listen to the water music…

The world's first wilderness quiet park was certified at Ecuador's Zabalo River in 2019. In this episode of Sound Escapes, you'll hear sounds recorded by Gordon Hempton, the Sound Tracker, at Zabalo River Wilderness Quiet Park — deep inside the Amazon. Gordon calls this place a living Eden…

"Olympic National Park has taught me that it's possible to not only love a place, but love a place deeply at first listen," says Gordon Hempton. "And spring is when Olympic is at its most musical." Delight in the sounds of Pacific Chorus Frogs, the Varied Thrush, grouse, and many more…

In Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, "The Birds," Bodega Bay, California, is inexplicably besieged by crazed birds. After the birds attack and kill several residents, the townspeople flee in terror. We never find out why the birds became deranged, but research may give Hitchcock's film…

Today we’re visiting the Zabalo River in Ecuador. It’s a completely undisturbed ecosystem, where all the creatures we hear are all native to the land, and have coexisted and continued to evolve together for thousands of years. No animal is stepping on the communications of another animal…

Birds are an inspiration for many musicians. Before writing “The Penguin,” Raymond Scott probably saw these birds at the Central Park Zoo. Though penguins are clumsy on land, Gentoos like the ones pictured here are the fastest of any diving bird, reaching 22 miles an hour. Speaking of…

A great place to listen to insects — and birds — is a remote mountain lake in the spring. The surrounding mountians and properties of the cold water make these lakes some of nature's great concert halls. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist and sonic guide for the this series, recorded…

The young Samuel Langhorne Clemens - later known as Mark Twain - signed on to train as a pilot on a Mississippi riverboat when he was just 22. He quickly discovered that if he volunteered for the early morning shift, he could experience one of the most incredible musical shows there is.

Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area is a massive inland peninsula, bordered by sections of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers that were permanently flooded as a part of FDR’s New Deal. Humans changed this landscape, but now birds have claimed it - and they are flourishing.