Ordinary Soundscapes - Part 2
As I mentioned in my first Ordinary Soundscapes post, a good portion of my current work is looking at the every-day sounds of the ocean. Like the view out a window is called a landscape, the underwater (or anywhere) ambient noises melded together as a soundscape unique to each location. Sometimes I listen out of curiosity, especially when the whales call.
Soundscapes are an intimate part of our world, irregardless of location. Like ambient sounds in a home (ordinary soundscapes), an office or even a forest full of birds and frogs. And recording and sharing sounds is now easy--to illustrate how loud the bus was on my husbands recent trip home, he recorded a snippet and texted it to me.
But what about the sounds we can’t identify, like the unsettling bump somewhere in the house at night? (Probably, thermal changes with the building structure--or at least that’s what I always tell myself). Or what about sounds that are there, but no one noticed?For example, two new-to-the-area species of bats were identified in my local area based on its sound alone (Mexican Free-tailed Bat (Tardarida braziliensis) and Canyon Bat (Parastrellus hesperus) ). In the summer with the windows open, I occasionally hear bats in the night soundscape outside. I’m not sophisticated enough to identify a bat species based on it’s echolocation clicks, but I wonder if one of those nights I was listening to the new ones.