Quietness opens up the world that we don’t hear in our everyday lives. That’s what makes it so precious. Maria Hawranek talks to Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who has circled the globe three times in search of nature’s rarest sounds.

Maria Hawranek: Has any sound especially surprised you?

Gordon Hempton: Melting snow. It’s a beautiful sound. I found it only because John Muir wrote about it. I doubted that he was being accurate in his description – I suspected that he was using his poetic license to, as Mark Twain would say, improve on the truth. But then I went up and recorded melting snow, and of course, it was just fantastic. Since then, whenever I can, I record melting snow just one drip at a time.

And the spruce logs on beaches?

A different kind of music, but definitely not random and really incredibly beautiful. It’s nature’s largest violin. John Muir, whom I mentioned, was a naturalist in the 1800s. I spent two years studying his life and quickly learned that he was quite possibly the greatest nature listener at a time when the Earth was most musical. He became a teacher for me. He was asked to join the fight to create Yosemite National Park. Muir was a man of the mountains, not a man of politics, so he hiked up into the mountains to spend a night at Soda Springs. In the morning, he woke up and decided he would join the effort. I decided to go to the same place, because I wanted to hear what he had heard that convinced him to come out of the mountains and join the political fight. I went there on a full moon winter’s night. It was absolutely beautiful and the circumstances turned out to be very favourable, because there was a renegade bear that had frightened all the campers, so they all left. Even the ranger was headed off in the other direction.

Weren’t you scared?

I thought: Oh, this is great, I’m going to have the whole place to myself, the bear won’t bother me. And it