Sound Escapes

In the season finale of Sound Escapes, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton takes us on a whirlwind tour of nearly every habitat on the planet. From tropical forests to deserts to wetlands, you'll hear …

“By modern standards, Mark Twain was really a switched-on listener,” says our Sound Escapes host, Gordon Hempton. “He brilliantly used sound in the crafting of his novels. Birds would sing at the rig…

After a long winter in northern Minnesota, everything seems to awaken at once. From the songs of migratory birds to the croaks of frogs and toads, we can witness a wonderful rejuvenation.

In this epis…

This week’s episode of Sound Escapes takes us to Pipestone Canyon in Eastern Washington, where you can hear a ridgetop wind come from a mile away. Here, you can not only listen to coyotes in the dist…

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…

“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 S…

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 R…

"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."

De…

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 toget…

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 ha…

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 ear…

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.

Hu…

Today we head to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, just a few miles north of the Canada/US border. We'll hear a prairie dawn chorus — complete with coyotes. Today he’s taking us to Saskatchew…

Take a carbon-free journey to Hawaii in the second episode of Sound Escapes. The Song of the Big Island takes us from the waves on the beach to deep within the Hawaiian rainforest.

View this episode'…

Gordon Hempton has spent his life recording the sounds of the natural world, from the rainforest of Hawai’i to the vast dry prairies of North America.

Then, one morning, he woke up to silence.

Ever sin…