This video, One Square Inch of Silence, takes a ‘listening journey’ with professional sound recordist Gordon Hempton to a Hoh Rain Forest location in Olympic National Park.
Hempton is an acoustic ecologist, interested in preserving not just the way the earth naturally looks, but how it naturally sounds. While audio ecology and synthesis may seem unrelated, both are concerned with consciously exploring and preserving sound.
Hempton has been documenting the number of ‘quiet places’ – locations free from human-made noise for consistent 15-minute intervals – within the U.S. In 1984, there were 21 locations in Washington that met his criteria. In 2007, there were just 12 locations in the contiguous U.S., and only three in Washington.
