Pre-dawn, the sounds in the house are few and predictable: the refrigerator lurching to a hum, then off again; the steam knocking in the pipes. This morning, however, the pigeons, delirious with the expanse of dark that was all theirs, thrashed against the windows, landed with thuds on the A/C units. The blogger Jason Kottke recently wrote about Sounds of the Forest, a collection of “aural tones and textures from the world’s woodlands” displayed on a map. Click anywhere in the world and you can listen to a forest recording from that region. We might, understandably, forget to notice birdsong underneath, that the pigeons are still paying attention to us even as we keep moving onward and into whatever is next.

Source: New York Times September 23, 2020 19:52 UTC