If you manage to block out all sound, you will have no trouble looking around at the warp and woof of the world, but you will feel an outsider, detached from the goings on. Sound puts us into the picture, or makes the picture more than an image. As the Inuit asks the visitor coming in out of the cold: speak so that I may see you. Add a voice, even a whisper, so that the other is really there.
David Rothenberg

Ears Wide Open

The Quarterly Bulletin of the Acoustic Ecology Institute

Number 3
August 2006

CONTENTS

»	Introduction
»	Institute Update
»	Recent Science Findings
»	Soundbytes
»	Listening on the Web
»	Join Acoustic Ecology Institute

Greetings, and welcome to the third edition of Ears Wide Open. Four times a year, this online publication opens some new doors into the world of listening, in all its expressions. The Contents to the left lead you to single-page glimpses of many aspects of the Institute's recent work; of course, you can also follow the links at the top of the page into the full website, which continues to grow.

This summer, I find myself in some new sound worlds: the big cities of the east coast, Boston, Philadelphia, New York. It's all part of a college tour with my soon-to-be-applying son, and I must say that the immersion into human-created sounds has not been nearly as jarring as I might have expected. Indeed, I've rather enjoyed the rattling rumble of the commuter train, the music in the parks, and the babble of conversations. Today in New York, I remembered a goofy joke in a recent animated kids movie, in which a lion in an urban zoo was driven to sleepless distraction by the "peaceful jungle ambience" recording in his cage, then fell peacefully to a sleep after managing to break the offending speaker, allowing the "natural sounds" of the surrounding streets to instantly return!

Yet while these urban days have had their charms, the sonic highlight of the trip was surely my first night after flying east, when I was blessed by a long rain on the roof of my childhood summer camp near "the Pond." Upstairs, no attic, just the rain pattering right there on the wood a few feet overhead, while softly hissing in the birches and hemlocks outside the windows.....that's some good listening!!

Here's hoping you're also reveling in the summer sonic delights found along your way,

Jim Cummings
AEI Founder

P.S.
While this quarterly bulletin is designed for members, please feel free to point friends to this page if you think they might enjoy hearing about the Institute. These little collections of pages do provide a concise introduction to what we're up to.

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