Editorials & Other Articles

Zorro

(18,597 posts) Fri Mar 13, 2026, 03:03 PM 4 hrs ago

These sounds are all around us. Hear them for the first time.

New technology enables us to perceive sounds beyond human hearing range, allowing a new perspective on our place on the planet.

Brian House, in long beard and muck boots, leads me through a pine forest on a cold afternoon until, on the edge of a marsh, we find it: an array of three circles formed by plastic milk crates equipped with furry microphone covers and connected by tubes to microbarometers.

It looks like the sort of thing one might use to make contact with extraterrestrials, or perhaps Satan, if you’re into that sort of thing. But House, a professor at Amherst College and a sound artist, has more earthly interests. A sign cautions wanderers in these woods not to touch: “Atmospheric Infrasound Research in Progress.”

House produces his art by recording sounds that are outside the range of human hearing. He then speeds them up or slows them down, so we can experience what had been inaudible. In this case, he’s collecting atmospheric infrasound — the extremely long-wave sounds from ocean currents, volcanoes, glaciers and even data centers — that can travel hundreds to thousands of miles and are all around us, even if we can’t perceive them.

The human ear on its own can decipher sounds with frequencies as low as about 20 hertz up to an outer limit of about 20,000 hertz, or 20 kilohertz. Infrasound is anything below that range. Ultrasound — such as the choruses of rats and the pulses of bats — is above it. Yet another category of sound, which most of the world’s insects use to communicate, travels inaudibly through solids.

https://wapo.st/3PkLsgJ

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These sounds are all around us. Hear them for the first time. (Original Post) Zorro 4 hrs ago OP

Brian House: Macrophones - The sounds of climate crisis unfolding across the globe Donkees 43 min ago #1

Donkees

(33,643 posts)

1. Brian House: Macrophones - The sounds of climate crisis unfolding across the globe

Reply to Zorro (Original post)

Fri Mar 13, 2026, 07:11 PM

43 min ago

Jun 23, 2023
Learn more about Macrophones, by artist Brian House:, Creative Capital Grantee 2023.

Normally too low-frequency to hear, infrasound travels vast distances through the atmosphere. It comes from calving glaciers, wildfires, energy infrastructure, and even HVAC systems at massive data centers. Big phenomena like these are entangled with the climate crisis. If we could hear infrasound, could we listen to the crisis as it unfolds across the globe? Macrophones appropriates Cold War technology and combines it with cutting-edge signal processing and machine learning in order to make infrasound audible. Situated in locations including old-growth forests, the Arctic tundra, and city centers, the installation comprises electronics that record microbarometric fluctuations through a sculptural wind filter. The recordings are processed and resampled upward into an acoustic range that we can hear, and via audio augmented reality, listeners at the site hear infrasound spatially situated in the landscape around them. Paying attention to how we are connected through the atmosphere, rather than through the internet, is both poetic and political. My hope is that listening to infrasound from nearby and from thousands of miles away can cultivate the expanded sense of the local on which an equitable climate future depends. Read more: https://creative-capital.org/projects...

This video was originally presented at the 2023 Creative Capital Carnival—an artist gathering for discovering grantee projects-in-progress, meeting with industry experts, building community, and celebrating artists.

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