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

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