Sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells, in Death Valley. Photo: Craig Miller.The quietest place I've ever been was in a national park and I don't think I'll ever forget what it was like.

Now, okay, "quiet" is a somewhat subjective thing. When I lived on the upper (way upper) west side of Manhattan in the 1980s, any interval without hearing a car alarm seemed like blessed relief. Quiet can be measured, of course, with sound pressure meters. Anything below about 40 decibels is pretty darn quiet for most people's purposes.

The National Park Service (NPS) says the quietest place it has yet measured is a spot in Great Sand Dunes National Park, where Vicki McCusker, who helps oversee the natural sounds program for the Park Service, says it was "bottoming out" their meters.

I've never been there but it's hard to imagine greater quietude than an afternoon I spent in Death Valley. Coincidentally this was also on a sand dune, near Stovepipe Wells. It was also Christmas Day, which kept the tourist traffic to a minimum. It was at a point in my life when I was in desperate need of some deep introspection, so I parked my car along Highway 190 and trekked into the dunes, found an accommodating slope and sat down. Occasionally a fly (or something) would buzz by. Other than that, the loudest thing was the buzzing in my own head, which I can only hope would've been inaudible to anyone with me.

It's interesting how, when things get really quiet, our bodies try to make up for it with ringing ears and internal chaos. The noted bioacoustician Bernie Krause talks about the time he and his wife, Kat were hosting guests from New York, who literally had to leave the Krause's semi-secluded Glen Ellen "sanctuary" because the night-time quiet was creeping them out.

I asked Krause what he could draw from that. "Well, it tells me that we’re more insane than I ever thought in the first place," he mused. "I mean, we’re definitely verging on pathological.  Because it’s exactly those kinds of sounds–the urban acoustic envelope in which we enfold ourselves–that kind of urban noise that’s driving up the numbers of prescriptions for Prozac."

Surveys of national park visitors would seem to bear that out.  In the early 1990s, NPS surveyed 15,000 visitors in 39 parks, about noise issues (NPS manages 391 "units" nationwide, 58 of which are designated as "parks"). More than nine out of ten visitors surveyed cited "enjoyment of natural quiet" as a reason for visiting. This survey provided some juice for the ongoing natural sounds program in the parks.

An open question is: where does it go from here? Much of the current effort in the parks appears to be geared toward developing "air tour management plans," a response to concerns that first arose over the increasingly crowded skies above the Grand Canyon. McCusker told me that while aircraft overflights are the most pervasive noise issue across the parks, the most common complaint is probably over loud motorcycles (note to "straight-pipe" Harley owners).

Krause, who conducted a year-long project documenting soundscapes in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, hopes the research will also be used to develop new rules governing on-the-ground noise pollution. "If the parks can set aside places where people can go and hear the natural world as it is, at any season of the year, then that will be a really big benefit for visitors coming to the parks," he says. "Otherwise, you’re seeing the parks with the wrong soundtrack. It’s like watching Star Wars without a soundtrack."

So check out this four and a half minute “journey” I produced with Bernie Krause, founder of Wild Sanctuary. It takes you from the familiar cacophony of the urban soundscape to a serene spot in Sequoia Park.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Listen to the radio report, "Soundscapes of National Parks" online.

A phonautograph, which made the first sound recordings (playback made possible thanks to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Last summer, QUEST told you about how scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have developed a technology to playback old audio recordings using visual scans. Along with bringing to life the wax cylinders we featured in our TV story, the Berkeley technology helped the world hear, for the first time ever, the oldest known sound recordings ever made. Now the historians who unearthed those recordings have discovered that they've been playing them all wrong.

The recordings were made by a phonautograph, invented by a Frenchman named Léon Scott more than 20 years before Edison came up with the phonograph. The technology worked by scratching sound waves onto sheets of paper covered with lampblack. Last year, historians used the Berkeley Lab's "visual stylus" to replay an 1860 recording of what they thought was a young girl singing the French song "Au Claire De La Lune". Since then, they've realized that they were actually playing the recording at double speed. Instead, it's likely the inventor himself doing the singing. You can hear both version at FirstSounds.org, or listen to an interview with the historians from NPR. It turns out learning to play old sounds isn't the only challenge — we have to know how to play them right!

Watch "How Edison Got His Groove Back" to learn more about how LBL's innovations are helping restore old sound:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

As the Series Producer for QUEST, I get to read through a lot of amazing science story ideas, but when I first read about the work that Carl Haber, Vitaliy Fadeyev and Earl Cornell were doing at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, I knew it was a story I wanted to do. OK, I admit that part of the reason is that I love music and sound, and have been interested in audio technology since I was a kid (back when we listened to records). But for me, a big part of the story's "coolness" is how this team – and Carl Haber in particular – came up with the idea. I love the idea that he was just listening to the radio one day and heard that the Library of Congress was failing in its struggle to preserve a significant portion of our nation's music and sound heritage. Haber basically thought, "well, as a designer of instrumentation for particle physics, I think I can help." And that's what he did. He felt passionate about solving a problem, and he changed the world.

I had heard of Edison-style wax cylinders, but I had never seen one, and I had no idea how much audio history (musical as well as cultural) had been recorded in the format. One of the best parts of the shoot (we shot on two different days), was our visit with Victoria Bradshaw at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Walking through the floor-to-ceiling shelving and stepping up to literally hundreds of carefully-packed wax cylinders was a revelation. Holding one in my hands (gloved hands) was an amazing feeling. And to see the wax cylinders upon which Alfred Kroeber had actually recorded Ishi speaking – hard to put into words. I couldn't help but imagine Kroeber himself, with a box of blank cylinders and a recorder strapped to a mule, fording a river on his way to meet an Indian who "spoke a language nobody can understand." Suddenly it was clear to me how important it is to save these recordings before they disintegrate.

And for a science-head, visiting Haber's lab was amazing. Far from antiseptic, the whole place was filled with hacked parts of microscopes, old record and cylinder players, computers running custom software, circuit boards, wires hanging everywhere. It was a great reminder that real science is a permanent work-in-progress. And when it's all said and done – and the Library of Congress is already using Haber's flat-record technology – we'll all be better off. Thanks to Haber's team, soon we'll have pristine, permanent copies of many of these endangered recordings. And as these collections are migrated to the web, that's great news, not just for museums and archives, but for all of us.

And one last quick thing: If you’re interested in learning more about our wax cylinder legacy, check out this UC Santa Barbara site. It has great information on the history of the format, and it offers hundreds of wax cylinders that you can listen stream right off the net!


Watch the "How Edison Got His Groove Back" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also, check out our online photo set for images from this story.