A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
geophony
Geophony is the non-living sound of a place: wind in trees and grass, running water, waves, rain, thunder, moving ice, shifting sand. It is one of three parts in the same scheme, alongside biophony, which is the combined sound of everything alive there, and anthropophony, which is everything people make. Geophony is the oldest of the three, since it was the only sound on earth for most of the planet’s history.
Etymology
The word is Greek for earth-sound and was coined by the American recordist Bernie Krause, who has spent a working life recording whole habitats rather than individual species and needed a vocabulary that distinguished the sources.
Notes
Geophony is not background. Many animals have shaped their calls around it, avoiding the frequency band a nearby river occupies or timing their singing to the lulls between waves. Krause’s acoustic niche hypothesis, biophony, holds that the living sound of a healthy habitat fits into the gaps the non-living sound leaves.