An eco-acoustic researcher at the Natural History Museum in Paris, Sueur has long been listening to the sounds of the earth, animals, and humans. Inspired by the work of the late Canadian soundscape composer R. Murray Schafer and Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist and author of The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), Sueur has traveled on \u201cacoustic quests\u201d to remote French forests and distant jungles in South America. One place he visits, the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Alps, prohibits noise in a surrounding zone of silence\u2014as mandated by a 1975 decree. With humor and passion, Sueur describes his fascination with flora, fauna, dinosaurs, and genetics. One might call Sueur a sophisticated listening machine who sought the absence of sound and noise and discovered that, in fact, \u201csound and noise are everywhere.\u201d He writes, \u201cSilence is by no means an emptiness or a negation. It is rich and contains information essential to animal communication and to the structuring of natural systems. It is a contested resource and a space to be filled.\u201d Helen Morrison\u2019s translation preserves the vitality and charm of Sueur\u2019s original French text. \u201cMaking noise is exhilarating,\u201d he acknowledges. \u201cWho has not experienced a certain sense of power on a moped, a motorbike, in a car or a boat travelling at speed and defying the passing of time?\u201d And yet Sueur hopes we can cut out the \u201cacoustic waste\u201d in our lives and \u201creintroduce natural sounds\u201d\u2014of crickets, frogs, owls, and any number of creatures. And of plants and trees in the forest that, as he beautifully puts it, \u201cbecome the instruments and musicians of the wind.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An eco-acoustic researcher at the Natural History Museum in Paris, Sueur has long been listening to the sounds of the earth, animals, and humans. Inspired by the work of the late Canadian soundscape composer R. Murray Schafer and Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist and author of The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), Sueur has traveled on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}