The last places without human sounds (w/ Matt Mikkelsen)

What is natural sound in an increasingly noisy world? asks sound recordist and audio engineer Matt Mikkelsen. Matt travels the world recording natural sounds in places where you can’t hear anything made by humans: no planes, no cars, no ringing phones. In this episode, Matt joins Chris to talk about the difference between quiet and silence. Matt shares his adventures and work with Quiet Parks International and even shares a story about the time he was struck by lightning. They also talk about the importance of choosing our acoustic environment and why it’s important to unplug and sit still in nature. Featured guest Follow Matt Mikkelsen on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/matthewmikkelsen/?hl=en and at matthewmikkelsen.com http://matthewmikkelsen.com/ Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksVote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:15Speaker 00

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I live in a big city right now, and I grew up in an even bigger city. So for most of my life, when I have gone outside at night and looked up at the sky, I haven't seen much. A few of the very brightest stars maybe might poke through, or maybe I'd see the lights of a plane taking off, or a very bright satellite. But the only times that I've gotten to see the full glory of the night sky have been when I have been out camping, or when I've been visiting a friend who lives in a rural area. Light pollution, the reason why you can't see all that much in the city at night, that's a term that I was familiar with. It's probably one that you have heard of too, right? The brightness of a city, even at midnight, it blocks out so much of what we would be able to see from

• 3:00Speaker 00

  the natural dark sky. Now, a related idea, but one that I had never heard of until I met today's guest, Matthew Mickelson, is noise pollution. Matthew is a sound engineer, a recordist, and the executive director of Wilderness Quiet Parks. Matt is trying to preserve quiet places, to protect natural areas from sound pollution, so that, much like how we have places where I can go and I can see the night sky without light pollution, we will also have places where we can go to hear the natural world without noise pollution. That's an idea that I had never encountered before, but it immediately makes sense to me, especially because Matthew has these incredible recordings that he has spent his career making, which give us these crystal clear examples of the types of quiet places that he is trying to preserve. For example, here is a

• 3:45Speaker 00

  recording that Matthew made of loons in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota.

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  Or here are frogs in the Amazon.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  I don't know about you, but I get surprisingly emotional hearing these clips. They're so beautiful and so special. And I want to know so much more about why and how Matt has devoted his life to protecting these places for future generations. So today on our show, we are going to talk to Matt about his work. We're going to talk about what it means to really listen, and why quiet is so important, whether you live in the middle of a remote wilderness or the middle of a bustling metropolis. All that and so much more, right after this quick ad break. Don't go anywhere.

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• 8:10Speaker 00

  And we are back. We're talking today with Matthew Mickelson about his work with Quiet Parks International, about his career recording sounds in nature, and why he thinks it's so important to have places where we can experience true quiet and really listen.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Matt Mickelson. I'm a field recordist and a sound designer, and I study quiet.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  So the first question I have for you is, I feel like it's actually maybe almost a philosophical one, but what is the difference between quiet and silence?

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Oof, such a good starting point. Something I like to establish kind of early. If we talk about silence, I think we're talking about a physical condition. Silence can be accessed in a recording studio, in sort of more scientific settings, like anechoic chambers, things like that. Silence is like a lack of sound pressure. Quiet is a feeling. A space can be quiet, but when I talk about quiet spaces, I'm not necessarily talking about silent spaces. The Amazon jungle is a quiet space. It doesn't have a lot of noise pollution. It feels very quiet in the soul, but it's certainly not silent. It's cacophonous and roaring and loud.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  And when you start to tease out those things, it becomes really interesting. Like, what is quiet? What is silence? What is noise? What is sound? These are all questions I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  And how did you get started thinking and talking about these questions? Why, like, why did that speak to you?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Uh, I wanted to be a professional drummer. That was like my first sort of thought of a career. I quickly realized that wasn't, I wasn't good enough to make that happen at the level that I needed to. So I got into sound engineering and recording music. Went to school for sort of sound for film and television and sound recording technology. And quickly realized I loved studying sound, but didn't want to be in a studio every day. I just like loved being outside way too much for that. So I tried to figure out a way to like merge that love I had of sound and recording technology and the sort of love I had for nature and the very much like ramping up of talking about climate change and conservation and these things. And I heard about a man by the name of Gordon Hempton, who, if you don't know about Gordon,

• 10:21Speaker 04

  he is worth a Google. And he sort of helped really bring to light this field of nature, sound recording and acoustic ecology and talking about quiet and why it's going extinct and why we need to sort of work to save it. And I just fell in love with the craft and the discipline and the thinking. And yeah, that's sort of how I ended up now. This past, it was a podcast I heard him on actually and with, with Krista Tippett. Yeah, it was an on being episode.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Well, I think one thing that's really interesting to me about you and your work is you're a person who, at least from the outside, has a really clear mission. You care about sound. You care about nature. You care, you care about preserving this piece of the world that is under threat. And one thing that I think is interesting about that as a particular mission is that it's a loss that I think a lot of people wouldn't be able to put their finger on exactly, even though they might feel it really acutely. Like, oh, something is different about the world, but I don't know what it is.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  It's such a good point. Quiet is one of those things that, yeah, we don't necessarily, the average person doesn't like actively think about how quiet their environment is or how quiet they feel. And that makes it sort of a difficult resource to try and protect when, you know, like if I contaminate your drinking water, it's gonna be really visceral and really in your face and you're gonna see it every time you pour a glass of water. Quiet sort of ties together a lot of these concepts of like, what rights do we have as humans to live in a world that isn't like assaulting our senses, I think. So a lot of my work is sort of like talking like this with people of like, asking them like, do you know what quiet feels like? Not what it sounds like, but what does quiet feel like? And then sort of asking them like, what places make you feel quiet?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Or bringing them into quiet and saying like, how do you feel? And 100% of the time, when I bring someone to quiet, they no longer ask why it's important to protect. It becomes very self-evident. And those of us who are lucky enough to experience quiet or live in quiet or spend any amount of time in quiet, it becomes like a non-negotiable sort of part of your, your being. You like, you need it to sort of function and to feel good. And that doesn't mean you like have to take a weekly hike to a wilderness area, but like finding your quiet is, is a really important thing, especially given like everything that's happening in the world. And you can find your quiet in a lot of different ways. And my goal is to like provide spaces for people that allow them to feel quiet and

• 12:48Speaker 04

  access that feeling so they can kind of feel restored and recharged. Yeah, I'm talking like pretty like high level sort of spiritual or I hate to throw around the word spiritual, but that's like sort of like high level stuff. There is a very ecological reason why we should protect quiet as well, like.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Wait, give me that.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, like natural communication between species is like interrupted by noise pollution. It, you know, impacts an ability of any sort of animal that uses vocal communication or vibrational energy to communicate. So we need to protect that stuff. There's lots of studies that show, okay, like owls can't hunt as far with noise pollution and different reptiles are affected and things like this. Noise is bad for the environment from a sort of ecological perspective. Noise is bad for humans. Like, we are subjected to unhealthy levels of noise almost every day. We sleep in unhealthy environments that are above the threshold we should be in. We're subjected to noise that's so loud, it's like causing us all to go deaf. It raises our stress hormones. It causes cardiovascular implications.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Sorry, there's a, a relationship between increased stress levels and cardiovascular implications. There's a reason things like OSHA exist. People need to wear hearing protection. So there's all that stuff, like noise is bad for us, quiet is good for us. And I always love to like sort of question like, quiet means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. You can feel that quieting by meditating or going to church. You can also feel quiet by like knitting or sewing. I ride a motorcycle. It makes me feel quiet. Like, it's really interesting how quiet shows up in our lives. And I think we all should like be asking ourselves, what makes me feel quiet? And do that thing, like you deserve it, you know?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Okay, well, let me ask, I'm gonna turn those two questions around right back on you.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  So what makes you feel quiet? Apparently riding your motorcycle is one thing.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  That's, that's always like the fun extreme example.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  What makes you feel quiet? And then where is quiet for you? Where is a place that's quiet?

• 14:45Speaker 04

  There's a lot of things that make me feel quiet. I think when you start to question how quiet plays a role in your life, it becomes a little bit easier to access. So I can find quiet when I'm like people watching on a park bench outside the Vancouver Convention Center, even though there's sea planes and things happening. But I love, you know, things that bring me joy and like bring me quiet is like, yeah, like hiking and, you know, the usual sort of naturey things in quiet places, of course. I love gardening and like sort of any playing outside. That could be like cleaning up sticks in my yard or like raking leaves. Like, I just love being outside and sort of having a task like that.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yes, I do some pretty atypical things, such as like I ride a relatively quiet motorcycle. That makes me feel quiet. It's like these things that sort of demand your attention in a way that is sort of lovely and self-chosen.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  You're defining quiet in a way that is subjective and personal and emotional. You're not defining quiet when you're saying it as like, it's below X decibel level. Like, you're not saying it's below 10 dB is what quiet is. And that is what quiet means to me, which is, I think, actually different than people might expect, especially from someone who is like technically a sound recordist.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I should note, like, the organization that I helped start, Quiet Parks International, over the years, we've developed and released this sort of much more scientific criteria about like, in a given environment, what is quiet? And that's where we talk about sound pressure levels and decibels and anthropogenic noise and the more sort of like standards-based approach, which are really valuable. So I can go to a wilderness area and I can deploy equipment and I can take measurements. And then at the end of that deployment, I can say, I can analyze the data and tell you, oh, this is a quiet place according to our standards or not. Same thing in urban areas. We have developed criteria to measure quiet in urban areas. I can deploy equipment and measure that stuff.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  What's important that I think that we've done, that a lot of people haven't done before, is also hold this conversation about the sort of qualitative aspects of quiet and sound with equal value. Like, one doesn't necessarily outweigh the other. And when I have a colleague of mine who can sit in the middle of Mumbai and feel quiet, the loudest city in the world, that's, I think, more interesting than me telling you, oh, this place is below 35 dB SPL or something.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  I grew up in New York City, like right in the city. I lived in an apartment where when I'm in the bathroom, I can hear my neighbors talking through the wall. And when I'm in my bedroom, I can hear my neighbors on their roof outside. And that's, that was just my baseline. My wife grew up in a much quieter environment. And so if we are in our house and a plane goes overhead, that is really prominent for her. She's like noticing that plane. Whereas for me, a lot of times I'm just like, oh, I was kind of focused on something else. But I think that we both. When you go to a place that is natural and you don't hear anything that is being created by humans,

• 18:01Speaker 00

  that feels really special in a way that we both appreciate. Right? It's not like, oh, what's the level that disturbs me in my house? Going somewhere where you go like, it's incredible to listen. And this is just the sound of nature. And so much of your work is making sure that places like that continue to exist because they actually, there's no guarantee that they will.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  It's very interesting how like, yeah, the places we were raised and the places we identify with shape how we experience the world. For a lot of people and good friends of mine and colleagues who were raised in louder environments like cities, if you bring them into a truly quiet place, and most people, that's a pretty unsettling experience for them. And your brain has developed the ability over the years to literally mask the sounds of those sirens, the neighbors through the wall, the airplanes overhead. And that's not a bad thing necessarily. Your brain is sort of like, as a coping mechanism, if you paid attention to every single siren in the middle of the night that, you know, passed by your house, you would go crazy, you would get no sleep. So it's really important.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  Our brains are so powerful and good at masking sound. It takes sort of that baseline a long time to change. But growing up in that sort of environment has given you a predisposition to being comfortable in those environments, which is great. There's no like bias on, oh, that's good or that's bad. In terms of like the natural world, I was having this conversation this morning on the TED Talks Daily Podcast with David Haskell. And we were talking about like this big question of like, what is natural? And when we talk about natural sound or natural environments, humans are natural, you know? Like, we evolved to be here. I think all the time I like pull this supercomputer out of my pocket and I, sometimes I'm stunned, like this thing came from planet Earth.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Like, the same way I harvest a potato out of the ground, somehow we've like dug these things out of the ground. Of course, it's not that simple. But that conversation around like, what is natural? What is unnatural is very interesting. And I think myself, as well as some of my colleagues, sort of try and put it into two buckets. What is like useful information that allows sort of like the natural flow of information without it being interrupted? Noise pollution is sort of like, what is interrupting the important information from reaching who it needs to reach? We hear in a very particular way as humans. Other species hear differently. But if you're a whale and you need to talk to another whale

• 20:29Speaker 04

  and you can't because there's a big ship in between you that's casting sound 100 or 1,000 miles throughout the ocean, that's a problem and that's noise pollution. So this like, it's better to sort of think about, instead of like natural versus non-natural, sort of like what is important information? What is non-important information? If you're trying to speak with your wife about something like, let's imagine like really big and heavy. If you need to move because of like family health things, family planning, you're having an argument, you need to sort of work through some stuff and there are airplanes flying over your house every three minutes, it becomes more difficult. That's like blocking an important transmission of information between you and your partner. I don't want to seem like, oh, all human generated sound is bad.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  That's certainly not my position. But it's important to think about like, what does this sound sort of do to us? And from a communication standpoint?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm very ready to accept that it's not like a binary of human sound is bad and natural sound is good. And that it's maybe more of a spectrum here, okay? But like, I think we can all, at least I, I feel confident in saying that some human sound is bad. Like, if you go hiking and you're in the woods and then a person behind you has their Bluetooth speaker with Who Let the Dogs Out? You're like, this has changed the experience for the negative.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Clearly.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  I would prefer to not hear the Baha men on this hike. And that's nothing against the Baha men. That's just, this is not the space for them.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Absolutely. There's a time and a place for everything. I feel this way about like, even I do a lot of talking with folks who live in like sort of military testing areas where they're flying fighter jets around and over national parks and stuff like that. And it's like, there's a time and a place to sort of like fly fighter jets. And that's important, you know? And it's important to recognize. And like maybe sensitive wilderness areas aren't one of those places. Same thing with the Bluetooth speaker. It's like, I love listening to Who Let the Dogs Out? You know what I mean?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  And that is a really cool fact to know about you, actually.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  And when I'm on a hike and, you know, put in headphones, whatever, if that's what you want to listen to on a hike, we could have a different conversation around awareness and all these things. But if that's what floats your boat, do it. But sort of be cognizant of how other people are experiencing an area. So, yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Well, I feel like that actually really perfectly leads into talking about Quiet Parks International. So can you tell us a little bit about like the mission and how it started? And what the work that you do is to actually preserve that?

• 22:47Speaker 04

  So along with some other really amazing colleagues and sort of change makers in the, in the space, we started Quiet Parks International officially in 2019. It was kind of a spinoff of some other nonprofits that we were working on at the time. And we decided, okay, let's like, kind of collect all these things, take this global. The mission is like relatively simple, which is just to like save quiet for the benefit of all life. And we're currently in this conversation, sort of dissecting what that means. And we have like, done some really amazing work with all volunteers, sort of, where there's no one who is like paid, who holds paid positions on our, in our organization. Because people, what we found in running some of these other organizations

• 23:31Speaker 04

  is like people all over the world know and care about quiet. And no one was sort of like bringing all these people together under the same umbrella to have the conversation. And that's, I think, what we've been able to do at Quiet Parks is sort of collect everyone who cares about quiet in one space, try and give them tools and resources and have these conversations around quiet, what it is, how we can work to protect it, all sort of under one roof. A metaphorical roof. We have no location. We are spread out all over the world. But it's been really amazing to talk with people in New Zealand or India or China, Sweden, all over the place, where we might not even speak the same language.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  And we might have to like talk through translation apps. But we, when we talk about quiet, we understand the same feeling. And that's been really powerful. So we have a few different program areas. We have a Wilderness Quiet Parks Program, an Urban Quiet Parks Program, things like Quiet Stays, Quiet Certification Programs. We do assessment, like soundscape assessment, sort of like technical services. And we have sort of criteria for each of those program areas that we've developed with some really amazing people in the field to say in each of those contexts, like in a national park or in a wilderness area, what is quiet? In an urban area, in a city, what is quiet? Obviously, they're different and they should both be recognized. So we've sort of been able to not only figure out some of the data,

• 24:59Speaker 04

  both quantitative and qualitative, that should qualify a quiet park in our mind, but also where those places are. So we have sort of crowdsourced suggestions from people from all over the world of where are these quiet places? And started to dig into them and figure out, okay, how do we work to protect them? Are they quiet in the first place? And if they are, yeah, how do we sort of empower local communities to steward this resource that we didn't even really realize we were losing until pretty recently, but people care deeply about?

• 25:31Speaker 00

  We're going to take a quick break and then we will be right back.

• 25:43Speaker 05

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• 28:43Speaker 00

  And we are back.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Okay, that sound that you were just hearing, that was a recording that Matt made of Birds at Dawn, and that was made on the American Prairie Reserve in Montana. One thing that I think is really cool about your work is that you have this intersection between the work you do with Quiet Parks International and with the work that you do as a sound recorder, where even if people aren't able to get to a remote, natural, really quiet, natural place, you have recorded these sounds. And so people can experience the sounds of nature, the benefits of a quiet park wherever they are. I think that's such a really beautiful intersection of the two different places that you work, which are obviously related.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have been really lucky to sort of ask these questions about quiet and then, yeah, be able to sort of travel to these places and record the sounds of them. I'm a photographer and I shoot video too of all these places, but it's really, sound is like this crazy memory trigger for us. You know, like when you smell that one smell from your childhood and you're like, where is grandma and why is she wearing perfume? Again, or you know, something like that. Sound does the same thing for us. So if I played you the sound, a sound recording of your childhood bedroom, even with giving you no context, I would almost bet money that you could say, that's the sound of my childhood bedroom. Based on where the walls are positioned

• 30:28Speaker 04

  and how the air conditioning or whatever was sort of run, we have this incredible ability as humans to sense space through sound. And we're obviously a very visually dominant culture, but sound is such a powerful sense. Like just to think about the fact that I can hear through walls, I can hear over mountain ranges. I can have these complex conversations with you that are all a result of our ability to use these things called ears. It's like absolutely wild. For me, I love sound. I think sound is just so cool. And I get to sort of try and bring that awareness to a lot of people. So I've been able to, and lucky enough to sort of travel all over with some really cool microphones, doing this very nerdy thing. And also sort of like make a living doing that

• 31:14Speaker 04

  more technical job and not necessarily having to rely on like conservation nonprofit to be able to fund some of the work.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  What are some of the recordings that are ones that you're proudest of or most emotional that you've recorded of nature? What are some of the sounds that you've captured that really mean a lot to you?

• 31:31Speaker 04

  You know, when I was like on the TED stage, I actually like almost kind of started crying because for me, like each of these sound recordings has that memory trigger for me. When you play me one of my sound recordings, I can tell you where I was, what day it was. I can usually tell you like what I had for breakfast. I can also tell you like what was going on in my life, for better or for worse at the time. So it's really like, it was sort of this collection of like, yeah, this, and I'm standing nearby with all of these sound recordings. I'm there essentially, or somewhere in the area. Some of the sounds that, yeah, people were able to hear in the TED Talks that I fought really hard for. And when I say fought really hard for sounds, I mean, I just devoted a lot of time and energy

• 32:13Speaker 04

  and resources into being able to sort of capture these sounds.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Was especially this one pack of coyotes in Yellowstone. I lived in Jackson Hole for a few years and for like two weeks throughout a winter, I was like tracking this coyote pack every night. And I really wanted this like epic coyote recording. My mentor had this coyote recording that everyone talked about. And it was kind of COVID times and venturing off into, you know, into the woods alone in the middle of winter seemed like a good way to pass my time. So yeah, and on sort of the last night of my, of my trip, I was able to witness that beautiful coyote chorus that was sort of echoing all around the valley.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  I have been able to capture these like really beautiful moments. I hate the word capture, but sort of witness these really beautiful moments at the right time. And it's very similar to wildlife photography. It's like you're just sort of sitting there for a really long time. And not that nothing interesting is happening, but it's not that like Nat Geo cover. And then you have a 10 second window to sort of like prep for one of the most incredible moments of your life.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've captured some really interesting moments in my life. I have a sound recording of myself getting struck by lightning.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Whoa, okay, you've been struck by lightning.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, like that's like the party line. It's like technically I was standing underneath a tree that got struck by lightning.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Okay, still very close to lightning.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Super.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  You have a recording of that.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  I have a sound recording of it.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Oh wait, well, I mean, we gotta play that recording. If you're listening to this show, we're gonna, the next thing you hear is this is Matthew being struck by lightning.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, and those are like moments like not many people have detailed like high fidelity sound recordings of their near death experience.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  But that's why sound is so cool. It's like, it used to be a really traumatic recording for me to listen to. I had PTSD after that happened. I like couldn't look at puffy clouds without going into a panic mode. And now I've, you know, I've listened to that recording enough where I can laugh about it and it's a really great party story. When you relate to the world through a craft and you kind of bring that with you everywhere you go, I've been able to record some really interesting and cool stuff, most of which no one will ever hear, you know?

• 35:02Speaker 00

  What do you find of the sounds you record? What do you find resonates the most with people? And what do you find? What are you surprised by that people don't seem to connect with as much that you wish they would?

• 35:13Speaker 04

  People connect with the sounds that they're like nostalgic for most. Those are like the most emotional sounds that people sort of feel. And I've talked to some researchers who say that like nostalgia is the number one factor in determining whether or not someone will be inspired by a sound, scared of a sound. So I've played like the sound of gentle wind through pine trees for my friends down in Ecuador, the Kofan tribe. It's like, that's a terrifying sound for them, you know? They like, that is a very unnatural sort of sound of a very foreign place. When I play the sound of the Amazon jungle for myself and for my friends who grew up here in North America,

• 35:57Speaker 04

  that's a very foreign and scary place. And what is that sound? And oh my God, is that a jaguar in the woods? And all these things we're not comfortable with. So it's sort of very much dependent on like, what is your world like? And how did you grow up? And that really impacts how you are affected by a sound. But ultimately, people love witnessing the power of nature. And that can take shape in a lot of different ways in sound recording and photography. So there's nothing more powerful than like hearing the roar of an alligator bellowing, you know, in the swamp during mating season.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Or howler monkeys in Costa Rica like communicating across valleys.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Or coyotes in Yellowstone sort of letting it all go. People love that stuff because it's sort of like connects us to the world, into this bigger, bigger than us feeling that we love to have as humans.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  And what about the flip side? What is it that you wish people paid more attention to or connected more of the sounds?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  I wish we didn't need the like really epic sort of, I mean, with our exposure to so much media, so much great media too. I'm not just talking about sort of the bad stuff. I'm saying like these wonderful, you know, Planet Earth, Nat Geo sort of things. We have seen as humans amazing things from all over the planet and off of our planet too. But I think what it ends up doing is like, makes us appreciate less sort of like the daily wonder of what it's like to be able to listen or to be able to like see you, you know? But I think this sort of idea that you don't need to like be in the Amazon jungle to have a beautiful, quiet listening experience.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  And like you can go take a walk down your street right now and sort of like appreciate what the wonder that is everything in life without needing that like sexy iconic howler monkey recording, you know?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Like someone is listening to this and they're moved by what you're saying. How can they do that? Like, how can you go out and really have that listening experience and be mindful of the wonder of what you're hearing? When you're not in a place where you're hearing something dramatic and exotic and different?

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Totally. It's such a good question. It's one that I get all the time. And as of today, I'm actually going to answer it a bit differently, being inspired by my friend David Haskell, who answered this question earlier in a way that actually really changed to sort of how I think about it.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  First is like, I think it's important to understand how powerful your ears are. And like what is sound? Like sound is just vibration. And right now I'm just like modulating air so you can derive deep meaning from what I'm saying. It's like, it's absolutely nuts. And you can hear me, like you could put a microphone like on this table, like touching the table and my voice is permeating the table and the floor. It's just energy, right? And everything is sort of, that makes sound is just producing energy. So knowing a little bit about how cool sound is, it's like, I think, pretty sweet. We just have these invisible waves sort of, mostly invisible waves around us all the time. And then what David suggested, which I thought was just brilliant, is like step outside your door and pretend just for like five minutes, 10 minutes,

• 39:27Speaker 04

  that you paid a lot of money to be in some like immersive sound sculpture at like a world famous museum. Like stop deriving sort of like, oh, that's my neighbor's lawnmower or something. And just sort of like try and take yourself out of that identification sort of mindset that we often have and just like revel in the wonder of like everything that's sort of happening. But we have this habit of as humans of sort of like needing to identify things when they come to our senses. Like this is a glass of water, this is a microphone. I am hearing Chris, I am like hearing the hum of the air conditioning. When you can start to sort of like divorce yourself from the meaning of the sounds and just appreciate them for what they are,

• 40:11Speaker 04

  is this sound, instead of saying like, oh, that's the sound of a robin? It's like, okay, it's a bird, but is it like musical? Is it happy? Is it stressed?

• 40:22Speaker 04

  What is this sound like making you feel? And similar to how we listen to music, like I could play you a piece of music. You could say, this is sad music. And if you're not a musician, I could say, why is it sad music? You'd just, you'd kind of be able to end by saying like, it sounds like sad music. And you're right. The natural world is the same way. Like you can derive the sort of same meaning when you start to sort of practice interacting with it. There's a lot of cool information out there. None of which you need to be like a sound expert to enjoy. Being a human is so cool. And I think like, the more we can sort of connect with that, the better we're going to be able to face like all the challenges we need to.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  I'm struck by the fact that a lot of us are trying really hard to fill moments of boredom. We don't want to be bored, but part of that is also, we don't want to be listening to Quiet. We want it to be filled with a podcast, maybe this podcast, maybe, maybe music, maybe talking to someone, maybe a phone call. Like, there's this urge to distract ourselves. And there's a lot of rewards for distracting ourselves, but there's also a real cost to distracting ourselves from what we're actually hearing. And it seems like a lot of your work is pushing back on that piece of the culture.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Like, I think that's a result of us wanting to control our acoustic environments because it came so far out of our control. When you put on a podcast and you're on the train on your way to work, that's you selecting your acoustic environment in a way that's empowering. And so I applaud that. You shouldn't be subjected to the sound of a really noisy degraded New York City subway train all the time. You get to choose your acoustic environments. And that's the same thing, I think, when people are engaging in activity like that with noise machines and things like that. There is, I think, a real problem with our inability to sit still and be with ourselves. Especially in sort of modern, definitely American culture, but I'll say in many modern cultures.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Not modern cultures, sort of like Western cultures. We hate being with ourselves because we just never do it. And it's actually super lovely. Like, I cannot recommend enough going to your local park bench and just sitting there. Don't like, look at your phone, don't bring a book, don't listen to a podcast, just like for five minutes. Just like, look at the world, look at the people. What do you hear? What do you see? What do you smell? You don't have to like devote your life to sitting in complete silence and like meditate and do all this stuff that seems like it's kind of difficult.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Just like, I think, once you start to do that more, it becomes like such a joy. And I think, I like had this light bulb the other day. I had a really long drive. It was like an eight hour drive. And I didn't listen to like any music, any podcast. I just like drove. But it's a really fun skill to have to sort of like be able to occupy yourself. And one of the things we've taken away from adults is like the ability to have like childlike wonder and imagination and awe. I think listening reconnects us to all that stuff. You can have that back, you know? All you have to do is start to play with it.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Just a small moment from my personal life that really connects me with that is when I think about a sound that is meaningful to me. It really is often the sounds that have brought me huge childlike wonder. So one that comes to mind for me is that I moved to Los Angeles and one thing I started doing in Los Angeles was surfing. One part that's beautiful about it is I get to be out on the water in a place where it is largely, at least what I'm looking at is not like created by humans. I'm looking out at the horizon and I'm trying to look for waves. But something that I didn't expect would happen is that you're out there and then a dolphin will come up. And you can, you could hear the dolphin breathe.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  You could just hear the like, and that is a sound where I was like, I would have paid so much money for this experience. And this is just something available here? This is just out? And I, I still can think about that and go, I can't believe we heard that. We heard this mammal in the water breathing.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Moments like that connect us to like how cool it is to be human. I think we need more of that, but there are these opportunities, I think, we're given, like the dolphin coming up to you. Or even when you pass by like one of those trees that's somehow living in like a little cutout in the sidewalk. I think it's an opportunity to sort of like, take a moment and just sort of see what comes up. That's the stuff I think it's like, what's going to sort of get us through what everyone's really nervous about right now is like recognizing and spending time being human. Cause it's so amazing.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  And there's like millions of years of evolution that have allowed us sort of like the power and privilege to be humans and to witness the things we get to witness.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  A thing that's kind of interesting to me about sound is that I think pretty much everyone has a sound or a frequency that is the flip side. That like turns their stomach that you like can't listen to. What is your, like, what's your death frequency sound? What's a sound that you hear and you go, oh no, I hate that sound?

• 45:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, there's the classic ones, the nails on the chalkboard and things like that.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Like that screechy sound?

• 45:47Speaker 04

  The screechy, I'm like a higher pitch, higher pitch sounds get me to cringe in that way. Like my sister can't do cotton balls.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Like, like if you even like go to reach into a bag of cotton balls, she's like, freaks out. And she's like relatively normal other than that, so it's pretty funny. So, yeah, I don't, I'm lucky, I don't have a ton of sort of, yeah, cringe noises. Cause I like, a big part of my job is I like edit sound. It'd be really inconvenient if I was overly sensitive to like pencil erasers or, you know, writing on, on chalkboards even or something.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  You've done a lot of interviews. I'm positive one of the most common questions that people ask you is like, what's your favorite sound? So I'm not going to ask you a favorite sound. Instead, I would like to ask you more specific ones. What is the sexiest sound?

• 46:32Speaker 04

  The sexiest sound I've recorded recently is, yeah, the sound of this alligator bellowing in Florida. And he was very horny. You know, it's very powerful. It's very powerful stuff and, you know, quite scary for a human, but I was like, damn, that alligator is like gonna get it, you know?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Okay, what about, what's the loneliest sound?

• 46:51Speaker 04

  I have some sounds of like owls, like living in this abandoned farmhouse in rural Colorado. That is like, I think it's pretty creepy.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Sort of comes to mind.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  That's a very lonely short story, all in just that single sound.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  What about, what is the happiest sound?

• 47:13Speaker 04

  I have recordings of like my grandmother before she passed, that like I hear her laugh and something like that. Or, you know, hearing recordings of my wife, sort of like with me, she comes on trips with me and helps me sometimes. And hearing sort of just like our, our back and forth or our banter, her voice, recordings of my mom or dad and my sister. It's like, those are things that trigger like really deep sort of emotional reactions for me. So those are sort of the happiest, like more human sounds. Those coyotes I talked about before in Yellowstone, those are some happy ass coyotes. You could just tell, I don't know what was going on. I don't want to anthropomorphize too much the coyotes, but when I was listening to them, I was like, whatever just happened was good.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  What is the scariest sound?

• 47:58Speaker 04

  Getting struck by lightning was probably my scariest life moment of all time. You can hear right before the like boom, you can actually hear the lightning touch the tree. Like the light travels faster than the sound. So even though the thunder is coming from the cloud, you can actually hear the lightning bolt hit the tree first. It's like, it's like a tinkling sound. And every time I hear that, I'm sort of shitting my pants. Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Can I curse in the background?

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  So sorry.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  No, that's totally fine. And, and very understandable.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, only when it comes to lightning, I just start cursing.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's, that's our special allowance. No, no, you're allowed. And then what's the most meaningful sound?

• 48:45Speaker 04

  I don't know if I sort of have a like top most meaningful sound necessarily. However, I think like I've been so lucky in my life to be in places and to visit places that feel whole. Sonically, visually, ecologically. The fact that places like portions of the Amazon jungle exist and are whole and healthy. And there are like native folks there who are controlling those lands and doing that work. And places in the US and, and Canada and Europe that are whole in that way.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  Those are the recordings that are really meaningfully, meaningful to me because they, yeah, they sort of give me hope that, um, we're gonna be all right. And even if we don't, it's fine. We'll just like return to cosmic dust and that's what we were originally. So it's fine. It's all good, you know?

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Well, this is so, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me, Chris.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Okay, that is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Before I read the credits, we are in the middle of doing our audience survey and we still need more responses. If you could help us by filling out that survey, it would be tremendous. We'd love to know what are some topics you would love for us to cover? What things are working well on the show? What do you want us to try and do differently? What do you want us to do the same? All of those kinds of pieces of feedback, it would be so, so, so, so, so helpful if you could fill that out. There is a link in the description, wherever you're listening to this, that you should be able to click and it will just take you right there. Or you can go to bit.ly/BHSurvey6. That's B I T dot L Y slash B H Survey six. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you as well to our guest, Matthew Mickelson. His organization is called Quiet Parks International.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  You can find out more about them at quietparks.org. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my book is called Humor Me. You can find out more about my book and my work and where I am appearing in the next year at chrisduffycomedy.com. This episode of How to Be a Better Human was recorded in the natural habitat of the podcast host, a small room that used to be a closet. On the TED side, we've got a team of naturalists who are working in complete silence, communicating only with the subtlest of facial gestures. Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansuka Sugmanivong, Antonio Lei and Joseph Dubryne. Ryan Lash edits this video while being struck by lightning multiple times. And Mateus Salas is the quiet hand, sifting fact from fiction as he checks our work.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  On the PRX side, they are howling like monkeys and croaking like toads. It's Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Without you, our show would be nothing more than silence. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

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