Updated <\/p>\n
March 13, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDTtoday at 5:00 a.m. EDT<\/p>\n
AMHERST, Mass. \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
It looks like the sort of thing one might use to make contact with extraterrestrials, or perhaps Satan, if you\u2019re 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: \u201cAtmospheric Infrasound Research in Progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s collecting atmospheric infrasound \u2014 the extremely long-wave sounds from ocean currents, volcanoes, glaciers and even data centers \u2014 that can travel hundreds to thousands of miles and are all around us, even if we can\u2019t perceive them.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 such as the choruses of rats and the pulses of bats \u2014 is above it. Yet another category of sound, which most of the world\u2019s insects use to communicate, travels inaudibly through solids.<\/p>\n
Knowledge of these sounds isn\u2019t new. Humans first detected infrasound in the late 19th century, for example, and monitored it to track nuclear tests during the Cold War. But recent advances in artificial intelligence, signal-processing software and the miniaturization of sensors make it relatively cheap and easy to remove the noise and isolate these sounds.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no Silence in the Earth,\u201d wrote Emily Dickinson, who lived not far from these woods.<\/p>\n
Now, science is proving her correct.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re evolved to have a narrow perceptual range of what we need to know,\u201d House says, \u201cand we\u2019re just oblivious to the rest.\u201d But when you realize you\u2019re bathed in soundwaves from far away, \u201cyour sense of the local expands.\u201d You feel that you are part of something larger.<\/p>\n
We lose our human-centric view of the world as we realize that even the smallest of creatures are \u201ctalking\u201d to each other. We feel insignificant when we hear an ocean storm hundreds of miles away.<\/p>\n
House, with his $2,000-setup in the woods, has made an album<\/a>, \u201cEveryday Infrasound in an Uncertain World,\u201d featuring the incoming sounds on a single day. He has also captured natural and human-made sounds in isolation. With his permission, I\u2019m sharing some here.<\/p>\n \u201cThe planet is speaking to us,\u201d he says. And this is what it is saying.<\/p>\n A symphony of sounds<\/p>\n House\u2019s album is haunting and unsettling. (When I played it at home, the cats ran away.)<\/p>\n You might pick up on elements that resemble a squeaky gate swinging on its hinges, the footsteps of giants, an empty can rattling down the street, a slide whistle, drumming, wind blowing, a missile falling from the sky.<\/p>\n Listen to an excerpt from Brian House\u2019s album, \u201cEveryday Infrasound in an Uncertain World\u201d<\/p>\n In other places on the album, there is popping and clicking and zooming, what sounds like garbled voices rising and falling, a heartbeat, a seagull, shrieking, rumbling. Browp. Thump. Boom. Crunch. Bowch.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what\u2019s happening all the time,\u201d House says.<\/p>\n Long-waved sounds of nature<\/p>\n When we listen to infrasound, it\u2019s not the sound we typically associate with a thing, such as the crashing of the ocean surf or the thunder of a storm. Common sounds have wavelengths only inches or a few feet long. But infrasound waves are often hundreds of feet long. They can travel great distances without being absorbed by the atmosphere.<\/p>\n The infrasound coming from the ocean is called a \u201cmicrobarom.\u201d The interaction of wind and surface waves create something reminiscent of a background heartbeat. Sometimes it sounds like ripples of thunder or the echoes of an explosion.<\/p>\n The infrasound from a storm front, caused by clashing air masses, sounds like a fighter jet or a clap of thunder. But the infrasound from actual thunder sounds like a wimpy \u201cbloop.\u201d The jet and thunder sounds are joined by muffled thumps, pops and cracks.<\/p>\n Listen to the infrasound from a storm front<\/p>\n The infrasound from a glacier, which House recorded while in Svalbard, Norway, is made of a series of thuds and knocks, with orchestral tones in the background. None of this comes from the visible calving of ice but rather from the movements deep within. Each \u201ccrack,\u201d lasting one second in the sped-up recording, is actually a full minute long.<\/p>\n The volcanic infrasound, which House took from publicly available U.S. Geological Survey data from a 2021 eruption in Tonga, sounds like a wave crashing on a beach. But these are, in fact, the pressure waves, caused by the ejection of rocks and ash, that traveled thousands of miles. Because the frequency was extremely low, House sped it up by 960 times rather than the usual 60 times.<\/p>\n The sounds of human activity<\/p>\n House\u2019s recordings reveal that we are changing the planet in ways we can\u2019t always perceive.<\/p>\n For Earth\u2019s first 4.5 billion years, give or take, only nature could produce infrasound. But human industrial activity has altered the soundscape of the planet as surely as it has altered the climate. Studies suggest that intense levels of human-generated infrasound can cause symptoms such as nausea and dizziness, and could even be used as weapons.<\/p>\n A train\u2019s infrasound resembles a jet approaching and then screaming past, with its Doppler effect. (Actual jets don\u2019t generate noticeable infrasound at all.) A helicopter sounds like a slide whistle \u2014 generated by the air currents, not the engine. A data center, with its massive power and cooling systems, produces an almost soothing hum, while industrial HVAC systems combine to form a discordant droning.<\/p>\n High-frequency nature<\/p>\n At the other end of the spectrum, animals communicate at frequencies too high for us to hear naturally. House recorded rats in the New York subway and then slowed down the recording by 24 times, to bring it into our hearing range. The result, in his telling: \u201cThere are cries of joy and excitement, and there are shouts of warning, admonishment and displeasure. Percussive chatter mixes with plaintive questioning, and most relatable of all are the occasional bouts of laughter.\u201d<\/p>\n I am less sure about what the animals are saying, but they are definitely singing and squawking, solo and in groups, and variously sounding like they are barking, howling and sounding a foghorn.<\/p>\n The technology is relatively accessible. For $179 you can get the Echo Meter Touch 2<\/a> from Wildlife Acoustics. Plug it into your phone and it allows you to hear bats calling in short pulses of about 10 per second. When the sound is played at 1\/20th speed, you can hear big brown bats chirping and clicking rhythmically, in different tones.<\/p>\n Communicating through solids<\/p>\n The more science advances, the more it seems that everything is talking. Plants emit airborne sounds<\/a> when under stress. Coral larvae navigate toward the sound of healthy reefs<\/a>. Fish<\/a> and turtles vocalize. A nonprofit called the Earth Species Project<\/a> is using artificial intelligence to decode the language of animals so we can understand what they are saying to each other.<\/p>\n