1,000(ish) Sounds to Hear Before You Die

April 24, 2014 Alan Cross 0 Comments 1 min read

There are plenty of bucket list books: 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, 1,000 Things to Do, 1,000 Albums, etc, etc. And now there’s The Sound Book, written by Trevor Cox. He’s coming up with a list of things you need to hear before you shuffle off this mortal coil. From the New York Times:

In The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World (W. W. Norton & Company), he argues that you could work your way through all 1,000 items on such a list and still miss out on some of the world’s great marvels.Instead, he lets his ears guide him on an adventure to track down quirky, extreme and historically venerated phenomena of our sonic universe. In the process, he makes a lucid and passionate case for a more mindful way of listening to and engaging with musical, natural and man-made sounds.

Not every reader will want to follow Mr. Cox as he splashes around a Victorian sewer, noting how the sound of his speech spins around the inside of the curved walls “like a motorcyclist performing in a Wall of Death.” Nor will they be able to squeeze through a pipe, as he does, into an abandoned storage tank deep inside a Scottish hillside that once held seven million gallons of shipping oil. With 75 seconds of broadband reverberation time, the tank has entered the Guinness book of records as the world’s most reverberant space.