Travelers frequently talk about seeing the world, but it’s past time for us to learn to listen to it as well.
On a rainy summer day, I took the train to Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, and hiked through the squelching mud to a mediaeval fortress perched high atop a cliff. I arrived at the main viewpoint of the Grotte aux Fées (Cave of the Fairies) after descending into a dark cavern and twisting through its dimly lit corridors: a plunging 77m waterfall that shoots from an underground limestone ledge into a translucent pool. I closed my eyes and took out my phone to record the rush of dreamy reality before me as the splatter echoed through the cavern and soaked my jacket.
I had come looking for a sound, not a sight. Throughout my travels, I’ve discovered that I collect sound recordings in the same way that other people collect souvenirs. On my phone, I have recordings of soft, muffled footsteps and whispers inside The Art Institute of Chicago; ferry toots from a steamboat at the harbour in Evian, France; merchants and shoppers haggling in rapid-fire Italian at Rome’s Fontanella Borghese market; chirping birdsongs and the rush of wind whistling through the redwoods in Marin, California; and much more.
I started doing this as a quirky and artistic way to help me remember some of the most interesting details of my trips, similar to how some travellers take photos of landscapes or their food. I’ve discovered that listening to these recordings allows me to recall each location and moment in a way that scrolling through images does not. This may be due to the fact that our brains remember sound differently than other types of senses.
According to Dr. James Giordano, a professor of neurobiology and biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC, our brains process information and turn it into memories by receiving it through our senses, encoding it, and storing it in the same way that a computer does. When we receive and encode information, it is relatively short-term in nature; however, when we store it, it becomes long-term memory. Echoic memory refers to the information we receive and process through our ears.
“Consider the brain to be a space and time machine. It enables us to literally transport ourselves back and forth in time and across space “Giordano explained. “Echoic memory is exactly what the name implies: it is an echo of something that happened.” Giordano explained that our brains convert sound into memory in nearly the same way that we do with other senses, but it appears that we remember what we see and touch far better than what we hear.
In one ear and out the other, a group of students at the University of Iowa participated in two experiments in which they listened to sounds, looked at images, and held objects. Students were asked to recall whether various stimuli were the same or different after a set period of time in the first experiment. They were then asked to recall the sounds, images, and objects after an hour, a day, and a week. In both cases, students’ recollection of sound was far worse than their tactile or visual memories, and the gap widened as time passed. This study appears to suggest that if we take a picture of something and record the sound of the same thing while travelling, the image will appear more familiar to us when we look back at it on our phones, whereas the sound will appear fresher and, in a way, newer or more striking. Perhaps this explains why my eyes glaze over when I scroll through images I recall vividly, whereas my mind awakens more readily to distant sounds that transport me back in time.
Because our sound memories are poor, it may be more important to record sounds than photos in order to truly recall the experience. Amy Poremba, the University of Iowa professor who conducted the study, appears to agree. “I visited the Big Island of Hawaii, which has black volcanic beaches. Black volcanic rock beaches have a distinct sound. When the waves hit them, they make a tinkling-glass sound.” Poremba was so taken with the sound that she grabbed her phone and recorded it. She said she “listened to it over and over again” after flying back home. Giordano explained that, just as the smell of certain foods can transport us back to a particularly memorable meal you may have had while travelling, sounds can do the same. “Our experiences with specific scenarios are frequently linked to other aspects and dimensions of the experience,” Giordano explained. “Hearing specific church bells can be very evocative for you. It transports us to that location not only physically but also emotionally.”
It appears that Poremba and I are not alone in our belief that soundscapes tell a story. In recent decades, there has been a greater understanding of how learning to listen to the world around us can reveal a completely different type of cultural immersion.
The Japanese Ministry of Environment famously conducted a nationwide project titled 100 Soundscapes of Japan: Preserving Our Heritage in 1996. The initiative highlighted “the richness and wide variety of Japanese nature and culture,” ranging from drifting ice in the Sea of Okhotsk to flapping cranes in a sanctuary in Tsurui to the handweaving of ancient ramie textiles in Fukushima. The goal was to get Japanese people to go out and hear these sounds for themselves. Lapland, Finland, launched a soundscape campaign in 2020 that featured similarly unique sounds to the region, such as a creaky wooden sleigh being driven by huskies, whittling wood in a forest, and reindeer clopping. And organisations such as Quiet Parks International (QPI) have recently formed to promote “quiet tourism” around the world, encouraging visitors to not only see but also listen to the world.