characteristic sounds. In the Midwest, thunderstorms build up and roll across the flat land, bringing rains that can nearly drown out the sounds of a city. In the Maritime Northwest, on the other hand, the rains fall continuously in the winter in a manner described by the natives as drizzle or mist, and the loudest noise created by rainfall may be from a defective drainspout. The winds, which are themselves without content acoustically, blow across land and sea creating songs from geographic instruments they encounter — through forests, up against rocky headlands, through narrow passages and across wide deserts. In the prairies, the Traditionally, the natural sounds of a region defined for the inhabitants their sense of place as much as, or more than, the visual environment. wind is an enormous wind harp as portrayed in this description from Saskatchewan: The wind could be heard in a more persistent song now, and out along the road separating the town from the prairie itfluted gently along the wires that ran down the highway... the night wind had two voices; one that keened along the pulsing wires, [and] the prairie one that throated long and deep. In each region the sounds change with the seasons, as the streams swell and shrink with rains and melting snows, as leaves fill out the trees and then die, as the earth tilts and the wind directions shift, sections of the orchestra wake up on cue, like hibernating animals, to contribute their pcirt. During winter, 30 to 50 percent of the surface of the earth is covered by snow and ice for a length of time and this brings a dramatic change in the soundscape. In some regions where the winter is modified by air coming from off the sea, the snow that falls is wet; it may fall quietly to the ground, sUencing the earth. In drier and colder climates the earth may find itself pelted with stinging "com" snow. If one walks in wet snow, it squeaks; in dry snow and ice the sound is a crunch. In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak described a walk in a Russian winter: "The snow screeched angrily at each step." The forests of the earth each have their own sound- scape. The mstling noise of deciduous forests is quite different from the tall and silent old-growth fir forests of western North America, described by Canadian poet Emily Carr: The silence of our western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. Ifyou spoke your voice came back to you as your face is thrown back to you in a mirror. It seemed as if the forest loas so full of silence that there was no ' room for sounds. The birds who lived there were birds ofprey— eagles, hawks, owls. Had a bird loosed his throat the others would have pounced. As natives in a region we are enveloped in that region's soundscape. Transplanted to another soundscape, even if it is basically natural and "peaceful," we may be disturbed by sounds as our auditory system responds to new information. In the jungles of Burma, Somerset Maugham discovered a raucous, teeming life that was difficult to adjust to: "... the noise of the crickets and frogs and the cries of birds produced a tremendous din so that till you become accustomed to it you may find it hard to sleep." He concluded, ". . . there is no silence in the east." RURAL SOUNDSCAPES While many of us seek out places where we can be surrounded by the natural soundscape, most of us would not like to live in such places permanently. Instead, we might seek — or even just long for — a pastoral environment where the soundscape is filled with the sounds of nature and the more familiar and meaningful sounds of human activity. The distinct quality of the pastoral and mral sound environment is that sounds are discrete and interrupted. The "keynote" sounds, as they are referred to by acoustic designers, are sounds that define a soundscape for its
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