Each year, as summer winds down in the United States, outdoor enthusiasts make the most of weekends to walk, bike, or hike, taking in awe-inspiring landscapes. These days, with the gentle urging of an unlikely ensemble of scientists and artists, more Americans are also discovering another joy: tuning in to soundscapes.

Soundwalking – exploring the environment through attentive listening – is drawing quite the following. In Chicago, the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology holds annual soundwalks in public parks, led by artists and naturalists. These events bring awareness to the experience of listening, according to program director Noé Cuéllar, enhancing “our sense of place, moment, and shared experience.”

“We all listen differently, and when we listen together, we discover new ways of listening,” he wrote after the 2025 event.

The concept of soundwalking has expanded greatly since it was first introduced in the 1970s by a Canadian musician and composer. Using rudimentary technology, scientists have since recorded and identified numerous “languages” in the natural world – among elephants, blue whales, even tree roots. This century’s rapid advances with smaller, cheaper, and more sensitive instruments, as well as the ability to store and share millions of recordings online, have widened access to what’s been described as Nature’s “biophony.” Much like a symphony, a biophony comprises complex harmonies and rhythms – performed by an orchestra of birds, animals, insects, plants, as well as wind, water, rocks, and soil.

Many of these sounds, inaudible to humans until now, communicate intriguing and often important meaning.

California-based audio ecologist Bernie Krause was among the first to capture the changing soundscape of a forest after selective logging. Even though it appeared largely unchanged visually, his recordings confirmed that the rich soundscape – of birds, critters, leaves, and branches – degraded substantially.

“Environmental listening ... becomes a way of making declining biodiversity more tangible to the public and, ultimately, to decision-makers,” according to Jacek Smolicki, who introduced the Walking Festival of Sound in the Boston area this year during a fellowship at Harvard University’s ArtLab.

“Where there are sounds, there are relations,” he wrote in Harvard Design Magazine, describing how Indigenous or nomadic peoples relate to environmental sounds. To the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia, Mr. Smolicki wrote, “the loud roaring of the wind is not a disruption from which one should seek shelter, but the voice of the landscape.” Listening to and interpreting that voice offers them clues to changing weather and navigation guidance.

Mr. Krause has long asserted there is “musicianship” in the wild. Each species in an ecosystem, he has written, stakes out a “sonic bandwidth – to blend or contrast – much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”

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Being both an eyewitness and an earwitness to nature calls for patience, slowing down, and deep listening. Such traits help elevate interactions with the natural world – and might do the same among neighbors, colleagues, and even political partisans.

As Kathleen Dean Moore, a professor of philosophy and an environmentalist at Oregon State University, has written, “To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it. ... To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.”