Forest Soundscape

A landscape looks like one thing and sounds like another. The sounding version has more in it, is harder to photograph, and takes about twenty minutes to notice.

How it runs

1. Spread out. Each person finds a spot out of sight of the others, within a whistle’s reach. Mark the boundary clearly.
2. Put an X in the middle of your page. That is you. For twenty minutes, every sound you hear gets a mark on the page in the direction it came from and at roughly the distance you judge it to be. Use symbols, not words — a squiggle for wind, a dash for a distant car, a shape for each bird.
3. No talking, no walking, no phones. One whistle brings everyone back.
4. In pairs, walk each other through the maps. Point at a mark; say what it was; say whether you knew what it was.
5. Overlay. Lay all the maps together on the ground so the group sees the same twenty minutes from twelve positions.

Facilitator notes

• Twenty minutes feels impossible for the first six and short by the fifteenth. Do not shorten it.
• The most productive question afterwards is not “what did you hear” but “what did you hear that you could not name” — it opens the door to field guides, bird language and coming back tomorrow.
• Do it once at midday and once at dusk in the same place and the two maps make the argument about time of day better than any lecture on the wheel.