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Open Sound New Orleans

[caption id="attachment_233" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Music, ambiences, and stories from N'orleans! "][/caption] Yet another ear-opener in the recent surge of online soundmaps, and by gorey, this one might just be my favorite of them all! Could be due to a bit more personal connection to the city in question (visits, friends who've lived ...

Ontario Study to Probe Health Effects of New Wind Farm

For the first time, researchers have designed and initiated a broad-scale study that will provide enough data to begin to answer one of the key questions looming over wind energy development: do turbines close to residences create negative health effects? The researchers sent health surveys to 1000 residents near a ...

NPS Soundscape Studies in Yosemite and Beyond

Nice find of the day: A page on the Yosemite website describing the work they did over the past two summers to assess the soundscapes in the park. [caption id="attachment_223" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="http://www.nps.gov/yose/naturescience/soundscape.htm"][/caption] And that's not all! There's also a link to a half-hour MP3 file/podcast featuring the NPS Natural Sounds Program's ...

Global Soundmaps Bursting Out All Over

It seems like every time I turn around, there's a new global sound mapping site popping up in my browser! If you want to take a listen to the everyday sounds of this aural adventure called Planet Earth, here are three quite varied options--a click on each image below will ...

OCS Seismic Surveys Pass First Senate Hurdle–And Come Packaged with Biological Inventory

Conservationist fears that the end is neigh for the decades-long moratorium on oil and gas exploration off most of America's coastlines were ratcheted up this month by the passage of the American Clean Energy Leadership Act in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. While Senate Democrats highlight the alternative ...

Thomas Berry’s Expansive, Quiet Presence Moves On

On June 1, Thomas Berry died peacefully at his home in the Wellspring Community in Greensboro, NC. While this may have no direct bearing on the issues covered by AEI, his writings and his inspiration have been central to my ever-developing sense of self and purpose on this planet in ...

FWS Wind Farm Siting Recommendations Still Fail to Consider Noise Impacts

Call me naive, but I never imagined that the Fish and Wildlife Service would make it nearly to the conclusion of its process of developing Siting Recommendations for wind farms without any consideration of the acoustic footprint of these sprawling industrial installations. Of all the possible impacts that large wind ...

China Continues Pushback Against Lurking LFAS Ship

Throughout the spring, China has been actively complaining about the presence of the USNS Impeccable off its coast (see earlier AEInews coverage). This week, the "Bejing Review," an English-language weekly, ran a story on the controversy, playing the environmental card in its efforts to reach in international audience, though some ...

“Gliders” Coming of Age for Ocean Acoustic Monitoring

One of the more exciting new technologies to come of age in the past couple years is ocean "gliders" that can cruise the seas, silently or nearly so, while collecting data ranging from temperature and salinity to sounds. The gliders are small (roughly 6 feet long), and surface periodically to ...

Listening in on Fish: New Frontier in Biology

This one sat around for a while waiting for me to write about it, but it's pretty timeless, so here goes! One of the leaders in fish bioacoustics, Rodney Rountree, wrote a great overview piece in the Nov/Dec issue of Marine Technology Review on the groundbreaking work being done in ...