Range of Light

Study in clouds by John Constable

English landscape painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable were two noted observers of the nature of light.

The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything.
― John Constable

Both painters rendered landscapes bathed in what art historian Richard J. Boyle aptly described as "the veil of atmosphere".

Turner and Constable evoked the intensity of light and keen observation of Nature found in the poems of their Romantic era contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
― John Keats, excerpt from the poem Hyperion

John Muir wrote of the quality of light he encountered in the High Sierras:

And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.
― The Yosemite, chapter 1.

Late afternoon in the Eastern Sierra

Photo by Michael Hogarth

REFERENCES

• The Yosemite, John Muir, 1912.
• J. M. W. Turner, Wikipedia.
• John Constable, Wikipedia.

Sound and Soundscape

Listening is one way to attune to nature's rhythms.

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears;
The earth is but the music of the spheres.
― George Byron

Sound comes to us as sensory and perceptual events both sequential and ongoing. Distinguishing and appreciating sounds in nature is a matter of attention and practice.

Sound arrives to our ears as mechanical waves. Waves enter our ears to be translated by neural action. Air waves are transformed into perception. Psychoacoustics is a branch of science dedicated to understanding sound perception.

The brain works to locate sounds. The brain must also work to distinguish a particular sound from a sea of sounds. The range and origins of sounds in nature are varied and rich.

Soundscape

Soundscape is a term coined by composer R. Murray Schafer. It describes the elements and origins of the summation of perceived sound.

Soundscape ecology is a subfield of ecology that studies sounds in the landscape. A soundscape is considered as the sum of three contributing components:

1. Biophony - sound generated by terrestrial and marine organisms;
2. Geophony - sound generated by wind, rain, earth-movements, or other physical processes; and
3. Anthrophony - sound generated by human activities.

Natural sounds have biological and non-biological origins. We imagine the vocalizations of birds, whales, or coyotes to be the summation of sounds in nature, but there are often under-appreciated, non-biological sources of sound such as:

• lake ice cracking and popping as it expands and contracts;
• aspen leaves fluttering in the wind; or
• ocean waves breaking on the shore.

Sound Appreciation

John Muir wrote extensively in his journals about the sound he experienced in the Yosemite Valley:

July 8. "All the Merced streams are wonderful singers, and Yosemite is the centre where the main tributaries meet...Sing on, Brave Tamarack Creek, fresh from your snowy fountains, plash and swirl and dance to your fate in the sea; bathing, cheering every living thing along your way."

Nevada Fall, a 600 ft. slanting descent. Merced Canyon, Yosemite

REFERENCES

• My First Summer in the Sierra and Selected Essays. John Muir, 1911.
• Purdue Soundscape Ecology Project, Purdue University.
• Soundscape, Wikipedia.
• Soundscape Ecology, Wikipedia.
• Studying Nature's Rhythms: Soundscape Ecologists Spawn New Field, National Science Foundation.