I work in the same style as classic landscape photographers. You find the right perspective, and then you wait until the light is right. I do the same. I find the right location, and then I wait for the sound, the atmosphere to be right, and for the space to be revealed.

Noise pollution is basically defined as the presence of simple information that makes it impossible to hear all the other more delicate - and often more important - information. Noise pollution creates, if you will, dumb environments. Our industrial areas, many of our downtown urban areas, are dumb acoustic environments. Very simple, very loud, often unhealthy.

Whenever you're in a natural system and you're making sound, you are putting yourself at risk. As you go up the evolutionary ladder, from insects to frogs to birds and on up into mammals, the higher intelligence recognizes that when you vocalize, you put yourself at risk. So mammals generally vocalize or make noise much more rarely than, let's say, insects or frogs. And when they do, and put themselves at risk, it has to be worth the risk, and have true meaning, such as signaling during a hunting party, calling in prey, some religious or spiritual ceremony, something like that.

An acoustic ecologist is a listener who is aware that sound is information. It's information because it's created by events, events produce sound, and that sound has all kinds of data, if you will, that conveys what event occurred, what the materials were, whether it was sudden, slow, loud, in what direction. And because it is information, we can think of it as a message. The acoustic ecologist studies information systems that are both intentional and sometimes wild.

"Acoustic ecologist" is basically a fancy name for someone who tries to become a better listener. Not just listening to those thoughts, ideas, and productions of human intention, but listening to places - whether it's an urban environment, residential, industrial, or even the farthest corner of the world, in one of our last great quiet places where we can listen to the pure sounds of nature without any human-caused noise intrusions.

Not only does the modern person often think that sight is more important than sound - there's no objective evidence to indicate that. Many people, even audiologists who study the science of human speech and hearing, have assumed for a long time that the human ear evolved to hear the human voice, rather than the voice changing to fit the human ear. And the human ear is actually not a perfect match if we map its sensitivity to the different frequencies in the human range of hearing; it's an unequal curve, it's kind of a wavy line.

I'm very thankful, hearing impairment or not, that I've brought listening into my life. I will never say that I'm a good listener, however. Thinking that I was a good listener was one thing that kept me from being a good listener. It's a very dangerous thought. I just want to be better.