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  Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen have produced an informative and romantic gazetteer of the sounds that resonate in our souls . . . The Sound Atlas makes a too rarely considered case for a quieter kind of ecology, within which essential sounds can have broadcasting bandwidth.

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  Engelsberg Ideas

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  As guide books go, The Sound Atlas must surely stand as one of the most fascinating and creative written to date . . . Vieser and Yuen have assembled a collection of 36 essays on the subject of sound, each offering an insight into strange sounds across landscapes and imagination.

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  Geographical

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  This cosmopolitan sound collection opens with a background hiss that was detected in 1964: astronomers first blamed it on pigeons roosting in their antenna before realizing that it was cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. The book also features icebergs crackling and music mysteriously created by tapping stone pillars in a medieval Hindu temple in India.

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  Nature

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  If you want to know what a person is really like, write Vieser and Yuen in this lyrical set of essays, ask which soundscape moves them most . . . The authors ambition is to teach us how to listen . . . The whole cosmos seems to be an Aeolian harp. It is hard, given our biases and all the chatter, to hear it. This extraordinary book can help.

  '

  Fortean Times

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  A wonderful book. It is full of fascinating facts about the ocean of sound that surrounds us. If you were to pick one popular science book to read this year then I can highly recommend this one.

  '

  Halfman Halfbook

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  This is a fascinating idea: thirty-six brief essays exploring that most evanescent of phenomena, sound – how it acts on the human sensibility, how it is captured in memory and understood in culture. It begins with the sounds of deep space and winds its way through an extraordinary array of acoustic experiences from both animate and inanimate sources – moths, bats, cicadas, and whales as much as stones and seas and Eelds. The authors promise a commentary that blends personal experience with cultural insight, informed by history and science alike. I’m seriously intrigued by this, and I have a lot of trust in Reaktion as a publisher.

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  The Broken Compass

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  The world is full of noises, and The Sound Atlas is a fascinating and resonant guide to many of its most extraordinary and beautiful ones.

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  Caspar Henderson, author of A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous

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  I’ve always thought that music has nurtured me more than literature or art, but I never realized that there was such a rich soundscape outside of music! This book taught me that to “see” sound is to touch life.

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  Kyoichi Tsuzuki, photographer and journalist

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  This globe- and cosmos-spanning immersion in sonic oddities, sacred musics, slender silences, and singing stones inspires appreciation for the resonance of places, creaturely language, and what exists beyond earshot at frequencies not often considered. Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen are excellent aural tour guides on this journey, linking together different geographies and historical moments in unexpected and thoughtful ways. Their words vibrate, reminding us not only of the ways our bodies respond to sound but of how we might be more responsive and responsible for human contributions to a wild planetary soundscape.

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  Gavin Van Horn, author of The Way of Coyote and co-editor of the anthologies Kinship and Elementals

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  The Sound Atlas is an open invitation to see the world in a new way, by listening to it. Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen invite you to imagine a new map of the world that cannot be seen. This book entertains a delightful contradiction: that it might be best read with eyes closed and only ears open. It contains sonic images of real and remarkable places, imagined spaces and moments in past, present and future time, as well as richly coloured evocations of natural phenomena and acoustic artefacts, unheard places of transience and memory and man-made worlds, built from some forgotten, ephemeral auditive substance. All you need to do once you’ve read this book is close your eyes so that you can hear it all, and experience the sensory world anew.

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  Tim Hinman, soundmaker and podcaster

Preface
1 Sounds of the Universe: In Search of Harmony and Resonance
2 The Shape of Sound: The Singing Pillars of Hampi
3 An Arms Race 50 Million Years in the Making: The Shadow War of Moths and Bats
4 Caves, Sounds and the Human Imagination
5 Reconstruction of the Paleosonic: Bringing Back the Sounds of Past Life
6 Calling Out Across Far Distances: Sound Messages in Air and Water
7 Reverberations Across Time and Fate: The Oracle at Dodona
8 Word on the Wind: The Curious History of the Aeolian Harp
9 To Be Defined By Sound: Regarding the Cicada
10 Gagaku: A Music that Crosses Space and Time
11 The Sound of Glaciers
12 The Stories and Secrets of Singing Sands
13 The Humility Pipe
14 The Untameable Ritual of Keening
15 Death of a Sound and Age: Pining for the Foghorn
16 A Voice, an Echo, a Silence
17 Sounds of the Atomic Age
18 Sounds from the Deepest Artificial Point on Earth
19 The Humming Fields and Meadows of the Altai
20 Otherworldly Ordinary: The Found Sounds of the Fantastic
21 Pay Attention: On The Sounds of the In-Between
22 The Not-So-Secret Love Lives of Fish
23 Voices Within and Without
24 Listening to Traces
25 Explaining the Inexplicable: The Taos Hum
26 One Square Inch of Silence
27 Acoustics Accidental and Incidental
28 Sound Over Sight as Sense: The World According to Whales
29 Geophony, Biophony, Anthrophony: The Three Sound Types Beneath the Seven Seas
30 That’s Not What it’s Supposed to Sound Like’: Bizarre Bird Calls From All Seven Continents
31 Sensing the Sound of a Landscape through Rock and Stone
32 The Body Fields and the Works of Jacob Kierkegaard
33 aslsp: As Slow As Possible
34 From Wax and Glass, Music and Voices: The Past, Present and Future of Sound Recording
35 The Sound of Manipulation: Sonic Warfare and Propaganda
36 Humanity’s Message for Whom? The Voyager Golden Record

Bibliography
Acknowledgements

Michaela Vieser (Author)
Michaela Vieser is a writer based in Berlin. Her books include the German bestseller Tee mit Buddha (2009).

Isaac Yuen (Author)
Isaac Yuen is a Hong Kong-Canadian writer. His books include Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World (2024).