of national-security driven exploration on both sides of the Cold War that, aided by rapid advances in computer/digital technologies, soon encompassed the oceans, the Antarctic, and inner and outer space. Guiseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison even urged astrophysicists, in 1959, to listen for the interstellar signals that they believed were indeed out there. Only a few months later, in April 1960, Frank Drake sent the first radio transmission from Earth to outer space, aptly naming his work Project Ozma for a character in The Wizard of Oz who lives in a place “very far away, difficult to reach and populated by strange and exotic beings.”

Yet the modern mind also had a strange fascination for silence, including the question of whether or not such a thing could be saidrepresented in nature’s chorus.

The first environmental sound recordings to break through from science into the mainstream, and to connect with a burgeoning environmental consciousness, were the humpback whale songs released to the public in the 1970s. The United States Navy had data on whale songs as early as the 1950s, collected as a byproduct of an underwater acoustic surveillance system installed to monitor Soviet submarines and sonar codes. These recordings were de-classified in the late 1960s, while the scientist Scott McVay published a ground-breaking article on the data in 1971. Since we live in an era in which the slogan “save the whales” has become a green cliché to many (a flashback reference to “whale song” even made it into a The Simpsons episode), it is important for