Berklee professor makes audio map of the White Mountains

I’ve done stories about folks making geo-tagged maps with photos and data – here’s a guy making one with sounds:

For three weeks, the Berklee College of Music professor will traverse the national forest, ferreting out the best sounds with which to illustrate the nearly 1,200-square-mile wooded, mountainous terrain that extends from eastern New Hampshire to western Maine.

This year’s White Mountain National Forest Artist in Residence, Wilkes is creating “sound snapshots” of the landscape. His field recordings, some originally as long as 45 minutes, will be whittled down to 30 to 90 seconds, and uploaded to an online map of the forest that the public can access and listen to anytime. (The residency is a joint collaboration between the national forest service and the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire.)

Wilkes will tape the trilling of birds and the pounding of waterfalls. He’ll also record the sounds made when humans come into contact with the forest – of hikers chatting, or the roar of cars passing through the Albany Covered Bridge.

The story from today’s Concord Monitor is here.