Recordings from the Western Soundscape Archive are featured throughout the new Natural History Museum of Utah. The $100 million dollar museum officially opened to the public on November 17th following years of work and anticipation. Soundscape archive librarian Jeff Rice worked closely with the museum and recorded and designed sounds for six major dioramas and several other listening areas within the building. Many recordings were also supplied by archive consultant Dr. Kevin Colver.

The Western Soundscape Archive is featured in the November 2011 issue of Outside magazine. Read the article on the newsstand, or view the story online.

The Western Soundscape Archive is featured in the February 21, 2011 issue of High Country News. View the article online at: http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.3/jeff-rice-collects-natures-noises. Or watch an audio slideshow featuring an interview with Western Soundscape Archive librarian Jeff Rice.

The Western Soundscape Archive (WSA) celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Take an audio tour of the Refuge on our Arctic Soundscape page. You will find almost 60 hours of audio recordings from the Refuge gathered by a team of researchers in June 2006. During that time of year, the birds and other animals call throughout the day and night, taking advantage of the constant daylight that occurs in northern latitudes during this season. The result is one of the world's premier natural soundscapes. View press release.

Tune in to Western Soundscapes, a 16-week series on public radio station KUER in Salt Lake City. The series airs Wednesday mornings at 7:30 AM and features recordings and interviews from the Western Soundscape Archive. Also listen to occasional stories from the archive on national radio programs such as Living on Earth, Hearing Voices from NPR, and To the Best of Our Knowledge.

Site update: The Western Soundscape Archive now exceeds 2000 audio recordings representing more than 90% of the West’s bird species, all of the region’s frogs and toads and approximately a quarter of its mammal species (based on NatureServe figures for the 11 contiguous western states). You will also find a growing collection of longer ambient recordings (“soundscapes”) that are searchable by location and state. Other site additions include new, easy to navigate species distribution maps and more than 10,000 spectrograms from the National Park Service sound monitoring program.  

The Western Soundscape Archive is featured in Sunset magazine. In the magazine’s January 2010 issue, archive librarians “share picks for listening to nature” and track some of the disappearing sounds of the West. The archive is also profiled this month in the Deseret News and Sojourns magazine.

The Western Soundscape Archive is featured in the Los Angeles Times. View the article at: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/04/nation/na-soundscapes4 .

Recordings from the Western Soundscape Archive can be heard as part of What is Missing?, a new exhibit by world-renown artist Maya Lin, opening September 17th at the California Academy of Sciences. What is Missing is "a multi-sited artwork dedicated to bringing awareness to the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss," writes Lin. "It will bring attention not just to species that have gone extinct, but to things we do not even realize we have lost, linking endangered species to the threatened habitats and interconnected ecosystems that will most likely disappear unless we act to protect them." Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., created What is Missing? as her last public memorial, and solicited recordings of vanishing species and habitats from around the world. The Western Soundscape Archive was among a number of groups and agencies involved with the project, and contributed audio recordings from Yellowstone National Park and the Yellowstone River.

Site update: The WSA now includes representative sounds of more than 90% of the West's bird species, 95% of the region’s frog and toad species, and more than 100 different types of mammals and reptiles. You’ll also find many new ambient recordings from a wide variety of remote and wild places, from desert and coastal environments to the Rocky Mountains.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service features Western Soundscape Archive in
Wild Angles, News from the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Read the media tip sheet at Howl that Song Again

A THOUSAND CALLS OF THE WILD CAPTURED

See: Press Release

View Video

The Western Soundscape Archive website now exceeds 1000 recordings! Begun in late 2007, the collection has quickly grown to include representative recordings from eighty percent of the West’s bird species, ninety percent of the region’s vocalizing frogs and toads, and dozens of mammal and reptile species. Also search our recently expanded collection of ambient recordings from locations across the West. The Western Soundscape Archive is a free, non-commercial web-site focusing on the sounds of animal species from the western United States. It is housed at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. See About this site for more information.

Sounds from the Western Soundscape Archive can be heard as part of the exhibit Wild Birds of the American Wetlands: Photographs by Rosalie Winard at the Utah Museum of Natural History. The exhibit is scheduled to run from November 1, 2008 through February 22, 2009.

Western Soundscape Archive is featured by the Associated Press. The article appears in more than 300 news outlets across the country.