There was a sound I heard every August morning when I was a child visiting relatives outside Marion, Alabama. It began before dawn — a dense, layered chorus of insects and birds that rose and fell with the heat. By mid-morning, the fields would quiet to a steady hum punctuated by the distant sound of someone's screen door, a tractor starting up, cattle moving through a fence gate. By evening, the chorus would return, amplified.
That soundscape no longer exists. Not in the same form. Not with the same density. Development has claimed much of the farmland. The insect populations that produced those dawn and dusk choruses have declined sharply across the South, as they have across North America and Europe, driven by habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate disruption. The sounds I remember exist now only in memory — which is to say, they are already becoming history.
This is a piece about what we stand to lose when we think of cultural preservation too narrowly.
What Is a Soundscape?
The term "soundscape" was coined by the Canadian composer and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer in his 1977 book The Tuning of the World. Schafer distinguished between three components of any soundscape: geophony (sounds produced by non-biological natural forces — wind, water, thunder), biophony (sounds produced by living organisms — birdsong, insect choruses, frog calls), and anthrophony (sounds produced by human activity — speech, music, machinery, traffic).
Every historic landscape has its own soundscape — a combination of these three elements specific to its ecology, its geography, and its human history. The soundscape of the Mississippi Delta lowlands is different from the soundscape of the Blue Ridge Appalachians. The soundscape of a Lowcountry rice plantation in its active years included the sounds of rice birds, tidal water, the rhythmic labor of enslaved workers, and the creak of the floodgates. That soundscape was a dimension of the place as real — and as historically meaningful — as its buildings or its documents.
Audio spectrogram: A morning soundscape recording from a rural Alabama site, showing frequency bands for insect chorus, bird calls, and distant agricultural activity. Annotated to identify key acoustic contributors.
The Loss We Are Not Counting
Historic preservation, as it is traditionally practiced, focuses on tangible resources: buildings, landscapes, archaeological sites, objects. These are the categories established by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and administered through the National Register of Historic Places. Soundscapes, being intangible and transient, have no formal place in this framework.
But the losses are real and accelerating. A 2019 study published in Science documented a decline of approximately three billion birds in North America since 1970 — a reduction of roughly 29 percent of the total bird population. Many of the most affected species are those associated with open farmland and early successional habitats characteristic of the rural South: meadowlarks, bobwhite quail, field sparrows, whip-poor-wills. Each of these species contributed specific, identifiable sounds to the Southern rural soundscape. Their decline is a form of heritage loss.
The same pattern holds for insects. Peer-reviewed studies from North America and Europe have documented declines of 25 percent or more in acoustic diversity and intensity in natural soundscapes over a 25-year period. In the rural South, the familiar nighttime chorus of frogs, katydids, and tree crickets — sounds embedded in the literary and cultural memory of the region, from the writings of Flannery O'Connor to the recordings of Alan Lomax — is measurably diminishing.
Line graph: Population trends for key Southern rural bird species (Eastern Meadowlark, Northern Bobwhite, Eastern Whip-poor-will, Field Sparrow) from 1966–2024, based on North American Breeding Bird Survey data. Show steep declines beginning in the 1980s.
The Human Sounds That Also Disappear
The vanishing soundscape of the rural South is not only a story of ecological loss. It is also a story of cultural loss. Many of the most distinctive anthrophonic sounds of Southern rural life — the sounds produced by human communities and their labor — have disappeared along with the ways of life that generated them.
The sounds of field labor. The specific cadences of the work songs and spirituals that organized collective effort in the fields. The sound of the cotton gin during harvest season. The particular resonance of a hand-thrown bell calling workers to meals. The sound of a sweep plow turning red clay. None of these persist as living sounds — they exist only in recordings, in literature, in the fading memories of the oldest Southerners.
Alan Lomax and his father John A. Lomax understood this as early as the 1930s, when they traveled the South with recording equipment to capture folk songs, field hollers, and prison work songs before they disappeared. Their recordings, held today at the Library of Congress, are among the most significant sonic documents of American cultural history. What they preserved, we cannot re-record; the people who knew those songs, and the social conditions that produced them, are gone.
Acoustic Ecology as Preservation Practice
A growing movement within the field of acoustic ecology is developing tools and methodologies for documenting, analyzing, and preserving soundscapes before they change further. Autonomous recording units — compact, weatherproof devices that can operate continuously in the field for weeks — are deployed at historic sites to capture ambient sound. These recordings create what researchers at the Center for Global Soundscapes have called "acoustic fossils": time-stamped records of a place's sonic environment that can serve as baseline data for future comparison and as a primary source for historic research.
The SHPS is currently exploring a pilot soundscape documentation project at several sites in Perry and Dallas Counties, Alabama, with the goal of establishing baseline acoustic records before anticipated development in the region further alters the sonic environment. If you are interested in supporting this initiative, please contact us.
Photograph: Autonomous Recording Unit (Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter or similar) mounted on a fence post at the edge of an Alabama agricultural field at dusk. Natural light, sense of place.
What We Can Do
Preserving the soundscape of the rural South requires action on multiple fronts. It requires the ecological work of habitat conservation and restoration — putting land back into the condition that supports the birds, insects, and amphibians whose voices define the sonic environment. It requires the humanistic work of recording, transcribing, and archiving the human sounds that remain. And it requires an expansion of our definition of heritage to include the intangible, the ephemeral, and the acoustic.
UNESCO has recognized "intangible cultural heritage" — including oral traditions, performing arts, and social practices — as a category deserving of systematic documentation and protection since 2003. The United States has been slower to incorporate this framework into its preservation practice. But pressure is building, and the argument is straightforward: a place is not only its buildings. It is also its stories, its music, its characteristic sounds. When those sounds vanish, something essential about the place vanishes with them.
The rural South is rich in both. We are running out of time to document what remains.