“The sound mix you produced for this preserve is absolutely incredible.  I would like to move into that room for the rest of my days.”

     - a visitor to the soundscape room

“Visitors sit in a chapel-like space, close their eyes and immerse themselves in eight minutes of sounds recorded at the edge of Phelps Lake: barking coyotes, thumping grouse, a bear scratching itself on a tree, buzzing insects, whistling wind, a thunderstorm. It’s very moving.”

     - The Bend Bulletin, June 3rd  2009

Visitors sit on two curved benches while listening to the ten minute soundscape piece. The arrangement of speakers allows for complex spatial placement of sounds. Rain patters on leaves above us as it splats onto muddy forest floor below. Thunder erupts from the west and rumbles through our seats into the east. Insects circle our heads before taking off into the sky. Aspen leaves quake above us in the wind while their trunks, straining in the wind, creak around us.

Soundscape was commissioned as a permanent installation to heighten visitor awareness of the aural landscape of the preserve. The ten minute piece invites visitors to immerse themselves in the beauty and diversity of sound on the preserve. Composed entirely from nature and wildlife sounds recorded in the Grand Teton National Park, the piece attempts simultaneously to track changes through a twenty four hour cycle while passing through each of the four seasons focusing on four primary habitats, forest, meadow, wetland and lake.

I travelled seven times to the Grand Teton National Park to record nature and wildlife sounds for an installation at The Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve. I spent a week in each season in the wilderness listening, recording and learning. Most of the recording happened between 2am and 7am  so I got to witness the wilderness at a time of day few of us see. It was magical.

The acoustically pristine Soundscape listening room lives in a wing of the new visitor’s center. It’s extremely quiet and narrow slit windows cast muted light around the circular listening area. It has the feeling of a chapel. Four speakers overhead, four speakers at ear level, and two sub-woofers create a three dimensional sound environment in which sounds move not only left to right and rear to front, but floor to ceiling and ceiling to floor.

The Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve is a reflection of Laurance Rockefeller’s life-long commitment to making areas of natural scenic beauty accessible to the public. He strongly believed that nature has the power to restore and sustain the human spirit. It was his hope that, by experiencing this spiritual and emotional renewal, visitors to the Preserve would become aware of the importance of nature in their own lives and acknowledge their roles in acting as good stewards of the land.

Laurance S. Rockefeller left an endowment to create the natural preserve on his family’s ranch. The Grand Tetons were once a part of that ranch until the Rockefeller family donated the land to the United States as national parkland. The preserve opened to the public in the summer of 2008.