JOYCE — Gordon Hempton listened all over the world for silence. The quietest spot he found was close to home.
A three-mile walk into the Hoh Rain Forest takes him to a place of peace marked with a small red rock, measuring exactly one square inch, given to him by the late David Four Lines, a Quileute tribal elder.
It marks a spot atop a moss covered log 678 feet above sea level that Hempton calls the quietest place on earth.
From that one spot quiet radiates for hundreds of miles, he said.
It is the one square inch center of Hempton’s quiet battle against noise.
He is working to have airlines agree to detour around the park and to have park management include silence as a natural resource.
His One Square Inch project is a means of supporting those goals.
Hempton, 53, is one of fewer than a dozen people in the world who could be called acoustical ecologists.
He records nature sounds, licenses them to various businesses and museums and gives advice on how to use them in everything from video games and television shows to museum exhibits.
In 25 years, Hempton has recorded natural sounds in every continent in the world except for Antarctica.
He has collected a huge earful — some 3,000 gigabits of material.
Hempton — who moved to Joyce from Port Angeles four years ago and from Seattle to Port Angeles in 1992 — got into the work in his late 20s, he said.
“I love to listen mainly because I was such a bad listener all my life,” he said.
“It wasn’t until I was 27 or so that I decided to tune in.
“I decided I wanted to do this at all costs and so designed my life around becoming a better listener.”
Listening well doesn’t mean focusing on a particular sound, he said.
“That’s contrary to what listening is about,” he explained.
“That’s what seeing is. We study an object and if there’s something blocking it, we don’t see it.
“To be a listener means to take it all in. There is no frame, and one frame rarely blocks another sound.
“It’s a 360-degree experience.”
