An unapologetic plea to save nature’s symphony.
This is an invitation to listen, to discover and rediscover the planet’s ecosystems—its forests, marshes, swamps, bogs and shorelines.

Man-made noise is increasing dramatically, encroaching on even the wildest of natural habitats. Thrushes are falling silent and the gentle murmur of a mountain stream is being swallowed by the sounds of road traffic. Up in the boreal forest, wolverines cease their growling when logging truck convoys head for the sawmills.

The symphony of life is shrinking, losing texture and richness at the same rate humans are laying claim to the land around them. We are in the throes of a bioacoustic erosion that is alarming biologists around the world. Will an increase in noise pollution herald complete anthropophony—a world that is deaf to the sounds of nature?

Michel Leboeuf, born April 30, 19621 in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada. He is a science popularizer and writer. In addition to several fiction titles published for youth or adult audiences, he is also the author of guides and documentary works in the natural sciences. He was the editor-in-chief of Nature sauvage magazine from 2008 to 2018 as well as the editor-in-chief of QuébecOiseaux magazine for more than 20 years.

As a holder of a master's degree in biological sciences from the University of Quebec in Montreal, his fields of publication and interest cover forest botany, ornithology and general ecology. He is particularly interested in biogeography and questions of fragmentation of natural environments. His essays Le Québec en crumbs and Nous n'irs plus au bois earned him twice in 2011 and 2013 the Hubert-Reeves Prize, awarded to the best popular science work in the French language in Canada.

First Movement: The Sound to Upper America
Chapter 1. A brief sound history of Quebec
Chapter 2. The four seasons of sound

Second Movement: The Nature of Sound
Chapter 3. Geophony, biophony, anthropophony
Chapter 4. What is sound?

Third Movement: The Animal Soundscape
Chapter 5. The hearing of beasts
Chapter 6. War songs
Chapter 7. Songs of love.
Chapter 8. Contact, alarm and distress calls

Fourth Movement: The Plant Soundscape
Chapter 9. Trees are sentient beings
Chapter 10. The hearing of plants

Fifth Movement: The Song of the Trees
Chapter 11. The new rumor of the world
Chapter 12. The background noise of extinctions
Chapter 13. The Homogeocene era
Chapter 14. Quartet for the End of Time
Chapter 15. A new partition