DAVID PLUTH/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION (GONG ROCKS), MICHAEL J. LUTCH (HALL); SERGEY LOBODENKO/GETTY IMAGES (ALL ILLUSTRATIONS); PREVIOUS PAGES: NEVENA TSVETANOVA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (AMPHITHEATER)- SERENGETI, TANZANIA
Gong Rocks
A xylophone made from stone
might seem an unusual musical
instrument, more likely to produce
a disappointing clunk than a
sonorous bong, but certain stones
can make beautiful notes if the
microscopic structure of the rock
is right. Strike the rock gongs in
the Serengeti, and you get a won-
derful metallic clang. These large
boulders are covered in percussive
marks from thousands of years of
use. Such “rock music” provides
some of the earliest evidence of
sounds our ancestors made.48 NATGEOTRAVEL.COM
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In a world dominated by spectacle, what are the auditory equivalents of the Eiffel Tower,
Stonehenge, or the Grand Canyon? Searching for an answer, we tuned into Trevor Cox, a
British professor of acoustic engineering and an explorer of Earth’s most amazing sound
sites. “On vacation some years ago, I was leafing through a travel guide for sights to see
and experiences to be had,” he tells us. “It suddenly struck me that the book mentioned
nothing about sound. It’s easy to overlook how important what we hear is to our travels.
After all, we have no ‘earlids’ and so our brain is always listening to the soundscape. If your
ears chose your next holiday destination, where would they go?” Here he reveals 15 of his
favorite places to visit for extraordinary sounds.
The red dot
on the volume
control knob
indicates where
each sound
experience falls
on our scale of
quiet (left) to
loud (right).N
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