Tune Into Tree.fm: An Online Radio Station That Streams the Soothing Sounds of Forests from Around the World

Image by Snežana Tri­funović, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Walk into a for­est. Stand per­fect­ly still. Close your eyes. What do you hear? The sounds of birds, the rustling leaves, yes, yes…. But what’s that? And that? The for­est is full of sounds you can’t iden­ti­fy! Curi­ous sounds, far-away sounds, sooth­ing sounds, sounds that are not the churn­ing anx­ious wheels inside your head when you try to relax….

Expe­ri­enc­ing our­selves around trees has sev­er­al demon­stra­ble ben­e­fits, as the sci­ence of for­est bathing has taught us. Many of these have to do with visu­al, olfac­to­ry, and tac­tile plea­sures. But we must not neglect the nat­ur­al acoustic sys­tem all around us: an immer­sive expe­ri­ence in full 360-degree sound. Trees’ “vibra­to­ry ener­gies reveal humanity’s many con­nec­tions with forests,” writes David George Haskell at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can.

Forests “are full of song.”

That’s all very well for peo­ple who can go out­side. But if you’re locked down in a major city, say, or the office, or an ill-advised hol­i­day gath­er­ing, and you feel cor­ti­sol lev­els ris­ing, we’ve got you cov­ered. Back in Sep­tem­ber, we fea­tured Sounds of the For­est, a crowd­sourced audio archive gath­er­ing sounds from forests all over the world. Now, these clips are stream­ing at Tree.fm, an online radio sta­tion for tree songs in stereo. 

Streams rill, frogs hoot, birds caw and squawk in cho­rus. And then there are the trees, each species pos­sessed of its own voice, Haskell writes:

Gusts of wind soni­fy plant diver­si­ty. Oak’s voice is coarse-grained, throaty; maple’s is sandy and light. These dif­fer­ences have their ori­gins in plant evo­lu­tion and adap­ta­tion. Drought-resis­tant oak leaves are thick­er, tougher than the water-hun­gry maple. The dif­fer­ent sounds of trees on a dry moun­tain ridge and in a moist forest­ed hol­low speak to the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of the ecol­o­gy of each place. Pon­derosa pine sings sweet­ly in the winds of Cal­i­for­nia, its long nee­dles were, John Muir wrote, “finest music” and a “free, wing-like hum”. But in Col­orado, pines have evolved short­er, stiffer nee­dles to cope with heavy loads of snow and ice. There, the trees wail as their wiry nee­dles har­row the wind.

Tree.fm “is a tool that gives you instant access to the sounds of the world’s forests,” Beth Skwarec­ki writes at Life­hack­er. Many of those sounds, like the forests that pro­duced them, are endan­gered, not only from the usu­al sus­pects but also the noise pol­lu­tion of high­ways and hous­ing devel­op­ments. Lis­ten to for­est songs on repeat or hit “lis­ten to a ran­dom for­est” and be “trans­port­ed to Mada­gas­car to lis­ten to some lemurs, or to Ghana to hear some peace­ful­ly rush­ing water, or to Rus­sia, where a bird I’ve nev­er heard of puts on a vocal per­for­mance.” This is good med­i­cine. Dis­cov­er the for­est songs that best soothe your ner­vous sys­tem or delight ears at Tree.fm.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Sounds of the For­est: A Free Audio Archive Gath­ers the Sounds of Forests from All Over the World

Free: Down­load the Sub­lime Sights & Sounds of Yel­low­stone Nation­al Park

How to Find Silence in a Noisy World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness