Annea Lockwood was sitting on the shore of Flathead Lake in Montana with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson . It was the summer of 1975, and it’d been a couple years since the two fell in love . Lockwood was, among other things, enamored with the way Anderson’s music could make her feel “so at peace and so part of everything .” A similar phenomenon was happening here—she was soaking in the sounds around her, like the jet skis and motorboats in the distance. She was fascinated by the difference in speed between human activity and, say, a stone striking water, rippling outwards. “What if we could hear all those rhythms,” she wondered, “as one huge rhythm?” At the heart of her sentiment is a certain truth: We can learn from the natural world. In 1973, environmentalist and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer released an album documenting the aural quality of Vancouver, a city plagued by noise pollution. “We must again seek the hi-fi soundscape, where all sounds have the proper time and place,” he declared.…