Save Our Sounds
In some libraries, noise is good
By Susan Milius
“I’m a bad person to go to a movie with,” says Greg Budney, curator of the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at Cornell University. He sometimes reacts to details that other people miss. He now rustles around his desk for a list he keeps of moments in movies that have disturbed him. “In Black Hawk Down, that scene where Delta Force is leaving Mogadishu and a soldier tries to call his wife,” Budney says, “you hear a chiffchaff in the background!” In real life, the little birds called chiffchaffs live in Europe.
“There were Pacific tree frogs in The Hunt for Red October–in a Maine estuary,” he says. “It was horrible.”