Listen up: World Listening Day takes place Monday, July 18, and you’re invited to tune to the ear-minded world of sound exploration.

The global celebration, now in its 7th year, is sponsored by the World Listening Project, an organization devoted to understanding the world and its natural environment and cultures through listening and field recording.

This year, the day honors the electronic music pioneer, composer and accordion player Pauline Oliveros, who championed the idea of enhancing sensory perception by “deep listening.” “Take a walk at night, and walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears,” she wrote. Oliveros died last year.

Honor the ground-breaking 84-year-old sound innovator and tune in to the fun.

Hundreds of sound walks, installations and performances take place around the globe to celebrate the day. Search for some near you.

The best way to celebrate the day is to beat feet outside, find a quiet path and open your ears.

Can’t break away? Slip out online to explore some awesome recordings that will expand your aural horizons:

1. Listen deeply: In 1988, Oliveros and two colleagues descended into an abandoned cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, and recorded a drone-based improvisation, “Deep Listening.” The piece they made in the reverberating chamber 14 feet below ground crystalized Oliveros’s emerging ideas that the meaning of music extends beyond performance to include the performance space and even surrounding noise.

Listen to “Deep Listening.”

2. Listen to the world: Part radio, part art happening, Radio Aporee was invented by Berlin-based sound artist Udo Noll to help people “share ears.”

Immerse yourself in a remarkable sweep of recorded sounds from contributors around the world. A Google map includes notes from the contributor regarding the place, date, time and title of each recording.

A recent dip into the sound stream yielded a chorus of birds in the rain forest of Brazil’s Minas Gerais; two bagpipers performing in Royal Park, Brussels; a gas seller in Santiago, Chile, beating percussion on the back of his truck to announce he’s passing by. Launch today’s cache .

3. Listen to the ocean: To better understand fish and marine mammal migration, behavior and health, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, unobtrusively records the quiet evidence of Atlantic cod, haddock, whales, dolphins and seals as they court, mate, eat and ward off competitors. Where are these creatures going? How are they feeling? What the heck are they saying?

Thanks to the online sound archive, you can eavesdrop, too. Listen to the inquisitive calls of killer whales and to the odd moans and trills of a Humpback.

And who knew that cod grunt?

4. Listen to the wild: Hoping that the more people hear, the more they’ll care, the National Park Service encourages its visitors to mark World Listening Day by taking a silent sound-walk in nature, leaving distractions behind and focusing on the rich experience of natural soundscapes.

Recording systems installed in national parks to help improve management deliver valuable information about wildlife and park visitors and how they interact. Check out the Yellowstone National Park sound library to hear sounds ranging from the gush and boom of the Old Faithful geyser to coyotes howling at night.

5. Listen to the birds. Cornell’s Macaulay Library offers what it claims to be the largest collection of wildlife sounds in the world. The recordings date back to 1929 and can all be heard free online. About 9,000 species are represented, many of them birds.

Listen to a loon calling over an Adirondacks lake and a bird chorus in tropical Queensland, Australia.

This playlist from the NPR-National Geographic “Radio Expeditions” series includes sounds from the natural world. 

Absorb the gentle rustle and calls of bats in an abandoned underground copper mines in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan where they live.

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