It’s a cool August morning at our cabin. The quartz heater next to me plays a perfect fourth over and over as the thermostat switches from low to high and back again.

A tractor-trailer truck makes an eerie whistling glissando as it speeds downhill on I-89 near the welcome center in Vermont. Was it a load of pipes that became a giant multiphonic flute?

When the leaves fall in autumn, the nearby highway gets louder — constant, but subtly changing wall of noise. When they resurfaced the road a while back, it was louder still with tires roaring on the temporary grooved surface.