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🍂🎧 The Sounds Autumn Makes
Listening to a Season Around the World
Sam Grayson, Music Editor
Before we choose the first song, I want you to listen.
Open a window if you can.
Or just remember the last time you stepped outside and realized the season had changed.
Autumn announces itself in sound long before anyone makes a playlist for it.
There is the dry skitter of leaves across pavement. Rain tapping against windows that stayed open through summer. Geese calling somewhere overhead before you manage to find them in the sky.
Footsteps change.
Forests change.
Cities change.
People begin moving indoors, and suddenly we hear kettles, furnaces, radiators, television sets and music coming from rooms that were quiet during long summer evenings.
Then come the unmistakably human sounds of the season.
School buses.
Football crowds.
Harvest celebrations.
Halloween decorations clattering in the wind.
Children negotiating costumes.
Someone raking leaves into an enormous pile shortly before somebody else jumps into it and renders the entire exercise pointless.
And music, of course.
There are songs we deliberately return to when autumn arrives, but there are others that became autumn songs accidentally. Perhaps they were playing during a particular October. Perhaps an album accompanied us through a difficult September. Perhaps we once heard a song through the speakers of a car while driving beneath trees that seemed determined to use every colour at once.
That is the curious thing about seasonal music.
Sometimes the calendar chooses it.
Sometimes memory does.
When I proposed The Sounds Autumn Makes, I thought I was proposing a music feature.
Then everybody started arriving.
Kevin wanted to listen to a forest.
Saffron asked what harvest sounds like in different cultures.
Dylan heard video games and rain.
Chase wanted to take a recorder outside.
Cero wondered what autumn sounds like to children elsewhere in the world.
Nomad answered, essentially, let’s go find out.
At which point I realized this wasn’t my playlist anymore.
Good.
So we’re going to travel through autumn by listening to it.
There will be music here, certainly. But there will also be weather, wildlife, cities, kitchens, celebrations, memories, technology, childhood and whatever else the team hears along the way.
You don’t need to experience autumn the way we do, either.
Perhaps September means spring where you live.
Perhaps your trees don’t change colour.
Perhaps you’ve never seen a pumpkin growing in a field.
Perhaps the sounds that tell you a season is changing would be completely unfamiliar to us.
We want those sounds too.
Because there isn’t one soundtrack to autumn.
There are millions of them.
We’re simply going to begin with ours.
One final editorial decision before we set off:
Christmas doesn’t get in yet.
It has an entire empire waiting around the corner.
Let autumn have the room for a while.
Put on your headphones if you’d like.
But first…
listen.
Sam 🎧
🥾🍂 When the Forest Changes Its Voice
Kevin Todd, Outdoors Writer
Sam told us to listen.
Fair enough.
Come outside.
There is a point every year when I notice that the trail sounds different beneath my boots.
Not dramatically. Nobody rings a bell announcing that summer has packed up and left. You just take another step and hear it.
Crunch.
A few weeks earlier, the same trail might have been soft earth, pine needles and green undergrowth. Now there are dry leaves underfoot, and suddenly every step has percussion.
Crunch. Shuffle. Crack.
Keep walking.
The wind catches the canopy differently too.
Early in autumn there are still enough leaves overhead to make the trees hiss and rustle when the wind moves through them. As those leaves fall, the sound begins opening up. The forest becomes less muffled.
Things seem farther away and closer at the same time.
A bird call can travel.
A branch snapping somewhere beyond the trail gets your attention.
Water becomes easier to hear.
And then there are the leaves themselves.
One leaf falling doesn’t make much of a sound.
Thousands of them do.
Some scrape along the ground. Some tumble across pavement. Some catch against fences and tree roots. Some blow along a trail just ahead of you, apparently determined to maintain exactly the same walking speed.
After rain, everything changes again.
The crunch disappears.
Leaves stick to the earth. Boots make softer, heavier sounds. Water drips from branches long after the rain has stopped, and streams that whispered through late summer suddenly have something more substantial to say.
Autumn also changes what isn’t there.
The constant insect hum of summer begins fading.
Bird populations shift as migrants arrive, gather or leave.
Campgrounds grow quieter.
Popular trails start belonging to smaller groups of people again.
And when you stop walking, really stop, the silence isn’t empty.
It is layered.
Wind.
Water.
Birds.
A squirrel making considerably more noise than an animal that size has any reasonable right to make.
Your own breathing.
Maybe the distant sound of somebody else coming along the trail.
That’s one of my favourite things about being outdoors in autumn.
The landscape isn’t simply changing colour.
It’s changing acoustically.
So here’s my contribution to Sam’s project:
Don’t put the headphones on immediately.
Take a walk first.
It doesn’t have to be wilderness. Try a park, a wooded path, a garden, a neighbourhood with mature trees or simply somewhere you can stand beneath an open sky.
Walk for five minutes.
Then stop.
Don’t photograph anything.
Don’t identify anything.
Don’t try to turn the moment into content.
Just listen.
If you’re lucky, you may hear autumn arriving before you ever see it.
Kevin 🥾
🌾🎶 What Does a Harvest Sound Like?
Saffron Walkers, Cultural Food Researcher
Kevin asked us to stand still and listen.
I did.
And somewhere between the leaves and the birds, I started thinking about work.
Not office work.
Harvest work.
The gathering, cutting, carrying, sorting, cooking, preserving and celebrating that humans have done at harvest time for thousands of years.
What does that sound like?
Perhaps machinery moving through a modern field.
Perhaps hands working together.
Baskets being set down.
Knives against cutting boards.
Grain being processed.
Market stalls opening early in the morning.
Pots and pans in kitchens suddenly busy with whatever has ripened nearby.
People talking while they work.
Children running through a festival.
Music beginning somewhere after the work is finished.
And sometimes singing while the work is still being done.
Harvest has never been only something we see.
Humans have made noise around it for a very long time.
We have sung during work. Played music at celebrations. Told stories around food. Gathered in markets, kitchens, fields, temples, churches, community halls and family homes.
Those sounds change enormously depending upon where we are.
And that is where I want to gently interrupt our autumn.
Because when we say “the sounds of autumn,” whose autumn are we hearing?
For many of us, the phrase immediately conjures falling leaves, cooling temperatures, pumpkins and October evenings.
But the planet doesn’t experience one shared autumn.
While someone in Canada is pulling on a sweater, someone in Australia is moving through spring.
Harvest calendars don’t obey one international timetable either. Crops mature at different times. Rainy and dry seasons shape agricultural life. Local climate, geography, religion, history and culture all influence when and how communities gather and celebrate.
So I don’t want to make a catalogue called Harvest Traditions of the World and flatten hundreds of cultures into a paragraph apiece.
I’d rather listen for something smaller.
A sound.
The ringing of a bell.
A particular instrument.
A market waking up.
A song connected with gathering food.
The noise of a machine that replaced work once done by hand.
A family kitchen during preserving season.
A festival crowd.
A quiet ritual.
Perhaps even the absence of sound.
Then we can ask:
What is happening here?
Who is making this sound?
What does the harvest mean to them?
Has the sound changed across generations?
Food carries history, but sound does too.
A grandmother may remember a harvest that sounded completely different from the one her grandchildren know.
Technology changes the soundtrack.
Migration changes it.
Climate changes it.
Cities change it.
Sometimes traditions disappear.
Sometimes they travel.
Sometimes somebody decides they are worth teaching to another generation.
And occasionally a sound survives long after people have forgotten why it began.
That’s the trail I want to follow.
Not around the autumn.
Around many autumns, harvests and changing seasons.
🌾 Saffron’s Listening Invitation
The next time you’re preparing something seasonal, listen to your kitchen.
The chopping.
The stirring.
The cupboard doors.
The water running.
The oven opening.
The voices, if you’re fortunate enough to have company.
Or the radio, podcast or music keeping you company if you’re cooking alone.
Those ordinary noises are part of food culture too.
Someday, one of them may be the sound that takes you straight back home.
Saffron 🌾
🎮🌧️ The Sound of Staying Inside
Dylan Mann, Gaming Writer
Here’s an autumn sound nobody puts on nature recordings:
A video game starting up in the next room.
Maybe there’s rain against the window.
Maybe it’s already dark even though you’re absolutely certain it shouldn’t be dark yet.
Your jacket is hanging somewhere near the door. Your shoes are wet. Outside looks cold, damp and profoundly uninterested in your company.
And then you hear it.
The electronic chirp.
The startup sound.
The opening music.
The tiny noises of a world waking up inside a machine.
You’re staying in tonight.
Perfect.
For me, gaming has always had a strange relationship with seasons.
Games don’t technically know whether you’re playing them in January or July. A cartridge doesn’t care. A controller has no opinion about precipitation.
Memory does.
Play a particular game often enough during one part of your life and its sounds can become attached to everything that surrounded you.
Rain.
Dark afternoons.
School nights.
Weekends.
A bedroom.
A basement.
Friends crowded around one television.
Someone insisting they absolutely did not look at your side of the split screen.
They did.
Decades later, a few notes from that game can bring the whole room back.
That’s one of the things I love about old game audio.
Early video-game composers had severe technological limitations. They couldn’t simply throw an orchestra into the machine. Memory was precious. Sound channels were limited. Every beep, pulse and melody had work to do.
And somehow those limitations produced sounds capable of living in our heads for decades.
The bleeps and bloops weren’t pretending to be realistic.
They created their own language.
A sound could mean danger.
Another meant success.
Another meant you’d found something.
Another informed you, with remarkable cheerfulness, that you had just made a catastrophic mistake.
You learned to listen.
Modern games can surround us with extraordinary soundscapes: wind moving through virtual forests, footsteps changing according to the surface beneath them, distant wildlife, weather, voices, machinery and musical scores that shift according to what we’re doing.
Put on headphones and an imaginary autumn forest can sound astonishingly convincing.
But there’s another sound I don’t want us to lose.
The room around the game.
The controller clicking.
Someone laughing.
A bowl being placed on the table.
Rain outside.
A parent calling from another room.
A friend saying, “One more.”
The refrigerator humming during a loading screen.
Those sounds were never programmed into the game.
But they’re part of the soundtrack anyway.
🕹️ Dylan’s Listening Invitation
Think of a game you loved when you were younger.
Don’t begin with the graphics.
Try to remember its sound.
The opening music.
A menu.
A particular effect.
The noise made when you won, lost, jumped, crashed, opened a door or discovered something.
Now ask yourself what else you can hear around it.
Where were you?
Who was there?
What was happening outside?
Sometimes nostalgia isn’t a picture.
Sometimes it’s three electronic notes and rain against a window.
And for me?
That’s absolutely one of the sounds autumn makes.
Dylan 🎮
🎙️🍂 Before the Sound Disappears
Chase Li, Videographer
Dylan said something that stopped me.
The room around the game.
Not the soundtrack.
Not the sound effects.
The room.
Rain outside. A controller clicking. Somebody laughing. A refrigerator humming in the background.
The sounds nobody thought were important enough to record.
Those are exactly the sounds I want.
When we photograph autumn, we know what we’re looking for.
Colour.
Leaves.
Fog.
Pumpkins.
Golden light.
A road disappearing between trees.
We point a camera at the beautiful thing because we want to keep it.
But how often do we point a microphone at an ordinary Tuesday?
That’s what I’d like to try.
Not spectacular autumn.
Everyday autumn.
The sound your front door makes when you come inside from the cold.
Wet tires passing along the street.
A dog walking through dry leaves.
Rain collecting in a gutter.
A café door opening.
Someone shaking out an umbrella.
A bus pulling away from a stop.
Wind worrying at something that wasn’t properly tied down.
A kettle.
A zipper.
Boots being kicked off beside the door.
None of these sounds announces itself as important.
That’s why I think they might be.
Because seasons aren’t only the big moments we photograph.
They’re thousands of tiny sensory details we stop noticing because they’re always there.
Until they aren’t.
🎙️ Build an Autumn Sound Postcard
I’d like to add something practical to this project.
Take your phone or another recorder somewhere familiar.
Don’t hunt for an extraordinary sound.
Record thirty seconds of where you already are.
A backyard.
A balcony.
A street.
A park bench.
A kitchen.
A bus stop.
Beside an open window.
Don’t narrate it.
Don’t explain it.
Just let the place exist for thirty seconds.
Then save the recording with three things:
Where. When. Weather.
That’s it.
Vancouver Island. October morning. Light rain.
Tokyo. Evening. Windy.
Philadelphia. After school. Cool and dry.
Whatever describes your thirty seconds.
Come back to it in five years.
I suspect you’ll hear things you didn’t realize you were recording.
A vehicle that has disappeared from the roads.
Construction somewhere that later became a building.
A bird you don’t hear as often anymore.
Someone’s voice passing in the distance.
A dog collar jingling.
Maybe nothing historically important whatsoever.
But that’s the point.
We are extremely good at documenting occasions.
Birthdays.
Vacations.
Weddings.
Graduations.
First days.
Last days.
We aren’t nearly as good at preserving ordinary life.
Sound can do that beautifully.
Close your eyes while listening to an old recording and the edges disappear. You’re not looking at the past anymore.
For a few seconds, you’re standing inside it.
So that’s what I’m contributing to Sam’s project.
Not another autumn song.
A suggestion.
Before this autumn disappears, save thirty seconds of it.
Someday you might be very glad you did.
Chase 🎥
🌎🎒 Does Autumn Sound Different When You’re a Kid?
Cero Sullivan & Nomad Shaikh
Cero:
I think grown-ups are missing some sounds.
Not because they can’t hear them.
Because they don’t have to listen for them anymore.
Like a school bus.
If you’re a kid, you can probably tell when your bus is coming before you can see it.
You hear it somewhere down the street.
Then it gets louder.
Then the brakes make that sound.
Then the door opens.
That’s an autumn sound to me because autumn means school has started again.
There are other ones.
Sneakers going through leaves.
Backpacks being dropped.
School doors.
Kids outside when it’s getting dark earlier.
Halloween decorations hitting against somebody’s house when it’s windy.
Candy wrappers.
People knocking on doors.
And when it’s raining and you’re inside, I think LEGO has a sound.
Not just when you dump it out.
When you’re looking through a pile for one piece.
Everybody who plays with LEGO knows that sound.
Then I started wondering:
Do kids everywhere have autumn sounds?
So I asked Nomad.
Nomad:
And I complicated the question.
It’s one of my specialties.
Cero is describing a childhood shaped partly by Philadelphia, school calendars, cooling weather and the approach of Halloween.
Another child might recognize almost none of it.
October does not mean autumn everywhere.
For a child in the Southern Hemisphere, October arrives during spring.
Closer to the equator, four sharply defined seasons may not organize the year at all. Changes in rainfall, temperature, agriculture, school schedules, religious observances and community life may provide much stronger signals that time is moving.
So instead of asking children around the world:
“What does autumn sound like?”
I suggested we ask:
“What sounds tell you that this time of year has arrived?”
That is a very different question.
Maybe it’s rain.
Maybe insects.
Maybe birds.
Perhaps it’s a festival being prepared.
A particular kind of food being made.
Sports beginning.
School starting or ending.
Windows opening instead of closing.
A market changing what it sells.
A sound connected to farming.
Music from a celebration.
Or something adults wouldn’t think to mention at all.
Cero:
That’s what I want to know.
Especially the things adults wouldn’t think of.
Because if you asked me what October sounds like, I wouldn’t start with a famous piece of music.
I’d probably say:
School bus.
Leaves.
LEGO.
Halloween.
Miles would probably say squirrels.
Nomad:
Miles has not formally joined the research team.
Cero:
He can still have an opinion.
Nomad:
Fair.
And Cero’s insistence on including the dog’s hypothetical contribution actually illustrates the larger point.
When adults document culture, we tend to record the things we’ve decided are significant.
Ceremonies.
Music.
Architecture.
Historical events.
Traditional clothing.
Important foods.
Children may notice something else entirely.
The squeak of playground equipment.
A particular bell at school.
A snack wrapper.
A game.
A train passing their bedroom.
The sound their grandparents’ door makes.
Those observations matter too.
They tell us what ordinary life feels like from closer to the ground.
🌎🎧 The Cero & Nomad Question
So we’d like to borrow a corner of Sam’s project for an experiment.
Ask a child:
What sounds tell you that this time of year has arrived?
Don’t give examples first.
Let them decide what counts.
If their answer is something completely unexpected, even better.
Then ask:
Why that sound?
Write the answer down.
You may be preserving a tiny piece of everyday culture that nobody else thought to record.
Cero:
And if they say LEGO, they’re correct.
Nomad:
There are no correct answers.
Cero:
Except LEGO.
🎨🍂 Can You Draw a Sound?
Rowan Okafer, Illustrator
I wrote that question on the board without knowing the answer.
Can you draw a sound?
Obviously, you can draw the thing making the sound.
A bird.
A bell.
Rain hitting a window.
Someone walking through leaves.
But that’s not quite what I mean.
Can you draw the crunch?
Can you draw the difference between gentle rain and the kind that suddenly sends everybody running?
What shape is wind?
What does the rattle of dry leaves look like if you’re not allowed to draw a leaf?
That’s where this became interesting.
Illustrators cheat all the time.
Not dishonest cheating.
Useful cheating.
We use marks, shapes, repetition, spacing and movement to persuade your brain that something is happening on a completely silent page.
A smooth line can whisper.
A jagged line can crack.
Tiny repeated marks can become rain.
A spiral can become wind.
Put enough energetic marks behind something and suddenly it appears to be moving, even though absolutely nothing on the page has moved at all.
Comics take this even further.
CRASH.
THUMP.
RATTLE.
Letters stop being merely letters. They become part of the picture.
Make the word enormous and it gets louder.
Shrink it and suddenly we’re listening closely.
Stretch it.
Tilt it.
Break it.
Let it wobble.
Typography starts behaving like sound.
So I tried Sam’s experiment with a sketchbook.
I sat somewhere I could hear what was happening outside and made one rule:
Don’t draw what you see. Draw what you hear.
That rule is surprisingly difficult.
A bird called.
My hand immediately wanted to draw a bird.
No.
Draw the call.
A vehicle passed.
Don’t draw the vehicle.
Draw what it did to the quiet.
Wind moved through something nearby.
Don’t draw the thing moving.
Draw the movement.
After a while, the page began filling with marks that probably wouldn’t mean much to anyone else.
That wasn’t a problem.
I wasn’t illustrating autumn.
I was translating it.
✏️ Rowan’s Sound-Sketch Challenge
Take a blank sheet of paper and something that makes a mark.
A pencil is enough.
Sit somewhere for five minutes.
Then draw every sound you hear without drawing the object responsible for it.
Someone walks past?
Draw the rhythm of the footsteps.
Rain?
Draw its pattern.
A dog barks?
What shape did that bark make?
Something crashes in another room?
Excellent.
You have material.
Don’t worry about whether the drawing is good.
There is no correct symbol for a refrigerator starting up.
Invent one.
When you’re finished, look at the page.
You’ve made something peculiar.
It isn’t quite a drawing.
It isn’t quite a recording.
It’s a map of five minutes that will never happen exactly that way again.
And if you’re doing this during autumn, you’ve created another kind of autumn sound postcard.
Chase records with a microphone.
I’ll record with a pencil.
Rowan ✏️
🎧🍂 And Finally, the Music
Sam Grayson, Music Editor
I started all of this because I wanted to talk about music.
Then everybody made my job considerably more interesting.
Kevin took us onto a trail and reminded us that a forest changes its voice as surely as it changes colour.
Saffron listened to harvest and asked us to remember that seasons, traditions and calendars don’t sound the same everywhere.
Dylan stayed inside with rain against the window and showed us how a handful of electronic notes can carry an entire room from childhood.
Chase asked us to save thirty ordinary seconds before they’re gone.
Cero listened from closer to the ground.
Nomad moved the question around the planet.
And Rowan decided that if Chase could record autumn with a microphone, he’d record it with a pencil.
Somewhere along the way, my music feature stopped being about music.
Which, strangely enough, helped me choose the music.
I wanted one piece to close our journey.
Not twenty tracks.
Not the definitive autumn playlist.
Just one piece of music that leaves enough space for everything we’ve heard.
🍂 One Last Listening Invitation
Before you leave this feature, don’t play my choice immediately.
Give yourself thirty seconds first.
Listen to wherever you are.
Maybe there’s traffic.
Rain.
A television somewhere.
A furnace.
Birds.
Someone talking.
A dog moving around the room.
Perhaps almost nothing at all.
Let that be the opening track.
Then, when you’re ready, find a version of “September Song” that speaks to you.
There are many.
Choose your own.
That’s important.
Because after everything this project has taught me, I’m not going to tell you exactly what autumn is supposed to sound like.
I kept coming back to “September Song.”
Written by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, the song first appeared in the 1938 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday.
It has been interpreted by many artists since, and that’s part of its beauty. A song can survive its original setting and gather new meanings as different voices carry it forward.
But it isn’t simply the title that brings me here.
“September Song” understands something our little experiment has been circling from the beginning.
Time changes the way we listen.
Kevin’s trail will sound different next month.
Saffron’s harvest sounds have changed across generations.
Dylan can hear childhood inside a few electronic notes.
Chase knows today’s ordinary background noise may become precious precisely because nobody thought it mattered.
Cero is hearing things now that adulthood may eventually teach him to tune out.
Nomad reminds us that everybody’s calendar sounds different.
Rowan has taken five minutes that would otherwise vanish and left marks behind on a page.
And perhaps that’s what autumn does particularly well.
It makes time visible.
Leaves change.
Light changes.
Days shorten.
Things fall.
Things leave.
Things are gathered.
We notice because the transformation is happening right in front of us.
Music can do something similar.
A song lasts a few minutes.
Then it’s gone.
Play it again and technically it’s the same recording.
But you aren’t the same listener.
Maybe that’s why certain songs become attached to seasons.
We return to them and discover ourselves waiting there.
We’ve spent too much time discovering that it belongs to each of us differently.
So I’ll leave you with the song.
And I’ll leave you with the question that started everything:
What does autumn sound like where you are?
Listen.
You might want to remember it.
Sam 🎧
🍁 From Team Go Cybernaut
Thank you for wandering through the sounds of the season with us.
Record thirty seconds.
Draw five minutes.
Ask a child what they hear.
Remember a kitchen.
Remember a game.
Walk somewhere without headphones.
Listen to a tradition different from your own.
Or simply sit quietly beside an open window.
Autumn doesn’t need us to provide its soundtrack.
It already has one.
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Go Cybernaut is a human-led cultural discovery and celebration publisher, created by Gayle Olson with an AI-supported editorial constellation. Through accessible guides, playlists, stories, and seasonal celebrations, it creates a soft place to land for curious people seeking connection, delight, and discovery.
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