st the fun of just saying the place’s name — Yap — this Pacific island (take a left at Guam), might just be paradise. It’s a jungle island, with endless coastline, mangrove swamps where giant fruit bats play, and under water, manta rays with 10-foot wingspans glide without a sound. Yap’s entire culture is built on adherence to social peace, so that, according to resident Richard Flow, even playing your car radio too loud when you drive simply isn’t done. “Do it,” he says, “and you’ll come back the next day to find your windshield broken.” So the loudest sound in Yap? Waves hitting the reef, more than a mile from shore. And occasional broken glass.

The Hoh Valley, Washington State

Deep in the rainforests of Olympic National Park, the largest roadless area in the contiguous United States, the Hoh is home of the "One Square Inch Project," a fight to preserve just a single inch of landscape from human sound. Keep that one inch quiet, says founder Gordon Hempton, and the silence will radiate out for thousands of acres. And he’s right: The Inch offers few sounds louder than water dripping from leaves and the occasional clack of a grouse.

The Grand Canyon, Arizona

Some of the box canyons off the main river have been measured to be half as loud as human breath. But nobody can take that for long, so head back out to the Canyon proper, where the signature sound, says Mike Buchheit, director of the Grand Canyon Field Institute, “as it grows from the graveyard silence of any hike, is the roar of the Colorado River.” Of course, some people come just because they think all the red rocks are pretty.

Big Bend National Park, Texas

Big Bend is a kind of acoustic greatest hits record. Because the park, located in southwest Texas, has such a diverse landscape — mountains, deserts, river, with more species of birds, bats, and cactus than any other park in the country — only a few minute’s change in location can dramatically change what you hear. And one of the best things about Big Bend? It’s not on very many airplane flight routes. In fact, the sound of planes is still very rare here. And that makes it one of the most unusual, noise-free environments anywhere in the world.

The Kalahari Desert

Simple math: The greater the distance from people, the quieter a place is going to be. the Kalahari — which lies mostly in Botswana, but also spreads into five other African nations — may be one of the emptiest landscapes on the planet, over 350,000 square miles of low scrub and acacia trees, nibbled on by giraffes. But then, giraffes aren’t noted for being noisy. Photographer Jad Davenport says of the Kalahar

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