The sounds from our environment play a huge part in allowing us to embrace life in the moment. The sound of a car engine warns us not to walk across a side-street without looking both ways, the cheers of a crowd tell us we're part of a community who love our local team, and the chatter and music drifting up a dark staircase tells us the bar beneath our feet is going to be a great place for a night out. But what about the sound of nature?

When we portray natural beauty on film we tend to use soft, slow, minor-key music as a soundtrack; we're trying to show the world as a quiet place. We often consider the natural world as silent, in fact. Yet we know there's an abundance of life, weather, and physics going on, and very little of that is completely silent. To highlight this point, a group of students have teamed up with designers and architects to create three wooden megaphones to amplify the natural sounds of a forest near Tallinn, Estonia.

We often forget to listen to what is around us or to consider how an environment impacts on our lives beyond what we see and feel. If you like to take time to consider how music can influence the way we feel about our built environment, perhaps it's time you branched out and took a walk in the park, the woods, or in the hills... without your headphones.