Two weeks have passed since smoke from the Paradise and Cedar fires began to fill the sky over North County, casting an orange-brown pall on the landscape.

Across North County that first morning, residents and visitors alike sought news of the fires. Where were they? Which way were they burning? We looked and listened for specifics. We wanted the fire's last known address and itinerary, if possible.

About generalities, we were certain. We saw the smoke, watched it billow up and fan out to the west-southwest. Before too long, we smelled it. By afternoon and into the days that followed, it seemed that we could taste the fire's acrid breath on our tongues. A thin veneer of ash made for unstable footing whenever we ventured outside, which was as little as possible.

All across North County, our senses gave us news of wildfire. But the sounds in the landscape -- the soundscape, as acoustic ecologists call it -- may have provided our most disconcerting reports. On those first two or three days of the fires, San Diego County sounded radically different.

Acoustic ecologists, an odd assortment of musicians and physicists, architects and philosophers, began to study the character of soundscapes in the 1970s. Starting with an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia under the leadership of musician R. Murray Schafer, author of "The Tuning of the World," acoustic ecologists' first order of business then and now is to call attention to the sounds in the environment that we consciously ignore.

Most noticeably on the first day of the fire, there were the Santa Ana winds, the proximate cause of the calamity, which made tinder-dry leaves and twigs and blades of grass in the county ring hollow with foreboding, discordantly harmonizing with the reports from wind chimes that hang in every neighborhood. Closer to the fires, those who were imperiled heard sirens, the sounds of exploding propane tanks, and the roar of the fire itself.

For the rest of us, it was the relative absence of familiar sounds that ratcheted our sense of unease -- even if we weren't altogether aware of it.

The dominant sounds of the North County landscape, night and day, are the comings and goings of automobiles. We hear them as individuals on residential streets, but throughout the most populated parts of the county, they merge into the constant and inescapable thrum of our freeways. That incessant thrum diminished under smoky skies.

There were fewer aircraft in the skies those first days as well. Maybe one or two too few.

Meanwhile, we all seemed to speak in softer voices, when we spoke at all. And though I cannot prove it, I sensed lowered volumes of industrial strength, 100-watt sound echoing from the stucco canyons that are North County neighborhoods.

Now, the calamity of the fires has passed. The air has cleared and moistened. For better or for worse, the soundscape has recovered its normal cycles.

Even so, take a moment outside to listen attentively. Nested between the familiar sounds of North County life, you may hear something new, different and welcome.

Mark Hineline teaches history at UC San Diego and UC Riverside. He lives in Escondido. He can be reached at hineline@helix.ucsd.edu.