Quiet, please! 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.

For some serious silence, head to the Grand Canyon. Some of the box canyons off the Colorado 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 is the river's roar. Of course, some people come just because they think all the red rocks are pretty.

So big it makes up roughly half of the entire California state park system, Anza-Borrego is “only four hours from 20 million people,” says park interpreter Michael Rodriques. Yet “there’s no place where you’ll find solitude like this. This is a place where you can experience quiet—real quiet.” Anza-Borrego is desert mixed with palm oasis where click of hooves from endangered Borrego sheep—a subspecies of bighorn—make the loudest sound.

Inside the cones of volcanoes on Hawaii’s Big Island, scientists have actually measured zero sound levels. No sound at all. But that’s on a windless day when no helicopters are flying. You won’t be that lucky—a major battle with the Park Service now is over the sound pollution of the choppers. Instead, head to the Holei Sea Arch; but skip walking along the beach like everyone else. Go inland across the old lava. Listen to the earth form itself anew in hisses and cracks.

John Muir—founder of the Sierra Club—became a conservationist when the sound of a stream rushing by stunned him. So it’s only fitting that the national monument named after him is on the forefront of saving the soundscape. Only a dozen miles outside San Francisco, the Muir Woods—home to some of the world’s largest trees, redwoods over 200 feet high—began instituting “quiet days” in 2008.

Another of sound expert Gordon Hempton’s favorite places, Cape Cod is “a big surprise for tourists who haven't been there before.” He suggests Marconi Beach—especially early in the morning during storm season—where swells hit the beach after traveling a thousand miles. And that ocean rumble, says R. Murray Schafer, originator of the field of acoustic ecology, said, is “the sound which above all others gives us the most delight.”

The density of Europe’s cities can make quiet a little tough to find. But the west coast of Scotland has just the ticket. An easy day’s journey from London, a few hours from Edinburgh or Glasgow, the heavily forested mountains that surround the loch seem to absorb the sounds of the villages, while amplifying the slosh and crash of slow waves in the loch. No monsters here, and not many tourists. About the only sound you’ll hear is the soft “moo” of a highland cow.

It's simple—the further away from cities you get, the quieter it’s going to be. The Gobi’s last dream of a city disappeared centuries ago, vanished in a landscape where the horizon is so big you can see the curve of the earth. A few nomads scratch out a living, and paleontologists find new dinosaur bones every year. But for the most part, the only sound you might hear is the rustle of feathers on the 10-foot wings of lammergeiers—or, vultures—as they float endless circles.

Don’t even want to hear the birds from the Gobi? Try the Kalahari. Mostly in Botswana—although also spreading into five other African nations—this may be one of the emptiest landscapes on the planet, more than 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 Kalahari, “No sound out there at all. Nothing.”

The rumble of this water dropping 350 feet is audible more than a mile away. So why put it on a list of the world’s quietest places? Because, up close, you can’t hear anything else. “The Kololo tribe called these cataracts ‘The Smoke that Thunders,’” says Patricia Schultz, author of 1000 Places to See Before You Die. “But it should be called the Silence that Thunders—an oxymoron that makes sense to anyone enveloped by its mist.”