"Wie, hör’ ich das Licht" (Thus I hear the light)

I have noted before that America is a land rich in sound. You have the accents, the music, the birds, the streets - fire engine sirens several times a day in Charleston, bells from Savannah churches, the tweet of pedestrian signals in Atlanta. We walked through New Orleans one night earlier this week and Bourbon Street was a melange of different types of music.

Next morning though, as fog shrouded the uptown skyscrapers, it was clearly taking a while to wake up.

Not to worry, we have caught the train to Los Angeles, and at one of the meals in the dining car speak to a guy who describes for us all the accents of North Carolina! As we pass an antebellum mansion, an African-American woman behind us whispers through the crack between our seats: 'Miss Alice would have sat on that porch drinking mint juleps, know what I mean?'

The Amtrak whistle is one of the defining sounds of America. Shoot a film in Australia and you could still fool the audience it was set in America if you had the Amtrak whistle on the soundtrack.

In the capsule of the train compartment, however, hurtling across the country, the sound reduces to a rattling on rail tracks, carriage doors hissing open and the ubiquitous whistle.

Let this country pass even in 'silence', though, and it is still spectacular, as we travel through Houston

and West Texas towns

and plains

to the sunshine and snow-capped peaks of California.

In Los Angeles we return to noise at the other end, police helicopters overhead, la gente que habla español, and going to the movies where the intensity of the SurroundSound reminds us we are savouring the fruits of the industry of this town. It is altogether a fitting conclusion to the cross-country soundtrack.