Ever wondered what a rainforest sounds like at night? At the current rate of deforestation, future generations may not get to. A novel global conservation venture brings together artists, ecologists and scientists to capture the sounds of nature, using hanging microphones in African forests that are rain and monkey tamper-proof
Ever wondered what a rainforest sounds like at night? At the current rate of deforestation, future generations may not get to. A novel global conservation venture brings together artists, ecologists and scientists to capture the sounds of nature, using hanging microphones in African forests that are rain and monkey tamper-proof
Last November, New York city saw artists spilling onto the streets, paying a tribute to 70.9 per cent of the earthu00a0-- the surface of the planet covered in water. The Ear to Earth festival held at the same time borrowed a leaf from them. The annual festival started by New York resident Joel Chadabe in 2006, played the flowing sounds of Italy's river Tiber at the festival. 
Chadabe's eco conservation project is an interesting oneu00a0-- Ear to Earth only records the sounds of the planet, from its rivers to its wildlife. Chadabe says he started the project because he "realised that the least we could do as inhabitants of this planet was to bring about awareness, using whatever skills we had."u00a0 To that end scientists, ecologists and artists collaborate to record sounds of landscapes that are soon disappearing.
"The vibrancy of the arts, especially sound, is a good way to involve people. When you hear the sound of a place, you feel as if you are there. You are making contact with the place," says Chabade, who is also president of Electronic Music Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that holds concerts and symposia for electronic music in the Big Apple.
Italy-based composer and researcher David Monacchi studies acoustic ecology, and is a contributor at Ear to Earth. Last year, he recorded the rumble of the Tiber. His piece called the Stati d'Acqua (States of Water) explored the sound of water's constant physical transformation.
Monacchi is a regular at the fest, having travelled to the protected area of the Dzanga Sangha Dense Forest Reserve in southern Central Africa to capture sounds. On the border of Congo and Cameroon, on a weeklong trip in 2008, he recorded natural sonic environments, using it later for sound documentaries, installations, and compositions. "I make these trips to facilitate field recordings, and record sounds on site in the rainforest with experimental 3D microphones capable of capturing the entire spatial field," says the researcher as he blogs between jungle trips.
Monacchi also writes about building absurd contraptions to continue recording. "The camp in Central African Republic, was an area delimited by an elephant fence. After dusk, the danger of elephant groups moving towards the clearing made it impossible to leave the camp. Since I couldn't record sounds manually at night, we built an autonomous system in the form of a box that could be suspended from a tree. It had in-built recording devices and also served as an umbrella to protect microphones from possible rain."
Trials and failure led to the final recording that ran the length of 12 hours, and offered a sound portrait of a night in a forest swamp. "We made sure no monkey could climb the rope, and all the recorders and hard-drives came back home," says Monacchi in an email interview. "The recordings were intended to preserve evidence of the bio-diversity that would foster further research on the dynamics of species in old-growth habitats," he says.
On their website, audiences can experience an ecosystem, entirely through sound. Artists also choose to re-mix the audio recordings and sync them with electronica. The project aims to connect science and art through ideas that can change the world and save precious sounds like the mating call of the endangered Darwin frog.
Log on to: www.eartoearth.org
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