Reverberations

Calumet in Dub collects sounds, field recordings from the Lake Calumet region and areas on the Little Calumet River. The Research entails the collection of data sets on demographics, ecology, and pollution. That data is then translated into music which is mixed with the environmental recordings.

Long was inspired by a story published on the BBC website on the relationship of the Little Calumet River and the history of the migration of African American from the South to the North, housing, labor, and environmental activism of Hazel Johnson, a migrant from Louisiana who settled in Chicago during the second migration 1945-1970.

Calumet In Dub

Norman W. Long

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In 2021 and 2022, Indigenous Guardians from the Sayisi Dene First Nation deployed ten autonomous recording units (ARUs) within the Seal River Watershed. The ARUs allow for ongoing remote collection of audio data from the surrounding landscape, including bird songs and calls. The data is retrieved and analyzed to determine the presence and abundance of birds in the area. The process can be repeated and compared over time to help understand changes taking place within the ecological communities.

The work is being done within the Seal River watershed and is in the Traditional Territory of the Sayisi Dene First Nation. This watershed is a rich and vibrant landscape of lakes, rivers, wetlands, forests, and tundra in the region that is commonly known today as northern Manitoba, Canada.

These sound recordings are part of a co-produced research project by the Seal River Watershed Alliance and the National Audubon Society.

image: Chris Paetkau, Build Films

Songs of the Seal River Watershed

Seal River Watershed Alliance

Sound Notes

Track 1: Red-throated Loon (Gavia stellata): This small, graceful loon makes a remarkable variety of wails, coos, and croaks, as well as a prehistoric-sounding gayorworrk as heard here.
Track 2: Common Raven (Corvus corax): This intriguing bird makes a variety of calls varying from a low gurgling croak (heard here) to harsh grating sounds to shrill alarm calls.
Track 3: Willow Ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus): This rather rotund grouse is very vocal during nesting season and has a remarkable repertoire of call types. Both male and female produce a series of nasal clucks and growls that are used in many contexts.
Track 4: Wolf pair: Although our primary intent is recording the songs and calls of birds within the region, sometimes our ARUs pick up the sounds of other wildlife within the ecological community as they did here with this wolf pair.

Bark beetles are known for their voracious appetites, chewing through the inner bark of trees, cutting off their supply of sugars. Bark beetles assemble in huge numbers thanks to pheromones (chemical messages) they use to coordinate their mass attack. However, inside a tree, chemicals are not an ideal way to send a message because trees themselves produce chemical defenses, so bark beetles also use sound.

My research project focused on documenting the types of sounds bark beetles make and how they vary across beetle species. This required reproducing the environment they live in, which is a thin layer of phloem just underneath the bark. Back in the lab, I set up a “phloem sandwich” (see photo) and introduced beetles to each other, while recording the sounds they made with a tiny DIY microphone.

In this recording you will hear the chirps made by a male larger Mexican pine beetle approaching a female. As he gets closer to the female the type of chirp changes to a more complicated signal. The female also communicates with sound, these are the regularly spaced chirps and are not as loud, partly because she is further away from the microphone. This was the first publication documenting the types of sounds produced by the larger Mexican pine beetle.

Listen in on a conversation that few people can hear. In fact, many of the sounds made by bark beetles are outside our hearing range. This is what is so fascinating about bark beetles. They have this outsized impact, chewing through the landscape, leaving dead and dying trees in their wake. But there is still so much to understand about how they communicate using sound.

Some scientists have suggested that they can detect dying trees from the sounds trees make when they are deprived of water. In fact, we don’t even know how bark beetles detect sound. Understanding how beetles use sound and their sensitivity to sound may lead to new methods of control. Already scientists have shown that bark beetles behave differently when exposed to extreme sounds. Eavesdropping in on bark beetle conversations can be used in species identification and even detection of new pests in imported wood products.

Images (left to right)
1) Phloem sandwich is made up of inner bark (or phloem) held in between two clear pieces of plexiglass. A tiny microphone is positioned inside the entry point for the bark beetles. Courtesy of Richard Hofstetter (Yturralde and Hofstetter, 2015)
2) Western pine beetle. Courtesy of Kasey Yturralde (Yturralde and Hofstetter, 2015)
3) Scanning electron micrograph of bark beetle (Dendroctonus) abdomen, 120 X magnification. The arrows point to the body part referred to as the plectrum, which is scraped down the underside of the beetle wing to produce sound. Courtesy of Kasey Yturralde (Yturralde and Hofstetter, 2015)

Acoustic Ecology of Bark Beetles

Kasey Maria Yturralde

The entire album is made out of field recordings. These were recorded with microphones specially designed for bat research (Ultrasonic detectors).

Rym Nouioua categorized the sounds made by bats in flight according to species, sound type, and frequency range. In the “SWARMING” project, she processed echolocation calls, social calls, and feeding sounds from about 15 different insectivorous bat species (all recorded in Germany).

The sound performance revolves around the purified or modulated sounds (i.e. pitch, mixer principle progression, etc.), because the ultrasonic sounds emitted by bats are inaudible to us humans.

In this project, she placed particular emphasis on the fact that all the sounds, including the beats, were regenerated from bat sounds/recordings.

In these recordings, background noises recorded in the ultrasonic range (e.g. nocturnal birds, insects, wind or water/rain) are still audible as background noises that were left on purpose and not removed.

The project builds on this originality of content by communicating the value of bat sounds in a way that no one has experienced before.

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Swarming

Rym Nouioua

Nature sings with many voices – birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, and even wind and water. Urban soundscapes contain all of these elements plus the voices of humans and the mostly unwanted sounds – commonly referred to as noise – of all of our machinery. If noise is sound that interferes with communication, how do all of the living organisms, including humans adapt to cities?

The research presented here considers how urban soundscapes change as urban forests lose trees.

Studying the auditory dimension of a forest is a data-intensive, scientific undertaking, but it is also an absolute pleasure to eavesdrop on a host of melodious and some not-so melodious vocalizing species.

My research aims to understand how restoring forests, through the removal of an invasive shrub in tropical dry forests in the heart of India, changes the soundscapes of these sites. I carried out this research in the forests around the Kanha National Park, in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. Just like one does with a camera trap, we leave out acoustic recorders in the forest to record all frequencies between 0 to 24000 Hz, which include vocalizing species audible and inaudible to humans.

These soundscapes come from the two extreme seasons in central India – summer and winter. While each season boasts its host of migratory species, it is also the resident species that light up the spectrograms and put on a spectacular auditory show.

Central India is home to one of the largest populations of tigers, but it also hosts a much larger biological diversity, which often remains in the shadows of the tigers’ popularity. However, in the auditory landscape, it is these lesser charismatic species like the anurans, insects and birds that take the limelight. The region also boasts several forest-fringe villages where people and wildlife have both adjusted to make space for each other.

When we retrieve our acoustic recorders, we’re always excited to hear what awaits us in these recorded soundscapes. From finding oneself smack in the middle of a drama unfolding in the form of a possible tiger or leopard hunt to experiencing the Common Hawk-Cuckoo season in full swing, these acoustic delights remain hidden in gobs of data and jump out at us as we carefully analyze the data.

Listening to these forests reminds us of how unique coexistence with wildlife in rural Indian landscapes is.

Eavesdroppingon a tropical dry forest in the heart of India

Pooja Choksia

Sambar Langur Calls – A clip of a morning when the langurs and Sambar Deer were less than comfortable on account of a big cat in the vicinity. If you hear a Sambar deer and langur, you can be almost certain that there is a big cat about.

Dilwara cowbells – While the core areas of national parks are strictly protected, buffer regions often include fragmented forests and small hamlets and villages. People use the forest for their livelihoods and for cultural reasons, and in the same way, wildlife, especially ungulates, come close to villages and often feast on crops being grown by the villagers. In India, people are very much a part of the wild landscape. Here is a soundscape from a forest-fringe village waking up and going about their day.

Aire v.3 is an audiovisual album generated with machine learning tools that analyze patterns of the pollution from different cities around the world: Mexico City, Bogotá and Sao Paulo. The data comes from the predictive system of the Resource Watch, designed by the World Resource Institute and the NASA.

Interspecifics has created a series of sound and visual compositions showing the pollution dynamics in the air of each of these three cities. The first stage of this project revolves around an audiovisual experience in 10 minute segments where cityscapes made of elevations from 3D maps and satellite images are shown alongside generative sound compositions focused in latin american cities.

AireV3 CDMX

INTERSPECIFICS

Windschatten was built as a visual metaphor for cycles of consumption in the quaint village of Kalga, Himachal Pradesh as a part of an artist residency. Determined to create a sound installation using local materials, I decided that one of the most abundant local materials was the plastic in bottles that are used and quickly disposed of by consumers. It transforms concerns for sustainability and the environment into an architectural metaphor for cycles of consumption and waste.

The kinetic installation used plastic bottles designated as waste to construct a large, organically shaped arch. The sculpture is activated by the intensity and direction of the ambient wind conditions to generate its sonic response.

The bottles catch the wind in different directions and intensities to generate the sound of the winds. The openings within the bottles act as a funnel through which air columns vibrate and generate sonic responses. The sound generated by the installation is an eerie drone, which is quite a contrast to the pleasant soundscape prevalent in the village.

The project proudly displays its modest materials, leaving the plastic bottles uncovered and unpainted.

Yet the unremarkable building blocks combine to create something that is almost unrecognizable and completely extraordinary.

The sculptural form was conceived as a symbol of the landscape that provides the materials for the plastic bottles and which is made to suffer as a result of our wasteful modes of production and consumption. This project was composed of the number of bottles thrown away in Kalga every day.

Through the building process of the installation the artist ended up cleaning up the entire village of its plastic refuse. The kinetic installation transformed this abundant waste into a space for contemplation and imagination.

The structure not only references the natural processes that are disrupted by waste and pollution or the water-carrying capacity of the bottles that are thrown away — it also suggests the possibilities for modes of production that are sustainable and regenerative. The installation utilized the local community’s waste while rallying the community to contribute, build and enjoy the structure.

Rather than representing a landscape or forces of nature, windschatten evokes — in an abstracted form — the waste that it is made from. Hanging precariously over the edge of a mountain in an apple orchard, windschatten could have been another piece of plastic debris about to litter the river just below. Yet instead the installation suggests a different, more beautiful afterlife for consumer by-products.

Windschatten

Farah Mulla

If the Oceans Could Speak transforms data around our production, consumption and disposal of plastics in the world’s oceans into a sound and music composition.

This piece was created using datasets from the World Economic Forum, Plastics Europe, the University of California Santa Barbara (Roland Geyer), the University of Georgia (Jenna Jambeck) and Sea Education Association in Massachusetts (Kara Lavender Law).

Using underwater oceanic recordings together with data sonification, it uses sonic textures, harmonies and variations in pitch and intensity to provoke a response in the listener.

Created by Jamie Perera. Originally commissioned by We Are the Oceans as a Climate Symphony work.

If the Oceans Could Speak

Jamie Perera

Water Rhythms is the story of climate change as told by the ice and water. It is the acoustic story of our entanglements with a changing climate and changing landscapes of our own making. 

As glaciers worldwide shrink and disappear in response to a warming world, the availability and quality of freshwater is being threatened. As the ice disappears, these water rhythms are also shifting and fading away.

We have been sonically mapping changes in glacier runoff in some of the world’s most important water towers, including the Coast Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Indian Himalaya. 

images:
1) Portrait of TEDFellows Susie Ibarra and Michele Koppes. TED Countdown Summit. October 12-15, 2021, Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo: Bret Hartman/ TED
2) Production image from Water Rhythms for Reverberations

Through recordings taken from above and below the ice and water, including the sounds and music of the people who live along their respective shores, we invite the listener into a more embodied understanding of how we are inextricably connected to Earth’s lifeblood, freshwater. We invite you to listen deeply to the stories the water is telling us about a world of increasing ecological precarity.

Water Rhythms Listening Room

Michele Koppes and Susie Ibarra

WaterViz takes actual water and weather data gathered at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and converts it into music as a sonficiation. The Hubbard Brook sonification assigns specific elements of water data to specific musical instruments, creating a forest symphony. The listener can hear the quantities of water moving through the forest as precipitation, stream flow, soil water, evaporation, and transpiration. Several drivers of the water cycle, including air temperature and wind, also play a part in the music.

Sonifications, unlike charts and graphs, engage different neural circuitry in our brains than the visual and reasoning centers. In other words, sonifications allow us to process scientific data in new and exciting ways.

In the WaterViz, precipitation is played by cymbals, stream flow by bass guitar and french horn, soil water by guitar, evaporation+transpiration by African marimbas, air temperature by flute and wind speed and direction by violins.

Related Links

> explore the sonification audio key
> visit project website

You are listening to the ‘sounds’ of space recorded on the day of the first sunrise of the austral winter at Halley VI Research Station in Antarctica.

The Sun has been permanently below the horizon for over 3 months and this is a particularly important day in the calendar year at Halley, as the Sun finally rises again, trumpeting the start of lighter and longer days.

In this track we hear the wonderful variety of Earth’s natural radio emissions captured by the Halley VLF receiver on this momentous day.

All of us know the sensation of seeing first light, and we can imagine together how incredible this would be after the long ‘night’ of the Antarctic Winter.

Sunconscious takes us on a multimedia journey to the Sun, revealing the magic created when science and the arts collide. The album includes some unusual and fascinating ‘sounds’ as recorded on the Parker Solar Probe, Cassini and SOHO spacecraft. We also experience the ‘sounds’ of space as recorded at Halley VI Research Station on the day of the first sunrise following the southern hemisphere winter and last sunset following the southern hemisphere summer. These eclectic space and ground-based ‘sounds’ are accompanied by the hurdy-gurdy, a 1,000-year-old string instrument; the theremin, an electronic instrument; the electronic keyboard; and harmonic chanting into a well. Artwork inspired by the music and science also add a rich visual element to the album.

Related Research

Meredith, N. P., Turning the sounds of space into art, Astronomy and Geophysics, 10.1093/astrogeo/atz097, 2019.

Meredith, N. P., K. Cunio, D. Scarborough, & A. D. Wynne, Music of the Spheres, Astronomy and Geophysics, 63, 1, 10.1093/astrogeo/atac013, 2022.

Sunconscious (2022)

Sounds of Space Project

Field recordings of audio capture visits to fire affected areas in Oregon that connote a slice of succession activities. Like a slice of tree ring that marks age and time, sound recordings of the area are meant to capture multiple scenes and ecological voices, filtered through a raw material from the sites themselves.

Treating the wood as an acoustic resonator — a filter that distorts as much as it renders sound audible — casts a shadow onto the sounds it projects.

The wood slightly changes the spectrum of sound by boosting or cutting the amount of different frequencies in the sound.

By activating sourced raw materials (e.g., “hazard tree” wood) with acoustic signals stemming from local sites, the sound sculptures amplify the regional and collective voice of wildfire succession even as it outputs a modified version of the input sound.

Cultural burning has been a practice used by Indigenous communities in Canada for generations, serving various cultural purposes, such as stewarding the landscape and promoting resources. However, colonization disrupted these practices. Parks Canada acknowledges this history and seeks reconciliation, recognizing the importance of bringing back Cultural Fire.

Removing cultural burning is removing the sound of children laughing from the trees. Amy points out that prescribed and cultural burning are not the same, though you may have heard them used interchangeably. She values that Parks Canada views them as separate since prescribed burning is about hazard reduction where a lot of land is burned in a short time frame. However, cultural burning is about achieving cultural objectives for the community by using low-intensity fires in low-risk times to burn slowly to cleanse the land.

One of the most prominent ways cultural burning differs from prescribed burning is that it appears different to the senses. Cultural burning involves a fire you can walk beside, like a relative or spirit, whereas prescribed burning can swallow an entire side of a mountain in flames. Cultural burning is replete with the sound of children’s laughter since it is a community activity, whereas prescribed burning is abuzz with radio traffic and the sounds of helicopters pouring fire.

The podcast you are listening to emphasizes the value of training more Indigenous fire-keepers and bridging the gap between “prescribed burning” and “cultural burning.” The guests, Amy and Pierre, share their experiences and commitment to making meaningful strides with reconciliation.

This work also highlights the significance of Cultural Fire beyond fire management. It delves into its cultural, ecological, and historical aspects, emphasizing the impact on mental health, the inherent right of indigenous people to manage and connect to their ancestral lands through fire, and the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing.

This episode encourages listeners to consider the broader implications of embracing Indigenous practices, not only in Canada but globally. The discussion highlights the importance of respecting diverse cultural practices and knowledge systems in land management and conservation.

3 Questions for Reflection

• How can we promote the revival of Indigenous cultural practices and knowledge, particularly in the context of land management and conservation?
• What lessons can be drawn from the experience of Parks Canada in reconciling and becoming allies with Indigenous communities in other regions and organizations worldwide?
• How can we bridge the gap between prescribed burning and cultural burning to achieve ecological restoration while respecting cultural objectives?

Your Forest Podcast

Matthew Kristoff

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This laboratory recording starts with near silence. Just after 18 seconds, you hear a short duration high-energy ignition of a carpet of dry Pinus Monticola needles. The wall of flames moves away from the microphone. At 146 seconds, you hear fire interact with drought-stressed Pseudotsuga Menziesii saplings. We are sampling the crackling sounds produced by these trees.

From sitting around campfires for 300,000 years, humans intuitively know that crackling sounds from burning vegetation relate to the type of vegetation burning and the moisture in that vegetation.

Our experiments put values to this knowledge and definitively demonstrate the unique sound signature coming from a variation in vegetation type as well as how drought stressed the plant is.

To do this, we isolated 100s of individual “pops” occurring when the seedlings were burning and painstakingly aligned these short-duration features to find their similarities and differences. This work and the research that has evolved from it leads us down the path of asking what can be learned from the sounds of fire.