28 June,2011 10:05 AM IST | | Yolande d'mello
Ever wondered what a rainforest sounds like at night? At the current rate of deforestation, future generations may not get to. Ear to Earth is a conservation venture that brings artists and ecologists together to preserve the sounds of nature before it's too late
Last November, New York had artists spilling onto the streets in an ode to 70.9 per cent of the earth -- that is how much of our planet's surface is covered with water. The annual Ear to Earth festival worked around the theme 'Water and the World', with artists exploring the flowing sounds of river Tiber in Italy.
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Joel Chadabe, founder of Ear to Earth says he started the project simply because, "In 2006 I realised that the least we could do as inhabitants of this planet was to bring about awareness using whatever skills weu00a0 had." That's how this festival, based on environmental sounds, was started, adds Chadabe who is also the president of Electronic Music Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that organises concerts and symposia for electronic around the Big Apple.
"The vibrancy of the arts and especially sound, is a good way to involve people. When you hear the sound of a place, you feel as if you're there. You're making contact with the place," he says, to explain how Ear to Earth came about.
Ear to Earth has scientists, ecologists and artists working together in a unique attempt to conserve sounds of landscapes that are soon disappearing. Their website provides a platform for artists and how they hear, see, and understand the environment. "We want to interest people in environmental sounds and art as a way of becoming involved in the world," says Chadabe.
Italy-based composer and researcher David Monacchi studies acoustic ecology, and is one of the contributors to the Ear to Earth festival. In 2010, he presented his piece Stati d'Acqua (translated as States of Water) that explores the sounds of water's constant physical transformations with recordings of the Tiber river in Italy.
Monacchi is a regular, having travelled to the protected area of the Dzanga Sangha Dense Forest Reserve in southern Central African Republic. On the border with Congo and Cameroon on a weeklong trip in 2008, he recorded natural sonic environments and used it for sound documentaries, installations, and compositions. "I make these trips to do field recordings. I record sounds on site in the rainforest with experimental 3D microphones capable of capturing the entire spatial field," says the researcher as he blogs in between trips from one remote jungle to another.
Monacchi also writes about battling nature and building absurd contraptions to continue recording. "The camp was an area delimited by an elephant fence. After dusk, due to the danger of elephant groups moving towards the clearings, it was not possible to leave the camp. Since I couldn't record manually at night, we built an autonomous system in the form of a box, to be suspended from a tree, that would contain the recording devices and also serve as an umbrella for the microphones in case of 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 that no monkey could climb the rope and all the recorders and hard-drives came back home," narrates Monacchi.
"The recordings were intended to preserve evidence of bio-diversity that would foster further research on the dynamics of species ensembles in old-growth habitats," he continues. Audiences who lend their ears can experience an ecosystem conveyed entirely through sound. Artists also choose to re-mix the audio recordings and sync them with electronica.
The entire projects aims to connect science and art through ideas that can change the world and save precious sounds like an endangered Darwin frog's mating call that might not be heard in our noisy urban existence.
Log on to https://www.eartotheearth.org/
Notes from Bai Dzanghau00a0 swamp by David Monacchi
One night I had a strange experience that revealed some new concepts about niche segregation. I was awakened one night at about 2 am by a massive broad-band sound coming from the creek below the camp. I tried to identify the species that could have produced such an intense and persistent sound. But the reverberation in the high-canopy forest made it impossible to hear the source of the sound, and I could not venture out of the camp because of our concern for animal movement at night. The sound contained intensity cycles of 2-3 minutes that seemed to come from different directions in the space before me. Then, as I prepared the system to record the sound from my location, the sound suddenly stopped, leaving the acoustic space completely silent. After five minutes, it began again, but this time, listening carefully to the onset of the cycle, I was able to identify the sounds. They came from various groups of different frog species located in adjacent sectors of the saline. Instead of niche segregation, they were competing for the same acoustic space, using sound pressure to overcome each other's group. It was an impressive wave of sound. I was witnessing a new phenomenon. And it was one of the most interesting, and frightening, sounds that I've heard.
