My representative sample is taken from an overnight to morning recording made in Ngarkat Conservation Park. One of the earliest bird calls of the first light dawn chorus was that of a female Malleefowl. Her first call was uttered even as a Boeing 737 approached, travelling from Adelaide to Sydney, but this first jet was soon overlapped by a second jet, which may have been travelling either from Sydney to Adelaide or, perhaps more likely, from Sydney to Perth, given its acoustic path in the stereo field. 

The Malleebird's first set of calls begins at 00:00:30.155. A second set of calls is attempted between 00:01:05.280 and 00:01:19.903. However, the lower frequencies are obliterated by the jet noise; only the higher harmonics are barely audible. The Malleefowl then seems to sit out the passage of the jets, and does not attempt another call until 00:05:54.385.

The time elapsed between the end of the first audible call and start of the second audible call is 5 minutes and 11 seconds. This is a significant interval of obstructed communication, when one considers the frequency of overpassing jets at this time of the day.

I would like to offer the following analogy for your consideration: Suppose that you are especially eager or anxious to communicate with your relatives at a particularly important period of time via the internet, but there are ongoing recurrent interruptions/dropouts of at least 5 minutes to your internet service occurring every 10 to 20 minutes. You are forced to try to communicate with your relatives in the intervals between these continued interruptions/dropouts.

More importantly, since this interruption goes on day after day, month after month, year after year - relentlessly, and, indeed, increasingly - you are forced to adapt your communication to these interruptions, which reduces your previously-evolved 100% communication at this crucial time (pre-industrial revolution and pre-colonisation) to approximately 40-50% communication during this crucial time (if you're lucky).

How might this drastic interruption and reduction of species communication due to flagrant anthropogenic noise within the all-species-shared phonosphere affect the well-being and survival of other non-human species, which have no say, and certainly no veto, with regard to that impact? I suggest that the impact would not be particularly beneficial, to say the very least.

2024.06.02 Endangered Malleefowl versus Two Boeing 737s

One of my favorite quotes comes from Anthropologist Loren Eiseley. He said, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” In this episode I’m going to prove it.

A lot of you probably know that the first stage of my professional career was as a SCUBA instructor and commercial diver. I spent thousands of hours under the surface of the Pacific Ocean, enthralled by what my hero Jacques Cousteau called The Silent World. We divers used to laugh good-naturedly at that, because the ocean is anything but silent. It’s filled with noise, and I’m not talking about boats and such, although there’s plenty of that, too. I’m talking about snapping shrimp, parrotfish, ocean waves and swells passing overhead, the clicks of dolphins, the eerie call of whales, and all the other sounds we used to listen to and wonder about. 

But it isn’t just oceanic creatures that make noise. As you’re about to learn, it turns out that freshwater ponds are filled with sound. Yes, that still, calm little pond over there may be quiet above, but most likely, below the surface, there’s a whole symphony going on.

My guest on this program is an acoustic ecologist who has studied aquatic sound, but more than that, he has come up with ways to use sound as a predictor of freshwater environmental health—and as a tool for the restoration of ponds in areas where human activity has degraded them.

Episode 253 - The Secret Life Of Ponds With Acoustic Ecologist Jack Greenhalgh

Fragment of stereo version of 8 channel composition for WATCHTOWER, an in situ project consisting of 7 sound installations in the landscape around Fredrikstad, Norway. A project together with Johannes Bellinkx.

CONCRETE

7-second sample generated from a first WaveGAN training session with data from the Xeno Canto database, conducted in July 2023

Common Bird Songs for an Uncommon Climate

AI Birdsong Example no. 3

A work for mobile devices (phones, tablets, laptops), Supercollider 3, running on a WebRTC streaming framework.

A generative sound installation for mobile devices: your device is a loudspeaker in space.

Inside/outside is a sonic artwork about lives being lived on Berlin’s Oranienstrasse in late 2023 and early 2024. The piece explores the overlapping time and space that is both at the heart of urban life, and at the centre of our interior human experience.

Engaging with these recordings sets up a shared intimacy: with those who have been recorded, with those nearby, and with yourself. The sound, with no image, transforms that intimacy into an atmosphere.

This intimacy is actually profound - because to listen is to make a kind of silence. And in order to listen you must experiment with this silence. An outsider or voyeur need not at some level bother with experience, they remain as ‘other’ … but you can’t talk if you want to hear.

This experience is at the same time interior and exterior. Inside and outside.
Notes

Inside/outside is formed from an archive of recordings made inside homes, in bars and cafes, in U-Bahn stations, and along the street itself.

The work is created in real-time as a computer randomly selects edits from this archive, stitches them together, and broadcasts them as multiple audio streams. 

You can experience the work individually, or if you act with those nearby you can play and experiment - combining sound, time, and space with those around you.

inside outside (short mixdown)

Nikos Sotirelis - The age of corals
extract from the Harkening Critters compilation on forms of minutiae
as presented on Framework Radio episode #907 on October 28, 2024

-

For the full broadcast and tracklist visit:
https://frameworkradio.net/2024/10/907-2024-10-27/

For streaming the full Harkening Critters compilation visit:
https://f-o-m.bandcamp.com/album/harkening-critters

The Age of Corals (Framework Radio #907)

Gulf killifish, Fundulus grandis, are small fish that fill the estuaries of Louisiana. In fact, they are everywhere that the rivers meet the seas along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, from Mexico to Nova Scotia. As such, these fish can be used as biosensors providing indicators of toxicity.  

In collaboration with the research lab of Benjamin Dubansky at LSU, killifish data has been sampled and gone through a process of sonification and musification to create this work. Sonification provides a direct path from data to audio to hear the dynamics of the killifish cardiovascular system. The data is also put through a number of analytical processes which then map onto musical parameters in a process of musification. This work blends both approaches allowing us to musically explore these tiny yet significant animals. In the words of Dr. Dubansky, they are, "an army of sensitive biosensors, guarding our coasts from incoming and domestic chemical threats. Killifish act as beacons for environmental injustice and public health disparity."

In vivo in silico: Fundulus Grandis

episode 1

episode 2

In this conversation with Australian farmer, Bruce Maynard and multi-disciplinary artist, Kim V. Goldsmith, the background and decades of connection between Bruce and Kim is explained to create context for the SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes project that they began collaborating on in earnest in July 2024. Prior to this, Kim and Bruce had worked on a feasibility of the farm residency project and how it might work for them both. SOIL+AiR is a collaborative project that brings the creative minds of the farmer and artist together to explore agrarian culture and landscapes of inland New South Wales Australia.

As Kim explains, she first met Bruce when she was working as an ABC Radio (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Rural Reporter in the early 1990s. As a rural journalist, Kim worked a region from Central West New South Wales, to the Far West of the State and north to the Queensland border.

More about SOIL+AiR including soundscape samples at https://eco-pulse.art/soil-air/

Soundtrack: ‘Resonant bass flute and viole air aayer’ by Milo through Creative Commons 0

SOIL+AiR creative future landscapes mid-project update (December 2024)

ecoPULSE.art is a platform for projects exploring the future of regional territories through enquiry, connections and creativity. Kim V. Goldsmith is a storyteller with a background in radio and print journalism, communications and content production spanning 30 years. She lives and works in the heart of regional NSW Australia, where she explores the issues that come with humans in the environment, and through her sound work, aims to give a voice to the more-than-human world around us.

Artist collective working at the intersection of nature, art and technology.

Sjoerd Leijten is a transdisciplinary artist, composer and radio maker with a keen interest in dissident sounds and politics. His practice involves electromagnetism, field recordings, experimental journalism and hacking. Recent works have been shown at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, NL), Budapest Spring Festival (Budapest, HU), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL), FiraTarrega (Tarrega, ES) and Oerol (Terschelling, NL).

A Rational World available via:
https://numina-tapes.bandcamp.com/album/a-rational-world

MINNOWAHAW available via OGGY RECORDS:
https://oggyrecords.bandcamp.com/album/oggy021-sjoerd-leijten-minnowahaw

NIGHTINGALE available via:
https://numina-tapes.bandcamp.com/album/nightingale-original-motion-picture-soundtrack

I photograph, record, and write about the natural world. I see, I listen, I write. I fundamentally believe that curiosity can save the world—so I publish stories to make people curious. Ultimately, curiosity leads to discovery, discovery leads to knowledge, knowledge leads to insight, and insight leads to understanding. Please enjoy!

Started on saxophone. Now working with installation and occasional performance.

Image : Artūras Bulota/Kaunas Pilnas Kultūros

𝔈𝔵𝔭𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤 ℌ𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤, 𝔱𝔥𝔢 ℌ𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢, 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔱𝔥𝔢 ℌ𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔢𝔯, 𝔞𝔰 𝔞𝔫 𝔈𝔳𝔢𝔫𝔱, 𝔞 𝔐𝔬𝔡𝔢, 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔞 𝔇𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔰𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔬𝔣 𝔅𝔢𝔦𝔫𝔤.

New tracks tagged #Acoustic ecology