Skip links

Inside the Eden Project: an electronic rainforest

rainforest-aerial-walkwayThe Eden Project is a magnificent venue, featuring amongst many other things two giant biomes that simulate Mediterranean and rainforest climates, allowing you to see plants and animals from these climates up close.

While visiting, we recorded the sound from the top of a walkway in the rainforest dome, from which you can hear a waterfall, birdsong and gently piped musical sounds.

Aaron Rieger from Albuquerque, USA, picked out this field recording from our database to remix it, turning it into what he calls an ‘electronic rainforest, with touches of airborne static and feedback’. I was intrigued as to how someone who had never come across something so familiar to us in the UK as the Eden Project, came to choose the sound in the first place.

Aaron explained: “When I perused the catalogue of sounds in the database, I focused my efforts on finding something that has a clean, distinctive sound clip that I could tear up and mangle, or has a nice and clean ambience that could be laid down as a sort of sound bed for further tinkering.  In Eden Project, there were so many distinctive sounds to pull out, but what had interested me the most were the soft bongo-like noises that seemed to occur in a rhythm, and I built off of that while using other incidental sounds I had recorded one time or another that (hopefully) fit the general soundscape or, at the very least, the rhythms of the rainforest.

“In fact, I had no idea about the Eden Project until you brought it to my attention!  I saw the title “Eden Project” and was given the impression that it was a sort of rainforest restoration project recorded elsewhere in the world; I had no idea it was in Cornwall, or that it was a biosphere.  Compared to the other recorded sounds’ titles, I found “Eden Project” to have such an abstract quality to it, as if it were the building blocks of something that can be grown.”
City version:

Memory version: