Announcing our latest global project – Sounding Nature
We’re proud to launch our biggest ever sound project today, after months of work and sounds sent in by artists from all over the world.
Sounding Nature is a global sound map of nature covering 55 countries across six continents, featuring almost 500 sounds in total, covering everything from hippos, hyenas and eagles to geysers, hurricanes and glaciers.
Every nature recording has been reimagined and recomposed by an artist to reflect upon the damage being done to our natural world by human-generated sounds such as shipping, logging, drilling and even everyday traffic.
From Chile to Japan and from South Africa to Iceland, the project covers incredible sounds like:
- Animals from all over the world including hyenas, baboons, bats, sealions and howler monkeys;
- Natural phenomena including cracking glaciers, crunching salt flats, bubbling geysers and volcanic activity;
- Incredible sonic environments from jungles and savannah to swamps, cliff edges and desert.
- More than 50 bird recordings including fish eagles, whooper swans, cranes, herons and nightingales;
- 50 sounds of water, from roaring ocean waves to underwater shrimp recordings.
Sounding Nature includes sounds from the British Library, who provided a selection of their wildlife and environmental recordings for artists to work with. A total of 245 artists from all over the world have contributed recordings and recomposed pieces for the project.
The impact of human-generated noise can cause devastating harm to our natural environment, from shipping noise damaging or killing marine life to birds being forced to change their calls due to traffic noise.
The sounds created in response demonstrate an extraordinary breadth of creative approaches including transposing the notes of animals calls onto musical instrumentation, taking inspiration from Greek myth or authors including Eliot, Blake and Dostoyevsky or using sound as a means to protest against human activity such as deforestation, water privatisation and fracking.
