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Arquà Petrarca: the soundtrack to the summer

It’s mid-August in the incredibly beautiful town of Arquà Petrarca in northern Italy (hear more from this town here), where the poet Petrarch spent most of his days.

On this balmy, hot day, we listen to the cicadas in the trees chattering out their constant chorus – a hazy, evocative sound that’s truly the background to summer.

City version:

The sound of cicadas in Arquà Petrarca was reimagined into this fantastic piece by Andarctica, who writes:

“I really wanted to use the rhythmic pulsing of the crickets as a filter element, so it was a matter of first augmenting the sound to be more tonal and playable, then feeding it back through a vocoder with the original sample as the carrier.

“It led to some really nice phasing and harmonics, especially when put to tape.”

Memory version: