Translator: Giulia Hawley Reviewer: Massimo Garzotto
Do ecosystems have an acoustic intelligence?
To try to understand this,
I am conducting a long term research project,
which studies the most relevant element that in a dense forest reaches our senses:
Sound.
I've always had a sort of obsession to collect the sounds of nature,
ever since I was very young,
in the countryside and woods of Urbino, the town where I was born,
where I would literally spend entire nights recording,
waiting to capture the perfect soundscape.
The idea was to give the chance to others
to experience the same marvel of listening to the acoustic environment.
Today I am a composer, a sound designer, I teach electroacoustic music,
and I have been studying the world of natural sounds for about 15 years,
ever since I had this experience, in February 2002,
in the Amazon rainforest, in a central area,
that confirmed most of the intuitions I had had up to that moment.
During the recording of a dusk chorus,
that gradual moment of transition between day and night,
that is usually very active in natural habitats,
I understood that the order and balance
that I was perceiving was the tangible result
of all the ecosystem's processes, moment by moment.
I recorded the sounds using high-sensitivity microphones,
and then for three consecutive hours,
I listened to the coordinated and interdependent voices
of the different species that were playing a specific part,
presumably "written" by natural evolution, or rather, based on the natural selection
of 65 million years of evolution.
The hundreds of voices of this polyphony were primarily activated
by light, temperature, humidity, almost in an automatic way,
but every individual emitted acoustic signals, sound signals
with a precise, specific vital function:
nothing was left to chance.
And these sounds fit into acoustic niches of frequency and of time
over the course of 24-hour cycles.
I could perceive that this clock, however, was a very fragile mechanism,
much more fragile where the system had a higher biodiversity
and in the habitat where the canoe was entering.
In the whole planet, today,
that miracle of bioacoustics synchrony is becoming extinct.
(Environmental sounds)
The recording we've just heard in the background of the video
was done in Amazonia in 2002.
If we went in the same exact place in the same season today,
at the same time on the same day and with the same technology,
the recording would probably be already poorer and less organized.
Let me tell you a few data on extinction.
The present extinction rate, recently calculated,
is 100 to 1,000 times greater than the normal extinction rate,
the natural one.
IUCN - International Union for Conservation of Nature,
the global authority on the status of the natural world
publishes an alarming data:
1/8 of the birds, 1/4 of the mammals and almost half of the amphibians
which belong to the known and monitored species
have joined the Red List of Threatened Species.
The predictions in the 1990s,
which estimated that 30,000 species per year,
or four species per hour, would become extinct,
proved to be correct.
We are in the middle of a silent catastrophe,
not addressed by the media.
Life is collapsing globally
in what is defined as the sixth mass extinction,
provoked by the conscious actions taken
on the biosphere by one species, the Homo sapiens.
Deforestation, pollution, and invasive species
are the main drivers of the extinction crisis.
In addition, today's climate changes
are modifying the natural habitats,
impoverishing them
at a more severe and faster pace.
The situation is so serious that there is no time to demonstrate
that things are changing, even through my recordings.
I'm often asked:
"Are you comparing the records between past and present?"
I don't feel the need to,
but I feel compelled to record fragments of this intangible sonic heritage
as soon as possible,
and in as many places as possible,
The project "Fragments of Extinction," conceived as early as in 1998,
consists in recording the entire circadian cycles,
24 hours of continuous recording in specific habitats,
prioritizing those with the highest biodiversity.
The selected habitats are around the Equator,
between five degrees south and five degrees north.
We know that at the Equator the difference between seasons is minimal
and the duration of day and night has been the same for millions of years.
Because of this, rhythms of soundscape are extremely regular
and very beautiful.
Within this area, priority is given to "primary forests"
or, in other words, forests that are in their original state, intact.
In these primary forests, the priority is given to those forests
that are undisturbed to this day, where there is no human activity,
or untouched places.
In these remote ecosystems,
we can still trace the acoustic signature of evolution.
However, for the benefit of the future generations,
we have to hurry in order to capture this primordial polyphonies,
because they will be deteriorating fast.
The project "Fragments of Extinction"
has always been at the crossroads
between different research disciplines and approaches.
Technological: through 3D-sound recording,
utilizing the most advanced technologies available.
Scientific: through the ecological and ecoacoustic analysis of the data.
Artistic: through the creation and realization
of installations for museums,
immersive systems to listen to tridimensional audio documentaries.
Environmental:
this approach obviously allows me to communicate what is happening
through an interdisciplinary project.
So obviously, this project is faced with several difficulties:
to carry all the equipment you are seeing, for example.
In the last trip we did 24-hour recordings with 38 active channels,
meaning recording 38 tracks simultaneously using 38 microphones.
Just to give you an idea of the amount of data recorded,
we brought home a terabyte and a half in three weeks.
We managed to make all these technologies and batteries function
in places where electric power lines are hardly ever available,
mounting and installing them
in these challenging locations,
as we often had to travel to a high altitude for several reasons.
Lastly, the difficulties in everyday life, like humidity,
the biggest enemy of technology,
which often reaches 95%, with thresholds close to 100%.
In this picture from 2008,
we were in the Central African Republic.
We had to utilize a smaller, automated system
because we couldn't stay in the forest during the night,
as there was a risk of attack by elephants.
They are being hunted, as we know, and so today they attack humans.
Let's hear a small fragment of two species of monkeys
and one of elephants: the low-frequency spectrum.
(Environmental sounds)
I want to tell you one last episode.
Here we are in Amazonia, this picture is from February 2016.
After several hours of canoeing and walking,
we reached a very special and undisturbed area of the primary forest.
I decided to stay alone that night, to take care of the equipment
and to impact this particular habitat as little as possible
during the 24-hour recording we had to do.
Well, when the night came,
it was close to complete darkness on the forest floor.
I was scared. I was really scared.
And after hours
of wrestling with my thoughts
and fighting an impelling need to leave this environment,
almost completely unknown to science and where I was feeling a stranger,
I collected myself and calmed down through the act of listening.
I listened like I never listened before; I heard the flow of the events;
I was listening to the essense
of what kept together this extraordinary system
that was alive around me.
It was exactly the act of listening that allowed me to come back to my senses
and made my fear go away.
Let's listen to an unaltered excerpt of this recording.
(Environmental sounds)
Over the years,
I changed from a composer who created music
to one who looks for it in nature,
who preserves it and, eventually, brings it to the public.
It wasn't easy to give up the creativity
that is part of what a musician does.
But I created, during these years,
immersive spaces designed for people
to experience in spherical periphony and with a definition never tried before,
these primordial soundscapes,
as if they were in a time machine,
or in an unusual concert hall, or a temple, if you prefer.
And if we now extend this vision
to our grandchildren's generation or their kids' generation,
the recordings we are talking about will be the only way they will know
how extraordinary and complex the biophony of the natural world was.
I want to leave you with a question, a question I often ask myself:
these places, these spaces, these eco-acoustic theatres,
could they really become a way
to reconnect with the natural world
and help with the paradigm shift
that humanity will have to make necessarily, in the next decades?
Thank you.
(Applause)