BUILT SOUNDSCAPES

What do you think we are not hearing?

Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening?

I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized “built” soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on ‘hidden sounds’ - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds.

you are encouraged to listen in headphones

All sounds recorded by Lisa Schonberg on Pipeline Road in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019 at the Dinacon Digital Naturalism Conference (with the exception of one recording of a wasp nest, recorded in the town of Gamboa in a field).

Sounds featured, in rough order of appearance:

1. Ultrasonic component of dawn soundscape on Pipeline Road
2. Paper wasp nest on cecropia branch, through substrate
3. Atta sp. (leaf-cutter ant) foraging trail, locomotion sounds
4. Azteca sp. ants on Cecropia tree, locomotion sounds
5. Cicada, ultrasonic component
6. Odontomachus sp. (trap-jaw) ant, stridulation (partially ultrasonic)
7. Atta sp. (leafcutter ants), stridulation
7. Labidus sp. (army ant) trail, sounds of locomotion and aggressive behavior
8. Ultrasonic component of dusk soundscape, from canopy, Pipeline Road