Built Hidden Soundscape: Adolpho Ducke Reserve (2020)

This soundscape composition is in my series “Built Hidden 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?

The percussion in this composition is primarily of insect origin, and sits besides tonal, vibratory, and other sounds - of insects, bats, and human machinery and voice.** The electronics were used to record, edit, and arrange the recordings in a composition, as well as to present them to you, the listener.

I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized “built” soundscapes of hidden sounds. Unheard of is the second work in this series. 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 entirely of field recordings from Adolfo Ducke Reserve neary Manaus, Amazonas State, Brazil. The sounds are bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Reserva Ducke. 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.

I consider it vital to consider biophony (sound of living nonhumans) alongside human sound (anthrophony) rather than in isolation from it. To exclude human sound would further enforce the notion of a “nature” separate from humans; instead, I challenge this notion of nature as separate, to-be controlled by humans. Similarly, I challenge the notion of pristine, which erases humans from nature, denies the presence and impact of indigenous humans for millenia. Thus, this and related works often include sounds of humans and their technologies that are part of the insect / nonhuman soundscape.

Field recordings and soundscape composition by Lisa Schonberg. This work is part of the project ATTA (Amplifying the Tropical Ants), an interdisciplinary collaboration with entomologists Erica Valle and Fabricio Baccaro in Manaus, BR investigating ant bioacoustic communication. It was produced with the support of Labverde, INPA, UFAM, and the Oregon Arts Commission.

www.lisaschonberg.com