CD - 5 music compositions and 1 field recording

Lisa Schonberg was an artist in residence with Labverde in the Brazilian Amazon in 2017. These are the compositions she has thus far written for this new body of work. During her time with Labverde she made audio recordings of ants and the soundscapes of their habitats. She composed percussion and ambient music based on these recordings, supplemented by observations of the movements and form of the ants and her surroundings. Ants are doing so much of the vital work maintaining Amazonian ecosystem functions: herbivory, seed dispersal, predation, decomposition - which are in turn crucial to global climate regulation. By amplifying the sounds of ants perhaps listeners will be able to better relate with them; there is so much disdain among humans for insects, when it should be the opposite. Can listening to ants generate empathy and encourage us to do our part in countering climate change? Myrmecologists Fabricio Baccaro and Erica Valle at Universidad Federal do Amazonas produced and analyzed spectrograms of the ant recordings and are using the recordings as the start of new research on ant acoustics.

The compositions: Atta is based on the recordings of leaf-cutter ants; Multispecies is a collage of only ant sounds; Surface of the Abyss at Ducke represents passive listening of the penetrating diurnal soundscape of Reserva Ducke; Terra Firme is Lisa's response to sitting still and closely investigating this same soundscape.

1. Atta : Composed and performed by Lisa Schonberg. Mixed by Anthony Brisson. 
2. Multispecies: Composed by Lisa Schonberg. Mixed by Anthony Brisson. 
3. Terra Firme: Composed by Lisa Schonberg. Performed by Leah Bowden, Shannon O'Brien and Fiona Digney; recorded at the University of California San Diego. 
4. Surface of the Abyss at Ducke: Composed by Lisa Schonberg. Mixed by Anthony Brisson.
5. Pheidole biconstricta (field recording): recorded by Lisa Schonberg