THE INSECTS ARE PRESENT

The Insects are Present is a performance-installation that engages with insects and their sound to compose music. Alluding towards Marina Abramović’s 2010 work, audience members are asked to spend an extended time listening to insects, both through hearing and touch. Through this process of what I call speculative ecoacoustic music composition, the material of ecological information shapes and informs the resulting music.

Participants are invited to record their own thoughts about and for insects in an assertion of our ongoing connection with the insects in our shared living environments. These messages become components of future iterations of the installation.

This system of music recording, processing, and playback prompts interactions between real-time environmental sounds, with a focus on insects’ cryptic sounds in soil habitats. The insect habitat soil substrate is used as a sonic filter for playback and subsequent recording of the synthesized sounds, further imprinting the ecological material of the environment on the resulting music. Through listening to and through insect microhabitats, we can speculate on the relations of extant inter- and intra- specific ecoacoustics - and consider the continued trajectories of sonic adaptations to habitat, species shifts, and associated changes in soundscape.