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LISTEN: New Nature Sound Resource
Ellie Desborough , November 26th, 2018 16:40

Check out a sampler here

Arts organisation Cities and Memory have compiled almost 500 nature recordings, all reimagined by artists, spanning 55 countries and six continents to create ‘Sounding Nature’. You can listen to a sampler of this above.

Including a collaboration with the British Library, organisers say that the project is intended to explore the impact of humanity on the natural world and claim that it uses sound “to protest against human activity such as deforestation, water privatisation and fracking”. Stuart Fowke, creator of Cities and Memory, said that the project uses “sound as a tool to highlight not just the beauty of the sonic natural world that surrounds us, but the harm we are causing it.”

The varied soundscapes are an exploration on how human activity has devastating effects on our wildlife - producing sounds to reflect, for example, the killing of marine life and how birds are forced to change their calls to accommodate for traffic noise.

245 artists have contributed to the global sound map featuring noises from the mighty to the miniscule with erupting volcanic activity and hurricanes to delicate shrimp movements and nightingales. The project also features recordings from a variety of environments such as deserts, jungles and savannahs.

Sounding Nature can be viewed in its entirety here