Cucusonic, From dawn to dusk inside the changing soundscapes of a Colombian rainforest

Part of PeopleFest, 5-7 April 2024

How can listening to the sounds of nature be a way of sharing and developing understandings of biodiversity and climate change? Our immersive 7 channel audio installation is the outcome of a partnership between Cucusonic (https://cucusonic.net/cucusonic), a collective of Colombian biological scientists and anthropologists, the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, the charity In Place of War, and Studio Mécanique, a music production facility in Switzerland. This network was formed so as to record a bank of natural and bioacoustic sound recordings from the Neotropical forests of Colombia and to combine these with climate change data from a small farm as part of an immersive audio composition. We will present the composition along with a short film about the project and discuss the idea behind the work, that the sounds of habitats and species such as birds, bats and frogs can be heard in different ways: as a measure of biodiversity, as a feature of the cultural imagination of local communities, as a creative resource for musicians to compose with and as a means of connecting to climate data.

Rupert Cox, director of Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. Interested in art-science collaboration, visual and sensory studies, military geographies, eco-acoustics.

Alejandro Valencia-Tobon works at the intersection of public art and biological science, using sound to address the threats to biodiversity (www.erratico.info).

Julien Fehlmann, Founder and Director of music production facility Studio Mécanique and non-profit IRMA (www.irma.ac), which develops and supports music projects in violence-affected contexts.

Performances are at 11:00, 14:00 & 19:00: book your free ticket now