Healthy ecosystems are often noisy places: from reefs to grasslands and forests, these are sonically rich thanks to all the species defending territories, finding mates, locating prey, or perhaps enjoying the ability to add to life’s rich chorus.

Recording soundscapes of such places is one way to ensure we don’t forget what a full array of birds, bats, bugs, and more sounds like, and it couldn’t be more important, as the world witnesses a decline in many such kinds of creatures, due to the biodiversity crisis.

So on this episode of the podcast, host Mike G. plays a diverse selection of forest soundscapes from South America and Africa and discusses them with their creator, sound recordist George Vlad, who travels widely and shares the acoustic alchemy of nature via his Youtube channel.

Research shows that younger generations of people are often unaware of the decline in bird and bug populations, whether visually or sonically, and often therefore think that the current sights and sounds around them are the natural state of landscapes. This ‘ecological forgetfulness’ is called ‘shifting baselines syndrome,’ and one way to subvert it is to record soundscapes.

The episode features recordings from Brazil’s Javari Valley and an African ‘bai’ (a natural clearing in the rainforest).

Join us to explore these sonic landscapes with Vlad and get inspired to find the richness of natural sounds near you.

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter here: @mikeg2001

Banner image: A writhed hornbill, a Philippines endemic species, singing. Image by Olaf Oliviero Riemer via Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).