Ear To The Earth Festival Transports Listener to Another World
New York, NY —
If you happened to walk through the Wingergarden in the World Financial Center this week, you may have heard something strange or out of place. The Electronic Music Foundation gathered a bunch of audio artists to display or actually play their work in the Ear to the Earth festival. WNYC’s Richard Hake found if you close your eyes in the cavernous lunch time atrium you could be transported to a different world.
REPORTER: The World Financial Center’s glass and steel enclosed atrium is like being in a terrarium. It has out of place palm trees, shiny marble floors and a great view of the Hudson River. Over the sounds of people eating their lunch or making their way to the expensive boutiques that line the space you could hear birds and other animals that were recorded in their natural habitat and piped into this urban habitat. Bernie Kraus is a sound artist who records animals for a living.
KRAUS: We have a soundscape playing in the background from the Sierra Nevada mountains that’s from now an extinct habitat because they did selective logging in that habitat and it no longer exists.
REPORTER: All of the sounds heard in this exhibit are in danger of being lost. Kraus says it’s his job to record them and save them forever.
KRAUS: Acoustic ecology is really a reference to preserving our natural soundscapes in particular like the ways in which animals vocalize with each other which is what I call a biophany.
REPORTER: Most people walking through the Wintergarden seem to notice the sounds, but keep right on going, unaware of their uniqueness as they permeate the space like at a surround sound theatre. Joel Chadabe is the Curator and President of the Electronic Music Foundation.
CHADABE: We spent a lot of time with those sounds and it became very emotional experience that we are dealing with sounds of animals who have disappeared from the earth forever.
REPORTER: Like the sounds in the Calls of the Wild from the Madagascar Rainforest.
Chadabe says you can easily go into Central Park and listen to the birds around you, but there’s another level.
CHADABE: The second level is to listen to the same sounds through an artists work and that becomes more powerful because artists have done a little bit of the work for you in the delivery and making it impressive and making it engaging.
REPORTER: Like the sounds of a Sumatra Forest.
Soundscape artist Bernie Kraus says it’s a real challenge to try and re-create a natural sound environment out of its environment.
KRAUS: One of the problems of being in New York and urban centers is that there is so much noise going on that we spend so much of our mental energy filtering out the noise so that we are able to hear one another and communicate in a very limited way. But for those in the natural word it’s a very different prospective the natural soundscape provides them with information that we don’t even begin to understand.
REPORTER: But Curator Joel Chadabe says we can begin to understand and appreciate natural sounds if we stop and listen.
CHADABE: This is a new concept for art which is art as research or art as learning.
REPORTER: And for just a minute the Hudson River looks as if it’s flowing through Glacier Bay National Park. For WNYC, I’m Richard Hake.
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