The Animal Sound Society

For us, the The Animal Sound Archive has been a starting point, a base of inspiration, a source of material and an object of artistic research.

It is an existing, scientific archive based in Berlin, and the recorded voices are used as material for research in the field of bioacoustics. Thanks to their online platform, we have been able to both download and listen to its recordings, aimlessly scrolling through lists of names of animals in Latin, German and English. Listening to the archive outside the context of bioacoustic research, has been a sad experience. There is a constant prescence of death, as well as a longing to connect, to bond.

on a Russian island called Insel Mednyi.
It was 18:40 in the evening,
cloudy, weak winds.
A Northern Fur Seal and a man called Karl
They were 10 meters apart..

Ideally, the scientists take the role as somebody who is objectively observing the animals, not interacting. Their prescence should not affect the outcome of the reserach. The outcome, in this case, is a recording of a voice. We're interested in the conflict that arises here. Because the voice itself is a medium for communication, interaction, a connector between two bodies.

Our aim is not to question the scientific relevance of the research of the archive, or to get into debates about definitions of semantics. We allow ourselves to sometimes go against scientific conventions, freely floating in and out between fiction, anecdotal story telling and rewriting of scientific research papers into poetry. We're looking for ways to acccess this scientific archive and its research from a cultural perspective. We're looking for another form of listening that allows the animals to be individuals (rather than representatives for their species), that suggests that there was a meeting, or at least some kind of encounter.

It looks a bit like a hut, but nobody lives there. It is an unmanned recording station. The exact location is secret, but it is promoted by the German government as a nature a restoration project of a river that was damaged by a pumping station. It is powered by solar panels, continuously uploading audio files to a distant hard drive, wireless. The recordings are thousands of hours long and nobody has time to listen to them. Instead, algorithms are used to detect the voices. There is no reason for the scientists to listen to animals anymore. The era of hand-held recorders is over. The recorders work alone, without the help of humans. The scientists are gone. There are no more meetings.