Ralf Wendt
I had one of my most beautiful acoustic experiences in the Venezuelan coastal rain forest—alone, 2 o’clock in the morning, 1,800 metres above sea level, and forty kilometres from the nearest human settlement. Nerves and ears stretched to the limits of human perception to partake in the faintest sounds of living creatures hidden in total darkness: the magical split tones of a distant tinamou, the strange extra-terrestrial clicking of a nightjar, the human-like songs of a potoo, interrupted again and again by the high whistles of a poison dart frog on the threshold of audibility. Back at home, for hours I was unable to separate myself from the unfamiliar (and still unknown) sounds collected on online platforms like xeno-canto.org by crazy people like myself in the most remote corners of the planet. Afterwards, I spent two more hours on the roof terrace, fascinated by the few perceptible sounds of bats swarming in the nearby park, knowing that still 95% of their vocal range remains hidden from me. If there existed a radio station that played exactly that, I would be its most faithful listener. When the purr of a cat comes from the radio, above all the purring of the wonderful radiowork of the fine artist Terry Fox ( 2008) The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Cats, then that is a very special moment indeed. [Elisabeth Zimmermann] The extension of radio broadcasts into the field of non-human sound production provokes wonderful questions and thought processes. In her feature Animalia: From Human to Animal, Grace Yoon fantasises about the possibilities of animal-human communication 1. Grace Yoon. Animalia— Von Mensch zu Tier. SFB, SWF, through the imitation of animal voices.1 DLR (Germany), 1996, 52 min. On ORF Kunstradio, Robert Jelinek broadcasts insect mating calls that would sexually stimulate fleas, cockroaches and mosquitoes—if the radio were only turned up loud enough:
Did you experience a plague of insects last summer? Did you manage to finally free yourself from the great itching? Did you think that your home was free of insects in the winter? That all the critters were in a deep hibernation? You wish! With 221