14/06/2021
New research shows that soundscapes of forests, rivers and meadows aid wellbeing, even when purely digital. Arwa Haider explores how birdsong and other noises from nature – combined with music – can soothe us.
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Nearly a century ago, acclaimed British cellist Beatrice Harrison performed one of the BBC's first live outside broadcasts, from her own garden in Oxted, Surrey. It was May 1924, and Harrison played familiar melodies including Londonderry Air (Danny Boy) and Dvořák's Songs My Mother Taught Me, while nightingale birds responded and sang sweetly from the surrounding trees. The broadcast proved a public hit, with annual performances for the following 12 years and a record release. Listening back in 2021, these ensemble pieces sound elegant, wistful and serene, and somehow suspended in time.
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The rapport between nature sounds and music taps into an age-old sensation of human wellbeing, yet it continually yields new shoots. Generations of international composers have created nature-inspired work, including Beethoven's 6th Symphony (1808) aka "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life". As recording technologies developed, artists have increasingly sampled the natural world; Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus (1972) incorporated birdlife sounds from the Arctic Circle. US musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause has spent decades recording and archiving natural world sounds, and collaborated on diverse projects including The Great Animal Orchestra, Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes (2014, with British composer Richard Blackford). Nature's ingenuity and unpredictability has also been explored in experiments, such as French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's 2010 exhibition, which brought live zebra finches and Les Paul electric guitars to London's Barbican Curve Gallery.
