‘Tiny melodies’: musician uses moths’ flight data to compose piece about their decline | Insects

These are vital pollinators who go out at night, but now the butterflies have emerged in the brilliant light of day as co -creators of a new piece of music – composed using the own flight data from insects.

Ellie Wilson composed Moth X Human in a protected habitat on the presbytery in Salisbury, Wiltshire. It has attributed each of the 80 species of butterflies to resident a different sound, which was triggered when it landed on its instructor.

Around the automated melody created by butterflies, she composed music for live violin, cello, trombone, piano and synths. Wilson will be interviewed and the play will perform twice, at the Southbank Center in London on July 5 as part of the new musical biennial.

“I wanted to compose a piece of music that was partly created by the insects themselves,” said Wilson. “The butterflies have created these small tiny melodies – small fragments and patterns that I used to compose the rest of the room at random, especially by typing the cello body to imitate the sound of a butterfly trapped in a lamp.”

Population populations are experiencing a sharp drop in the world due to the loss of habitat, pesticides and the climate crisis. This has a training effect on the ecosystem because butterflies are an important food source for bats, owls and birds – but also because butterflies are essential for pollination, although in a way that still does not understand completely.

“Many of us do not see the butterfly figures decrease because they go out at night, but they are just as vital for our ecosystem as bees and butterflies,” said Wilson.

Wilson created the work with the support of contemporary music of Oxford and with biodiversity scientists in the United Kingdom Center for Ecology and Hydrology. The piece highlights the impact of the decline of British butterfly populations by ending with data from a different area: a monoculture of agricultural land with only 19 species of butterflies.

“I wanted the difference between the butterfly populations to be audible,” said Wilson. “There are so many sounds at the start of the room. At the end, there is very little.”

Wilson said the scientists with whom she joined forces were enthusiastic about their work from transformed into music. “They tried to get the message across the catastrophic decline in moth, but they cannot get a traction using figures and data,” she said. “Music is an accessible way for people to understand the progress of the disaster.”

Wilson is not the only British musician to use the nature to draw attention to the breakdown of the climate: Cosmo Sheldrake calls on the refusal of his legal attempt for the forest of the equator to be recognized as co-creator of a song he wrote.

“The nature of the ecological crisis is rapid, so striking, so completely urgent and total – and natural sounds have so much charisma and power – that nature -based music can reveal and communicate things about the natural world much more efficiently and powerfully than science,” said Sheldrake.

“It can be revealed that this can be revealed by listening to ecosystems,” he added. “The removal of a single tree devastates the sound landscape even if the forest may not seem different.”

Radio Lento recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, broadcasting “Captured Quiet” from 105 sites in 26 British counties. And the design and architecture cabinet based in the United Kingdom, Heatherwick Studio, transforms an uninhabited island in Seoul, South Korea, in public park, starring musical performance based on sound waves created by the mountainous land.

But Finland has pushed things a little further, becoming the first country in the world to create an official sound landscape.