Our forest rustles and chirps, babbles and drips – and yet most of its sounds elude the human ear. Composer Kirsten Reese and biologist and ecoacoustician Dr. Sandra Müller of the University of Freiburg have listened more closely: with hydrophones in streams, ground sensors in the soil, and specialist microphones at tree trunks. Over months and years, recorders in research zones in the Black Forest, the Solling and the Schorfheide have captured a minute of sound for every ten minutes that passed – a long-term acoustic memory of the landscape, that extends far beyond what humans can perceive.

But this memory is changing. Ecoacoustics reveal aurally what measurements alone cannot show: how an ecosystem sounds when it comes under pressure – and when it tips. Between wild nature and managed forestry, the forest does not exist as a stable state but a process with thresholds that can only be recognised as such in hindsight. When does a forest cease being wilderness and instead become a mere resource? The archive of re-cordings makes this audible: not the dramatic rupture, but the quiet shift – that moment when something has changed beyond return.

With Ensemble Recherche, this material was developed into a spatial composition in twelve scenes. Pitches and rhythms were extracted from the recordings, research data sonified, sound gestures imitated in sessions with the musicians – multiple processes of translation that make the inaudible heard. The ensemble musicians found their own nature-inflected modes of expression: creaturely voices that exist between imitation and invention. Art and science ask the same questions: what does the forest mean to us? Can we learn from its resilience? Do we only start listening, when it is too late?

With music by

Kirsten Reese

ENSEMBLE RECHERCHE

Anja Clift, Flute
Eduardo Olloqui, Oboe
Shizuyo Oka, Clarinet
Klaus Steffes-Holländer, Piano
Christian Dierstein, Percussion
Adam Woodward, Violin
Sofia von Atzingen, Viola
N.N., Cello
Lukas Nowok, Sound Design

Tickets

Tickets can be purchased through E-Werk and at the box office.

To purchase a subscription, please click here.

Co-operation with E-WERK Freiburg

Supported by
Freunde des Ensemble Recherche e.V.