Playing with Bugs
Ambience: Underwater insects sounds, clarinet
Picture a musician sitting beside a pond in the woods, playing a clarinet, accompanying the sounds of underwater insects. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Rothenberg: It’s opening yourself up to this world of sound where you’re making different kinds of sounds than you used to. And together you form something.
David Rothenberg is a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an interspecies musician.
Rothenberg: You need an underwater microphone and you need one that’s designed to pick up near-field quieter freshwater sounds.
David amplifies the sounds of insects and other underwater critters and plays along.
Rothenberg: By musically engaging with it as an interspecies music is want to do, you get a little bit closer to the beauty and structure and emotional value of the natural world. It comes alive in this new way that only music can express. Only music made together between one species and another.
With thanks to interspecies musician David Rothenberg, I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.