For an early experiment in the Bannerghatta hub, we created a custom recording device that could be left at the field station and would record a minute of audio every hour. This was our attempt to listen to the land and the ecology, outside of the research we were doing with people and communities. We left it for 24 hours on 13 January 2022, near the edge of the Bannerghatta Forest.

 

The data we got back was very pleasant to hear – the sounds of the forest as they change through the day.

 

While we were wondering about what and how we could listen, an idea occurred to us. Could we do a frequency spectrum analysis of the audio files? This kind of analysis allows you to break an audio recording into the frequencies that are contained in it. Once you have those constituent frequencies, you can analyse the various sources of sound that make up what you hear. In our case it allowed us to listen to what we recorded in a deeper way.

 

We have put together a short audio-visual story to share what we heard, listened and understood from these recordings: