“Sound is life for me.” The latest installment of the Earth.fm podcast, Wind Is the Original Radio , finds curator Melissa Pons in conversation with sound recordist and expedition leader George Vlad. You can listen to and read George’s work elsewhere on the site - and you may already have heard recordings of his in high-profile projects such as Dune: Part Two and Mufasa: The Lion King , as well as various documentaries, TV series, podcasts, and audiobooks. The love of George’s life, as a recordi...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 7 min
“I prefer to live in the fantasy, not in the desperation of the crisis [...], you know?” This latest episode of Earth.fm’s Wind Is the Original Radio podcast finds site curator Melissa Pons in conversation with Peruvian sound artist and ‘resilient designer’ Nahun Saldaña. In his work, Nahun explores the intersections between soundscapes and sound ecology, especially in relation to climate change and speculative sound future. Together, they discuss: The possibility of using soundscapes to drive t...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 3 min
For this March Equinox we have prepared a 60 minute Listening Party with soundscapes recorded in March from the North to the South Hemisphere. We're celebrating the season's transition and we want to invite you to reflect on how we can better accommodate our lives to our surrounding environment. Tracklist: 01:58 Midnight Forest Frogs - Andy Martin 09:01 Western Capercaillie Makes Vocalizations in Early Spring - Andrus Kannel 12:49 Early Spring Thunderstorm in Beech Forest - Ivo Vicic 25:57 Hippo...
Mar 23, 2025•1 hr
“I don't feel like nature is somehow healing me - I feel as if my body is remembering what it's supposed to be like.” Earth.fm’s Wind Is the Original Radio podcast is pleased to share the second part of curator Melissa Pons’ conversation with sound designer and field recordist Andy Martin. (You can find part one here .) Here, in another thought-provoking instalment, Andy shares his thoughts about deep listening, questioning (in part because of the varied ways in which it is defined) the differen...
Mar 04, 2025•2 hr 8 min
In this episode of Earth.fm’s Earth Is the Original Radio podcast - the first of a two-parter! - the site’s curator, Melissa Pons has a wide-ranging conversation with sound designer and field recordist Andy Martin. The insightful and granular conversation explored the following topics: Andy’s relationship with sound throughout his life and career, and what paths led to him dedicating himself to nature field recordings - taking in childhood illness, a love of the Star Wars score, involuntary mimi...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 51 min
A new turn around the sun and a new episode, this month’s guest being Chris Treviño, a field recordist and sound designer from Michigan with a background in anthropology and currently pursuing a Masters in Industrial Heritage and Archaeology, focusing on ways of knowing his own town through its sound across its history. We’re talking about some aspects of sound as heritage and memory as well as its cultural value in which Chris conceptualizes the notion of sonic time capsule, how we humans relat...
Jan 07, 2025•1 hr 20 min
Say hello to December with this month's episode, in which we welcome creative sound artist Jo Kennedy, co-director of Yorkshire Sound Women Network and co-producer of the Nature Tripping podcast!. Jo is a field recordist, sound designer, and audio producer who focuses on environmental and ecological projects. Together, we discuss Jo's path between environment and sound;, what listening - whether to anthropogenic sounds or predominantly natural ones - can potentially reveal; the power of novelty ...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Hello and welcome back to the Wind Is the Original Radio podcast! We have been longing to return and are so happy to kick-start this new phase with David de la Haye , an award-winning ecological sound artist focusing on underwater aquatic environments. This episode is a fun conversation - both uncanny and down-to-earth - about listening to underwater sounds and the fascinating experience of recording them. Plus, collaborating to create music from his field recordings and some necessary gear talk...
Nov 05, 2024•52 min
Recorded in the misty montane rainforest of Gunung Halimun National Park, this recording features subtle birdsong and the sounds of a distant mountain river. This location is one of the last truly wild places on the island of Java and home to a host of unique wildlife. Recorded by Marc Anderson at the Gunung Halimun National Park, Java, Indonesia
Oct 18, 2024•30 min
A place dominated and overseen by large feathered creatures, acrobatic corvids and smaller virtuosos. Nearer the ground, the arched-formations of rock provide a refuge to others, from doves with their splashing wing beat sounds to mammals like red foxes, whose sounds are amplified and travel like an upwards spiral. This amplification serves as a delicacy to my ears, bringing closer to my perception many tiny movements, many of which are hair-raising. Maybe it's merely the darkness operating its ...
Oct 11, 2024•30 min
The breeze bring some freshness in the evening during the hottest month of the year. This is the time when wildlife gets out of the hides to feed. Recorded by Sounding Wild in Outamba Kilimi NP, Sierra Leone
Oct 04, 2024•30 min
Taman Negara is a large area of protected rainforest on the heart of the Malaysian peninsula and home to an abundance of wildlife including tigers, leopards and elephants. This recording features the sounds of a myriad of insects calling from deep in the forest at night. Recorded by Marc Anderson in Taman Negara, Malasya
Sep 27, 2024•30 min
Spring in the Pacific Northwest is typically a damp rainy season. Snowmelt from the Cascade mountains and frequent cloud cover causes streams, and rivulets to pop up along mountainsides swelling the rivers in the valleys. This particular valley, like many in the western cascade range, has many small marshy areas surrounded by tall evergreen trees. By April the nights are filled with sounds of the Cascades Frog and a persistent white noise from nearby flowing water. Lengthening days, a dawn choru...
Sep 20, 2024•30 min
I have a tradition of recording for the week around Summer Solstice every year. The long days and extended twilights draw out the liveliest and most expressive Dawn Choruses of the season. This year I’m in Sinlahekin Valley in Washington State’s Okanogan High Country. It’s a deep, long scar on the ground gouged and left behind by retreating arms of the Cordilleran Ice Sheets of the last several glaciated ice ages. Arid steppes on one side, fir-covered mountains on the other, the Valley draws a l...
Sep 13, 2024•30 min
Recorded in the Spring of 2022, this soundscape has all the indicators of a warm day: pollinators, a variety of crickets, occasional frogs and a rich multi-layered display of bird song. It's one of the quietest places I know, allowing an equally quiet observer to listen to all the layers and make up a sonorous composition of this place weaving it in one's imagination. These are the most prevalent bird species one can hear in this recording: Common Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos ) , Common Qu...
Sep 06, 2024•1 hr 7 min
You can hear the tide slowly approaching in the distance, with activity from all sort of birds in this patch of green in one of the busiest islands of the Bijagos Archipelago. Recorded by Sounding Wild in the Bijagos Archipelago, Guinea-Bissau
Aug 30, 2024•30 min
Afternoon ambience from bushland in the New England tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. A light breeze blows through the canopy of the eucalyptus woodland and in the background, birdsong drifts on the cool mountain air. Recording by Marc Anderson at the Mummel Gulf National Park, NSW, Australia
Aug 23, 2024•30 min
High and dry. There is hardly anything here. No water, no trees, just a small two-track (dirt road where people have driven enough times to form a road, but the ground has never been graded), and a distant horizon. The terrain appears endlessly flat, but after some time walking, I cannot see my car anymore. No towns, people, highways, or aircraft. A strange silence seems to be suspended in the still air. I sit down in the sagebrush and the wind calms. Looking closer I see various small wildflowe...
Aug 16, 2024•30 min
Recorded in December 2023 on my first — but not last — trip through Costa Rica, a troop of Golden Mantled Howler Monkeys in Costa Rica’s Parque Nacional Corcovado greets the dawn and their neighbors (and the rest of the jungle) the only way they know how. Male mantled howlers have an enlarged hyoid bone, a hollow amplifying bone near their vocal cords that gives the ability to generate great “howling” calls that can heard for kilometers. Howling allows the monkeys to exercise territory and remai...
Aug 09, 2024•30 min
This segment of a dusk chorus in the summer-arid region of Vale do Côa, Portugal, is somewhat a reverse story from the dawn chorus recorded in the same period, although fading out much quicker into a windy night, when low whispering bursts take the place of the singing birds. In addition to the most audible and easily identifiable species, we can also hear the cuckoo here and there. Other species listed: Golden Oriole ( Oriolus oriolus ), Red-backed Shrike ( Lanius collurio ), Common BlackBird (...
Aug 02, 2024•30 min
Dawn chorus from a rare pinsapo (Spanish fir) forest in the mountains of Andalucia. Starting softly at first light, the song of a Eurasian Robin is the first to herald the new day. As the day brightens the songs of many other species fill the air. In the background the soft tinkling of bells can be heard from goats on a distant hillside. Recorded by Marc Anderson at Parque Nacional Sierra de las Nieves, Spain
Jul 26, 2024•30 min
Recoding by Seán Ronayne, in Zarnesti, Romania
Jul 19, 2024•30 min
A coveted silence drenches the deep valley. Winter at it’s finest. With closed eyes, I discern the distant white noise of a creek flowing beneath the snow. Alongside one of the small lakes, a coyote crosses the ice on the opposite shore, noticing my presence as well. As early dusk descends, a small flock of Canadian geese flies overhead, their honking resonating against the steep valley walls—a common sight during this season. The geese are nearing a lake that has a unique nearly musical echo em...
Jul 12, 2024•30 min
A classic quiet Savannah dawn chorus from this part of the world. Recording by Sounding Wild at the Outamba-Kilimi National Park, Sierra Leone
Jul 05, 2024•30 min
Growing up in the mid-Atlantic states of the US and with roots and time lived in the Deep South, few sounds bring me to a state of transcendence like the orchestrated song of insects at night. The spectrally tight but densely-layered score of hundreds or thousands of insects pulsing, ratcheting, trilling, buzzing, and singing in concert is soothing my the ears and the best sleep-aid I can experience for myself. There’s so much life in a chorus, and it’s not only insects. Frogs occasionally beep....
Jun 28, 2024•30 min
Recently we visited a beautiful paradise in the Eastern Arc Forests of Tanzania—the Amani Nature Forest Reserve. This reserve protects the unique, biologically important sub-montane forest ecosystem of Tanzania’s East Usambara Mountains. Home to unique and endemic biodiversity, the reserve contains stunning flora, fauna, and trails to explore. Our guide suggested visiting the lesser-traveled Kiganga trail. True to his word, as soon as we left the small town adjacent to the forest, we were greete...
Jun 21, 2024•32 min
A breezy afternoon in the lowland rainforest of Sabah, Borneo. Although the birdsong is more sparse than earlier in the day, many birds are active and can be heard calling and moving about in the the surrounding forest. Recorded by Marc Anderson
Jun 14, 2024•30 min
An excerpt made from a long form stereo reef recording made at full moon in June 2018 above the reef at LINI, North Bali. LINI is an NGO dedicated to community development through sustainable fisheries in north Bali, Indonesia. Their work includes aquaculture to mitigate illegal fishing for the aquarium trade, reef restoration and capacity building in local communities to nurture sustainable livelihood. This recording was made with a pair of aquarians into a Zoom H4N, secured in a waterproof bar...
Jun 07, 2024•31 min
Recorded in Sierra Leone by Sounding Wild
May 31, 2024•31 min
What does Nature sing on a place that has seen blood spilled in behalf of kingdoms’ territory dispute, species extinction and the abandonment of land? During the whole time I spent in this region, that was on my mind. It was psychologically difficult and the rocky and dry shrubs didn’t offer much solace. I think about the attempts of land domination and how a harmonious and reciprocal relationship could reflect on the landscape. This recording invites us to listen with an open mind. The main spe...
May 24, 2024•31 min
