Flickr / Kristine Paulus
A composer by the name of Jim Wilson has recorded the sound of crickets and then slowed down the recording, revealing something so amazing. The crickets sound like they are singing the most beautiful chorus in perfect harmony.
This recording contains two tracks played at the same time: The first is the natural sound of crickets played at regular speed while the second is the slowed down version of crickets’ voices.
Update: 03/12/2013
There is more to this recording that meets the ear.
“This turns out to be a recording of crickets slowed down by Tom Waits, an approximation of what they might sound like if they lived as long as humans. “What you hear is like human voices, or choirs from heaven,” Wilson says.” – The Guardian
Here’s an explanation of how the track was produced — and it’s nearly as mesmerizing as the original.
Sources: True Activist, Real Farmacy, Huffington Post
An evocative resemblance is not a biological explanation
The fascination of this recording lies in hearing a familiar sound presented in an unfamiliar way. The article describes two layers played together, one at ordinary speed and one slowed down. That means listeners are hearing a produced work, not simply an untouched field recording. Comparing the result to a human choir is a description of how it sounds to a listener. It does not show that crickets are secretly singing human-style harmony, or that matching an insect's lifespan to a person's supplies a scientifically meaningful playback speed.
The production history needs its own credit
The recording shared under Jim Wilson’s name has a longer history than the viral posts suggest: HuffPost reported that it was part of the 1992 song “Ballad of the Twisted Hair” on the album Medicine Songs by David Carson & the Little Wolf Band. The update quoted above appears to mix in a different artist. The Guardian article it links concerns the theatre director Robert Wilson, and the Tom Waits remarks that circulated with the clip, in which Waits describes hearing a slowed cricket recording and then speaks of how “Wilson slows people down” on stage, fit Robert Wilson, whose productions are known for their slow movement and with whom Waits worked for decades. They do not show that Waits slowed the recording himself. Whether the widely shared track contains cricket sounds alone has also been questioned: fact-checkers at Mimikama concluded that a related studio recording combined normal and slowed chirps with singing by the opera singer Bonnie Jo Hunt. Slowed cricket recordings do become lower and more tonal, but the claim that this particular choir-like track is nothing but crickets has not been independently documented. The listening experience can remain compelling while those questions are open. It invites attention to how framing, expectation and a change in playback can make an ordinary environmental sound feel like something entirely different.
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