The Wetland Project Slow Radio Broadcast takes place for 24 hours on Earth Day (Wednesday, April 22). Besides this podcast, listeners can stream the soundscape in sync with their local time from anywhere in the world at wetlandproject.com/stream. You can also tweet @wetlandproject to add your voice to the interactive online stream.

Wetland Project Podcast

Created and produced by Brady Marks and Mark Timmings

Sound recording engineer: Eric Lamontagne

2017 (58:16 min)

In this podcast, artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings re-create the seminal broadcast Soundscapes of Canada (Program 5: Summer Solstice, excerpts from a 24-hour field recording documenting the daily cycles of the natural soundscape), an experimental radio production by the World Soundscape Project that premiered on CBC Radio’s Ideas program in 1974.

For Marks and Timmings the inspiration lies in a tiny bit of Earth and the beautiful and complex sounds that emanate from it: the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in the traditional and unceded territory of the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations on Saturna Island, British Columbia, recorded on Earth Day 2016. The sonic phenomena produced by this little wetland — not unlike other wetlands around the world—tend toward inexhaustibility and infinity, but sadly also toward extinction.

The Wetland Project commemorates the 50-year anniversary of the founding of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) by Canadian writer and composer R. Murray Schafer. WSP members initiated the discipline of Acoustic Ecology by studying, through active listening, the relationship between humans and their environment.

• The drone of a generator
• People running
• Engine revs
• Birdsong
• Parts of passing conversations
• Gratitudes
• Passing aircraft

Best listened to with headphones to get the stereo experience of people running through your head.

In these two episodes, I'd like to bring you the dawn chorus, one in its own right as a thing of marvel, but also as a memory of the landscape's sounds. If it goes ahead in full, HS2 - the High Speed train link will belt through this landscape within a few dozen metres, punctuating the ambience with trains on what would be the Golborne Spur of HS2, past Warrington towards Wigan. In years to come, this may be a souvenir, a memory of the quietness of the land which once was.

Going to and from work during the Coronavirus lockdown, I've left my recorder in concealed and non-intrusive places en route to capture the full dawn chorus, picking it up later after my shift. With two recordings I found didn't give me the audio I wanted - the persistent noise of a neighbour's water feature, or the clinking and clanking of tailgate lifts and idling engines of delivery trucks.

This recording gives the audio story I want; I started recording at 04:23, and the silences between the night birds are so substantial that the self-noise of the recorder is so loud that I have edited the three hour long recording so that the segments before the dawn chorus really kicks off are much shortened. I will likely share these at a later date. I have also had to edit out birds flying very close to the recorder or even perching on the same branch giving a handling noise of sorts.

Part 1 here

In these two episodes, I'd like to bring you the dawn chorus, one in its own right as a thing of marvel, but also as a memory of the landscape's sounds. If it goes ahead in full, HS2 - the High Speed train link will belt through this landscape within a few dozen metres, punctuating the ambience with trains on what would be the Golborne Spur of HS2, past Warrington towards Wigan. In years to come, this may be a souvenir, a memory of the quietness of the land which once was.

Going to and from work during the Coronavirus lockdown, I've left my recorder in concealed and non-intrusive places en route to capture the full dawn chorus, picking it up later after my shift. With two recordings I found didn't give me the audio I wanted - the persistent noise of a neighbour's water feature, or the clinking and clanking of tailgate lifts and idling engines of delivery trucks.

This recording gives the audio story I want; I started recording at 04:23, and the silences between the night birds are so substantial that the self-noise of the recorder is so loud that I have edited the three hour long recording so that the segments before the dawn chorus really kicks off are much shortened. I will likely share these at a later date. I have also had to edit out birds flying very close to the recorder or even perching on the same branch giving a handling noise of sorts.

Part 2 here