Reveil (2018)

REVEIL relays the sounds of live open microphones operated by streamers on the Locus Sonus soundmap, Cyberforest programme, LIDO deep water hydrophone observatory, Biom Open Microphone network, and elsewhere. It spans from formal research to domestic projects and one-off broadcasts.

Starting on the morning of Saturday 5 May just before daybreak in Rotherhithe near the Greenwich Meridian, the Reveil broadcast will pick up these feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.

In 2018 Reveil features new streams from the UNESCO Monarch butterfly Biosphere Reserve at Cerro Pelón, State of México, the Noosa Biosphere Reserve in Queensland, Australia, a gull colony on South Walney Island, Cumbria, UK, with many more streams appearing on the soundmap over the coming weeks.

To contribute a stream using a mobile phone, laptop or Raspberry Pi, see the guide for streamers. Each stream adds to the variety and scope of this 5th transect. Please get in touch with questions / for support.

Streams come from a wide variety of locations, at a time of day when human sounds are relatively low, even in densely populated sites. This tends to open the sound field to a more diverse ecology than usual. The Reveil broadcast makes a space for this surplus by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.

The Reveil project is anticipated and informed by transects recorded by Gordon Hempton and Bernie Krause in the 1980’s and 1990’s that re-presented and extended auditions of the dawn chorus across large areas, as well as variants that captured the progress of Spring moving up over North America. The idea of a round-the-world dawn chorus recording lasting 24 hours has appeared periodically on wildlife and nature recordist lists. Gordon Hempton and the ornithologist Don Kroodsma have both imagined such a trajectory as a kind of aural surfing. In 2010 in collaboration with Páll Thayer, Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson made the installation DayBreak, Forever, which used a script to create a sequence through the Locus Sonus streams in much the same way Reveil would do later.

REVEIL 24 HOUR BROADCAST 2018

5AM London time (UTC 0+1) on Saturday 5 MAY to 6AM on Sunday 6 MAY