Unbelievable Discovery: Man Records Tree for a Year, Attracts Chipmunk Fans!

How does a landscape express itself when no one is there to hear it? This intriguing thought prompted Joshua Bonnetta, a film-maker and artist, to create an album from a year’s worth of sound captured from a lone tree in upstate New York. Comprising 8,760 hours of audio, the four-hour album titled The Pines encapsulates the vibrant activity of the natural world. As noted by writer Robert Macfarlane in his essay accompanying the album, The Pines highlights the natural environment’s constant activity and rich tapestry of sounds, which holds particular resonance during our current climate crisis.

“It began as something very personal,” Bonnetta shares from his studio in Munich, having moved from the US in 2022. For more than two decades, he has been capturing the sonic essence of various locations for his private collection. However, his recent ventures into extended field recordings pushed him to “chronicle this place as thoroughly as possible.” During a residency in the Outer Hebrides from 2017 to 2019, Bonnetta created Brackish, a sound installation featuring a month-long continuous radio broadcast using a weather-proof hydrophone placed by a loch. “I initially left the recorder for a day or two, and then gradually extended the duration,” he recalls. “Incredible things happen when you step away and let the environment speak for itself, offering a unique and privileged perspective of the area.”

Back in Ithaca, New York, Bonnetta remembers times spent in the woods at night with friends, occasionally hearing owls or coyotes, though such experiences were brief and infrequent. Inspired by his work in the Hebrides, he decided to apply the same technique closer to home in Tioga County, securing a recording device 10 feet up a pine tree. He routinely returned to change the batteries and storage cards and occasionally to replace the fluffy mic covers that chipmunks had taken a liking to on his otherwise robust equipment.

Bonnetta recorded a total of 8,760 hours of audio from May 2021 to April 2022. The daunting task of editing was made manageable with the assistance of Holger Klinck, a conservation bioacoustics expert at Cornell University, who taught him to visually identify sounds using spectral analysis software. “The collaboration with scientists is always humbling,” notes Bonnetta, who often works alongside experts in the field.

Bonnetta’s friend, Josh Berger, a re-recording mixer who has collaborated with filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Steven Soderbergh, introduced him to a software he describes as “Photoshop for sound.” This tool not only cleans up audio but can also disassemble and reconstruct it. The editing process spanned three years, fitted around other commitments. “I’d return from my day job and think, ‘Now, it’s time to work on the tree project,'” he says.

Bonnetta describes The Pines as a “spectral collage,” where the four hours are not merely edited highlights but are intricately layered, akin to a poetic rendition of a scientific diagram. “When assembling the sounds, I used multi-tracking,” he explains. “So, you might be listening to all the rain from July at once.” This method offers a dynamic portrayal of the life cycles of crickets and frogs through their sounds and captures the changing acoustics of the trees themselves as branches creak under the weight of snow or crack as they grow. “You can almost hear the leaves filling out on the deciduous trees,” he observes, linking this auditory experience to a childhood memory of a friend claiming to have recorded wolves. “It reminded me of that experience—listening in darkness, waiting eagerly for what comes next.”

While The Pines isn’t explicitly focused on the climate crisis, Bonnetta acknowledges that his work is inevitably influenced by environmental concerns. “You might be recording sounds that could soon be lost,” he reflects, recalling sounds from his former neighborhood in Ontario that were threatened by a forthcoming highway project that would disrupt the acoustic environment significantly.

Looking ahead, Bonnetta is exploring the subterranean sounds of the Alps, where Mount Hochstaufen experiences minor earthquakes with each heavy rainfall—a phenomenon that has persisted for centuries. He is also planning an audiovisual portrayal of the Bavarian forest at night, a documentary on the efforts of bioacoustic scientists on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and is captivated by the sounds of Munich, his new home. “Living in Europe for the first time, you can hear the bells from different neighborhoods and gauge distances,” he says. “It’s truly enchanting to experience space through local sounds.”

Bonnetta’s work generously invites listeners to immerse themselves in a landscape, infusing it with personal significance. However, he cautions those tuning into The Pines: “Just don’t fall asleep,” he warns, “there’s some pretty intense raccoon sounds!”