The Practice--Listening to Nature Songs

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Wikipedia
For as long as I know, humans have bonded with the natural world through songs.   This includes a human-non-human musical interaction or the human grabbing inspiration from bird or frog songs.  Within my own time, I've encountered musicians who either play music in a natural setting as an interaction with non-humans (David Rothenberg) or collect natural sounds to wed to sound healing recordings (Marjorie De Muynck).  And let's not forget indigenous musicians who play flute, drums or didgeridoo in the wild.

While I could provide an exhaustive list of such recordings, today I prefer to focus on recordings of natural sounds such as birds, whales, and wind.  Okay, I sense a few yawns from readers of this post.  We remember those early new age recordings of nature sounds that we used to induce sleep or ease tension, am I right? And I prefer to spend time in a wooded or marine setting listening to nature in the raw.  However, that's hard to do when I'm sitting in front of a computer typing a blog post about natural sounds.

So I'm heading to YouTube.  Want to come along?

Bird Songs



Surf/Wind

Frog Songs

Didgeridoo (an instrument made from eucalyptus wood hollowed out by termites)

Bees

Whale Songs

Find either short videos or long-play videos of nature sounds.  Listen to these videos as audio for as long as needed. Then write down emotional, mental and physical reactions in a music diary.  Next, head out the the woods or marine setting to experience the real deal in real time.

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