Zoolophone
440 plays
12,029 views
12,029 views
Welcome to Zoolophone, a unique bioacoustic experience. This project consists of techno songs created entirely from animal sounds. There are NO conventional musical instruments on any of these tracks!Band/artist history
Zoolophone began as an experiment: Using loop-based music software, could one turn animal sounds into 'techno'? This project is meant to provide a tuneful answer.
The impetus for this question was "Carnival Carnivores," a techno song by Saunk Hogben (another artistic incarnation), which incorporated various howls and growls.
That's been done before, of course. The tradition of blending animal sounds into music has occasionally even ventured into techno. Utah Saints used whale songs (or something very similar) in "Trance Atlantic Flight" on its "Something Good" album (London Records). And Hope made catchy use of a "ribbit" in its "Tree Frog" trance mix on "Classic Techno Traxx" (ZYX Music).
But could music - even up-tempo dance tunes - be derived exclusively from animal sounds?
An Internet search found few who'd tried. The closest match was a "B. Perovsek" on the Slovene Museum of Natural History website (www2.arnes.si/ljprirodm3/okvir.html). This composer is credited with a "bioacoustic composition" (file name "dotiki.rm") using over a dozen animal musicians, but the piece also uses more conventional instruments (synthesizer and accordion).
WILD WORLD, however, uses no such instruments. Every song on this album consists entirely of sounds produced by animals in the course of vocalization, locomotion, echo-location, or percussion. These are all derived from public domain and other royalty-free animal recordings.
This album includes sounds that range from the unaltered to the heavily processed. Some should be completely familiar. A few - mainly the percussions - may be too heavily distorted by effects to be recognizable as animals. But the majority of the sounds should still be identifiable.
To my knowledge, this is the first such project of its kind.Have you performed in front of an audience?Alas, Zoolophone does not play live -- though some members are adept at playing dead.
Your musical influences
There aren't many artists using animal sounds in music, but some at least sound like they'd be musical influences -- Buck Owens, Chick Correa, Robin Trower, Sheryl Crow, The Eagles, The Byrds, Three Dog Night, Cat Stevens, Skeeter Davis, and Gnat King Cole.What equipment do you use?
Processing and composition were aided immeasurably by Sonic Foundry's excellent music creation software. This company's ACID Music 3.0, ACID Style 2.0, and Sound Forge 5.0 were invaluable in this album's production. Indeed, without this technology - in which Sonic Foundry excels at being simple and intuitive - WILD WORLD could not have been made.
440 plays
12,029 views
12,029 views
Admin
Randy
@zoolophone
