Espirito da Floresta / Forest Spirit

«Espírito da floresta» is a climate choral piece by the composer, natural scientist, and musician Marcus Maeder. Maeder, who refers to himself as a bio-acoustician, enriches his compositions with everyday noises and sounds of nature. «Espírito da floresta» is based on sounds that trees generate under drought stress and the ones that correspond to the real measured values of the CO2 concentration in the immediate environment of the tree. These numbers vary depending on the time of day and the respective height of a tree in the forest. The forests are being particularly impacted by the rising levels of CO2. To compensate for this, the leaves close their pores to prevent moisture loss, thus making forests a drier place. «Espírito da floresta» aims to show how over millions of years, the rainforest has developed into a finely tuned soundscape. Disappearance of just one single tree can change this well-ordered world of sound resulting in more monotonous symphonies. The composition will be interpreted by the conductor, Jakob Pilgram, with the Basel vocal ensemble Iarnyx as a KlimaKontor project. KlimaKontor sees itself as a "rhizomatically acting, mobile office" within the Basel cultural landscape, whose aim is to conceive discursive-artistic spaces of experience and negotiation for a broad audience. The composition «Espírito da floresta» and its performance belong to the CONNECTION cluster, which aims to rediscover the interconnectedness of humans beyond species boundaries and make it possible to actually experience it sensually. Marcus Maeder is also involved in the web radio project Vozes da floresta/Voices of the forest,  a stream of the soundscape of the Central Amazon rainforest. The stream is generated from interval audio recordings made in 2018/2019 at the LBA/AmazonFace research station of the National Institute for Research on the Amazon INPA. Three automated audio recording devices distributed throughout the forest recorded 20 seconds of the rainforest soundscape at ten-minute intervals. These recordings are automatically crossfaded without gaps in the web radio – creating a continuous flow consisting of the diurnal cycles and seasonal changes in the soundscape of the forest.