Ecotone | Short Film Showcase

An ecotone is like a frontier, where elements usually separated thrive in friction, interact, communicate. If you're anything like me, this sound should make you very uncomfortable, unpleasant. But this is what 55% of the population hears daily, worldwide. However, our ancient acoustic environment was different. Today I invite you to listen with me to this how the thunder, the wind, birds singing, trails, buses, roars, join and become distinct in an untamed landscape. And I invite you to listen how we, humans, have merged our own sound into this symphony. On this island, I will show you a fragment of our own evolution. This is La Gomera, a place that has harbored for more than 15 centuries a whistle communication system. But that's not all. This island has a secret, just in its center. For thousands of years, this island has protected the oldest music, the natural soundscape. A sound that only reaches its maximum complexity in the most intact ecosystems, the oldest ones, almost ancestral. Mists have preserved a living fossil called Laurisilva, a forest that otherwise would not be here at this latitude, the same as the Saharan desert. Here, animals have created a unique chorus. Now pay attention. Listen with me. This sound is the result of millions of years of evolution. It is probable that our ancestors could understand this sound better than us. With their curiosity, they would even imitate it, deciphering its rhythms, its tones. But today, we don't have the time for that anymore. So, we have programmed recorders to get the sound of the island and its rules every hour of each day during the four seasons, to be able to understand it. This is the spring. Let's play a little. Just as we could have done in the past, here and now, we are going to imitate. Using the recordings and their dynamics, we are going to create music. For starters, each species has its own tones, its register, its songs, and its favorite tone. For example, Black Spur's favorite tone is at 1.95 kilohertz, B major. And as the ecosystem gets older, different species tend to occupy more and more notes, from the lowest to the highest pitches, avoiding song overlap, so they can make themselves better heard, creating rhythms, choruses. As the climate changes and moves towards the summer, soundscape becomes simpler, subtler. And in the meantime, I wonder, what if in the past this listening, this imitation, could contribute to shape our own communication? The reason why this imitation occurs so easily, even spontaneously, is because both the Blackbirds and the human inhabitants have adapted their communication specifically to the island. The dominant frequency coincides around the 1.95 kilohertz, silbo being slightly lower than the dominant sound of wildlife. Perhaps a casual convergence to the environment, or perhaps not. It's hard to know. Partly because the use of silbo has changed. Silbo became distant from the landscape, but landscapes have also changed. In 2012, a wildfire burned the forest south of the island, and with them, the soundscape created during generations of animals was lost. But silence is slowly filled, little by little, with new sounds. Night makes me imagine other times, and I keep wondering, why does silbo sound the way it does? Midnight has its own rules. This cricket chorus, for example, lowers its tone as the heat leaves the ground. And I wonder if silbo could also adapt to different situations, perhaps to distances, or humidity. How it could have been before the 60s, when there were no phones, no internet. When the autumn ends, animals in the island restart their maximum singing activity, even in the burned area. Young vegetation gives shelter to a newcomer biological community, slowly filling the silences, creating new soundscapes. And with enough protection, this forest will grow, and we'll hear new orchestras. In winter, birds get ready for breeding season. Their acoustic activity is very high, once again. Too much heat would alter their behavior towards slower rhythms and less occupied tones. Instead, the mild temperatures of winter are optimal. It is not known if silbo originated in La Gomera, or if it could come from the mountains north of Africa. The fact is there are whistlers there too, very few who whistle in their own social dynamics, and perhaps natural ones. In fact, their whistling has a higher pitch than silbo gomero, and would not overlap with the soundscapes we've been listening to here. Perhaps I am giving you more questions than answers, but that is how knowledge works. For now, I'll leave you wondering, reflecting about what can we learn from soundscapes and about ourselves. Once, someone invented the word nature, from latin natura, deriving from the verb nasty, which means being bored. When we talk about nature as if it's something apart from us, we despise our birth. We separate from our origin and identity, and isolate as a species from the rest of ecosystems. Listening to our surroundings, recognizing a fragment of our evolution, perhaps can bring us closer to our origins, to hear our own voice in a planet full of other species singing, of the thunder, of the roar of the sea, of a wind that takes us through the air, to understand that we are not an isolated entity. While silbo finds its place in the future, we should also rethink ours. Today, I encourage you to go outside, pause, stop, and listen.