​In his short introduction to Okeanos, Chris Watson told a packed house, assembled in the cavern-like underground Gallery Ambika P3, at the University of Westminster, that the seas and oceans are the most sound-rich environment on the planet.  Six years of recording and assembling these sounds led to Okeanos, an eight-channel composition of songs, signals and vibrations  from the smallest crustaceans to the loudest and largest animals ever to have existed.

Watson may be best known as the recorder of wildlife sounds made famous in the Attenborough programmes or Tweet of the Day, but he first came to public attention in the seventies as a musician, part of the trio Cabaret Voltaire.

Okeanos is in essence an hour of underwater recordings made using hydrophones hung ten to twenty metres below the surface, at various places around the globe.  To rely entirely on natural sound to sustain a long piece is a compositional challenge.  Watson succeeds partly by exploiting the narrative logic of a journey from pole to pole, but mainly by careful recompilation of sound, from the large-scale and structural to the minute and detailed, to create a musical logic too.
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Beginning at eighty degrees south, and above the surface, we hear a colony of Adelie penguins.  We follow them into the sea, and into a sound-world of singing Weddell seals and vast movements of water.  These undersea waves and swells have a sound unlike those at the surface or on the shore.  Having nothing to resound against but other bodies of water, they create a deeply menacing pulse.  Against this the singing seals and myriad small sounds provide an orchestra of microscopic detail.

​The icy Antarctic waters merge into the Indian Ocean and coral reefs with thousands of tiny sounds from crustaceans and molluscs.  Across to the Caribbean and the virtuoso singing of humpback whales, before crossing to the Atlantic coast of western Scotland.  Here grey seal females provide a touching harem chorus.  Orcas off Norway’s Lofoten Islands join in with songs that sound like they were created digitally, unlike any that could be created for an airborne acoustic.  It is the sound-carrying qualities of sea water that are part of the attraction for Watson.  In the final leg of the journey, the sounds of bearded seals off Svalbard, were recorded up to twenty kilometres from their source, but are as clear and haunting as if they were with us in the gallery.
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If being a composer is all about choosing, matching and compiling sonic elements, then Chris Watson is a composer.  Arguably he has a greater orchestral scale and diversity at his disposal than any other composer, as well as an unrivalled knowledge of both the technicalities of obtaining these rare sounds and their zoological importance.  This attention to context is the key to making a work that is both beautiful and authentic, not to mention a revelation. 

Reveil starts in Rotherhithe near the Greenwich Meridian and travels west from one open microphone to the next, following the wave of sound that loops the earth with the rising sun, picking up audio feeds from forest cams, very low frequency receivers, deep ocean hydrophones, space radio stations, and a network of soundcamps and streamers, in a sequence lasting one earth day.

Tony, who works for the RSPB's South West England team, is especially hoping to capture the dawn song of Dartington's robins.  "Back in the 1930s, Dartington was where the pioneering ornithologist David Lack studied robin behaviour," he said, "his work became one of the first species monographs and I love the idea that I'll be recording birds who may well be descended from the ones he studied."

The Dartington broadcast will be part of a listening event called a SoundCamp - one of several being held around the world to mark International Dawn Chorus Day.  SoundCamps in the UK will be at Stave Hill Ecological Park, London; Piel View House, Furness Peninsula, Cumbria; Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.  There will be others in New York, Chicago, Toronto, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia and Greece.  Tony will also be leading listening walks, continuing a long Dartington tradition of outdoor listening, recording and sonic art.

The sounds of the natural world are orchestrated in a similar way to classical compositions, and are as emotionally moving.  This is the message from three people who share a mission to bring these sounds and the world of music together.  I went along to the Barbican in London yesterday to hear a public conversation between soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, composer Richard Blackford and BAFTA-winning sound recordist and sound artist, Chris Watson. 

Krause began by showing graphically how insects, birds and other songsters avoid using the bandwidths that are dominated by what he calls the geophony – the sounds created by the earth itself, of rivers, wind and the like.  And the biophony of animal sounds is divided into clear strata so that each species group makes sounds at the pitches avoided by everyone else.  Put this onto a sonograph and the similarity with a musical score is striking.

Krause and Oxford-based composer Richard Blackford have taken this idea and collaborated on a new work for orchestra and recorded soundscapes The Great Animal Orchestra, which is also the title of a book by Krause.  This work is premiered at the Cheltenham Festival on 12 July, and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. We were given a brief preview of the opening, with a projected sonograph to follow rather than a score.  This showed neatly how the orchestra emerges from the complex soundscape of the rainforest, via a C-sharp on which the gibbon’s dawn song ends, to be taken up by the violins.

Chris Watson - Northumberland based globe-trotting sounds man for the likes of David Attenborough - has been reflecting lately on the sounds that would have surrounded Eadfrith as he made his fabulous illuminations in the Lindisfarne Gospels.  It is hardly surprising, he says, that the island's creatures such as eider ducks and grey seals should feature in the manuscript; the human song-like sounds they make would have been unpolluted by the machines and traffic that was over a thousand years into the future.  He played his own recordings to make the point, and conjured a picture of grey seals singing in the misty distance, originating the many legends of half-human sea-creatures.

The previous evening, Arlene Sierra’s Urban Birds  for three pianos, electronics, sampled bird song and percussion formed part of a concert at the South Bank Centre.  Sierra, an American working in the UK and lecturing in Cardiff, is another composer for whom birds and insects are an important element in many of her works. In Urban Birds recordings of blackcap, skylark and cuckoo and responses from the pianists form an intricately-textured piece.  I was unable to get to the concert, but Radio 3’s excellent contemporary music programme Hear and Now features the whole concert later on the 12th, so radio listeners will be in for an evening of nature-inspired music next Saturday.

Music of the Wild - the sound of the living world took place at the Barbican on 6 July - click the button for a full review