View All     Bioacoustic Data     Narratives     Music     Film     What is Cucusonic?     Participants     Methods     Background     Partners     Map




Cucusonic presents an immersive sound installation and film screening (free ticket here).


︎ Venue: Anthony Burgess Foundation (Manchester, UK). Friday, 5 April 2024 (Performances at 11am, 2pm and 7pm).

︎ Free admission. Book your free ticket here.




🦇 Bat animation: Mariana Sanín Ángel




From dawn to dusk
Inside the changing soundscapes of a Colombian rainforest


How can listening to the sounds of nature be a way of sharing and developing understandings of biodiversity and climate change?

Our immersive 7-channel audio installation is the outcome of a partnership between Cucusonic, a collective of Colombian biological scientists and anthropologists, the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, the charity In Place of War, Studio Mécanique (a music production facility in Switzerland), and the International Relations and Music Association (IRMA)

This network was formed so as to record a bank of natural and bioacoustic sound recordings from the Neotropical forests of Colombia and to combine these with climate change data from a small farm as part of an immersive audio composition.

We will present the composition along with a short film about the project and discuss the idea behind the work, that the sounds of habitats and species such as birds, bats and frogs can be heard in different ways: as a measure of biodiversity, as a feature of the cultural imagination of local communities, as a creative resource for musicians to compose with and as a means of connecting to climate data.

This event is part of PeopleFest, held during the Annual General Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA). Free admission. Book your free ticket here. #asapeoplefest @asapeoplefest












Credits: Jorge Medina recorded all weather data. Ana María Gómez and Alejandro Valencia-Tobon digitalised the records. Mónica R. Carvalho (University of Michigan) created all the graphs. Alejandro Valencia-Tobon conceptualised the idea and was in charge of the audio editing and post-production.

Julien Fehlmann: mixing and mastering in Dolby Atmos at Studio Mécanique. Event production: Rupert Cox, Alejandro Valencia-Tobon and Julien Fehlmann. All recordings made by the Cucusonic team. Special thanks to Ana María Gómez, Juan C. Arredondo, Danny Zurc, Carlos Restrepo, Diego Calderón-Franco, William Gómez, Beatriz Ochoa and Jorge Medina.




The work of Cucusonic has just been featured at the BBC Wildlife Magazine. Check out the article on #ecoacoustics by Andrew Griffiths:












Cucusonic is the winner for Outstanding International Engagement in The Making a Difference Awards at the University of Manchester:















Cucusonic works in partnership with The University of Manchester, the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology and In Place Of War, thanks to the support of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). Additional support comes from Finnish institution Kone Foundation (Saari Residence).