The first day of May is being celebrated around the world as International Dawn Chorus Day—a time when the early bird gets both the worm and the appreciation it deserves.
The day has been marked in various different ways, but one of the most interesting concepts is 24 Hours of Dawn, an audio project being organised by Soundcamp through a series of outdoor listening events. Linked by Reveil, it started at London’s Stave Hill Ecological Park at daybreak on Saturday 30 April, with a live radio broadcast taking place, transmitting the noises that accompany sunrise as the dawn moved west around the world. The live stream travelled around the planet over the course of 24 hours, eventually arriving back where it began, at Stave Hill.
Various Soundcamps and projects based all around the globe took part, from the Octopus Collective in Cumbria and the End of The World Garden in Cornwall, to Alam-Pedja in Estonia, the Wave Farm in New York, Cyberforest in Japan, Fabian Racca in Argentina, Sukanta Majumdar in India, James Wolstoncroft in Tanzania, Nhung Nguyen in Vietnam and many more.
People participated in the project by recording and broadcasting the sounds of daybreak on their smartphones using the LocusCast app, and a soundmap was created in the process, which you can see and listen to here.
As the Sound website explains: ‘Reveil is different from the vast majority of radio available online: it is not dedicated mainly to music or talk, and none of it is pre recorded. Each sound is propagating live somewhere in real time.
Our aim is to open a space for listening to something else—especially, but not exclusively, to non humans and from wild places—and in the course of one earth day to provide a sketch of this emerging field.’