An unusual art show closes this weekend in Richmond. It’s called Singing Amongst the Weeds, and it features insect songs that human ears can’t detect. An artist and a biologist teamed up to record, amplify and make music.
You’ve heard cicadas and crickets calling on summer nights, but unless you’re University of St. Louis Professor Kasey Fowler-Finn, you’ve probably missed most of what insects are saying.
“When we think of insects singing, we think of these crickets and katydids that we hear during the summer and it turns out that is less than ten percent of what insects are singing to each other. The other 90% insects are singing using plant stems instead of the air to talk to one another -- songs you can't hear with the naked ear.”
Enter Stephen Vitiello, a sound artist and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s fascinated by the sounds places make – recording, for example, vibrations through the windows of the World Trade Center, and he was heartened to meet Fowler-Finn who tracks the sounds bugs make.
“Quiet insects that you only hear through scientific instruments reading vibration off plant stems and flowers.”
At UVA’s Mountain Lake Field Station they’ve recorded the mating calls of tree hoppers, the footsteps of caterpillars, the sounds of stink bugs and ants – sounds that play an essential role in the survival of bugs and spiders.
“They need to find a mate. They also need to ward off predators, so there are some insects that make vibrations in order to scare off predators or let them know that they're noxious. There are calls that babies make to their moms and moms make to their babies in order to keep them safe.”
For the scientist and the artist eavesdropping on the insect world is an inspiration.
“There’s times that Kasey and I are in the field with microphones attached to the stems of flowers, and she’ll say, ‘I don’t know who is making that sound, and it could be that we’re the first people who have ever heard that sound.”
"And I've just been blown away by how many different sounds there are. Every time we go out into the field we hear a new insect singing, and it just makes me super excited to continue studying vibrational signaling in insects and how little we know about the natural world."
The work is funded by a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation which hopes to learn, among other things, how climate change is affecting the world’s bugs. Already, Fowler-Finn hears changes.
“Insects change how they sing with temperature. It turns out that females actually track male signals, and they change who they like, depending on temperature.”
Fortunately, she says, the females seem to be adapting, and that’s important -- not only to insects but to the global food chain.
“If we lose insects then our birds don't have anything to eat. We lose polination services. We lose these key systems that keep ecosystems stable.”
In addition to producing important findings and providing fodder for intriguing music, Vitiello and Fowler-Finn agree this project has proven one thing. Scientists and artists have something fundamental in common.
“You know when you go home at the holidays and your family says, ‘What is it you do?’ I feel like for artists it’s probably just as weird as it is for biologists. We have this very, very narrow niche that we’ve kind of embraced.”
The Sediment Gallery is open from one to six, April 6th and 7th at 208 E. Grace Street in Richmond. The artists will speak Saturday at 4, followed by a reception from 5-7.
