All animals are gone, and nobody knows where, but some animals were recorded by scientists. Their voices are stored in an online database called The Animal Sound Archive - or Tierstimmenarchiv, as they say in Germany.

The reason you are here is that one day, approximately 10 years ago, you accidently stumbled upon their online database, www.tierstimmenarchiv.de. With a base in Berlin, the archive has a collection of hundreds of thousands of voices of different animals from all over the world, and a generous portion of it is available to the public online. You have spent quite a big amount of time, randomly browsing through the recordings.

Listening to the archive, you are fully aware that every recording testifies for a meeting, a minimal encounter. Sometimes the meta-data reveals something about that meeting, like the place, the weather, the year, and even the time of the day. And sometimes there is just nothing written down. It is almost as if that meeting never happened. But there was always somebody there, somebody silent, carrying a recorder. The Animals Were Never Alone.