the Animal Sound Archive is an existing scientific archive of animal voice recordings, based in Berlin. Unless you are a scientist or enthusiast in the field of bio-acoustics, we doubt that you have ever heard about it. Fortunately, we have taken it upon ourselves to introduce it to you.
Although its database is open to the public, there is no instruction manual on how to navigate through it. Reading the metadata that comes with each archived entry will hint about a context in which the animals were recorded, or perhaps a scenery, but there is no way of smoothly moving between the scenes, from one recording to another, without having to return to a search menu. The categorization imposed by the archive bluntly erases the individuality of the animals and turns their voices into something impersonal, a quantitative measurable object. There is no order in which the recordings should be listened to. Scientists pop up here and there, in zoos and remote places all over the world, but there is no character development. There is no chronology and no causality of action.
You don’t have time to listen to all the 120 000 recordings, but we will let you hear some of our favorites. What we will offer you is a narrative. In fact, we will offer several. This essay is written in the format of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.
As teenagers, you spent many days, evenings, and nights completely immersed in fantasy role-play. It was escapism and at the same time a social context. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book is a solo version of this, an intimate journey negotiated between you, the reader, and us, the authors
Our role as authors is to describe the scene, the context you are in. It is merely an extrapolation of the metadata already given by the archive. We’re almost not there.
The choose-your-own-adventure books were popular in the 80-90s, but then storytelling role-play computer games took over and the publishing of our favorite series, Lone Wolf, stopped. Now, the latest Virtual Reality games allow us to step into the body of another. The experience is impressively immersive. But it is a body that lacks a history, and in many cases, also a voice.
We believe that the comeback of the Choose-Your-Own Adventure-books lies in their strength to force the player to embody a psyche. Perhaps one can say that it strives to create empathy. We aim for a combination of control and intimacy. We will put thoughts and feelings into your head and use you as a vessel to navigate through the Animal Sound Archive. We hope you don’t mind!
We want to hint towards a potential connection between bodies separated by technologies. We also want to hint towards a potential connection between bodies brought together by technology. The theme of this story is death and loneliness as a collective human state of mind. It is set against the extinction of animals, as well as the history of sound production, and voice recordings in particular.
It starts with the handheld recorders of the 50s and ends with automated recording stations and algorithmic voice detection. There is the improving storing capacity of sound, the digitalization of the archive, and the promise of eternal memory. There is a changing focus of research from the study of individual animals, to monitoring whole populations. There is the story of the dead founder of the archive, Günter Tembrock, and his predecessor Karl Hans Frimmel, whom we have turned into a fictional character. You are about to meet him soon.